I won’t go back to the psych system.

I.

When I was about 14 my parents threatened to institutionalize me for expressing suicidal thoughts. I'd read lots of stuff about the history of abuse of inpatients online, but I was so apathetic at the time that the only reason I didn't want to go is because I would not be allowed to make youtube gaming videos in there. I have to think about this as something that happened to somebody else in order to get angry about it. Fortunately, I never did get institutionalized. Who knows how much worse my antisocial traits would be now if I had.

II.

When I was about 16, I formed a fixation on a friend, and it ended very poorly, with all our mutual friends deciding to drop him. He'd been pretty pro-psych as far as I remember, and mentally ill himself. He told me I was unhealthy. It devastated me in a way I think I've never been able to fully recover from. I was and still am unused to caring about somebody's opinions this much. I decided to go get evaluated for anything my previous shrinks had missed, as some sort of penance maybe? I was diagnosed with borderline personality disorder, but it was kept a secret from me til my twenties. I went through DBT to make my parents stop breathing down my throat, but the therapist dropped me from the program because I wasn't improving. Today I am still incensed that they blame me for not keeping up with that program; how could I have ever cared about it if I didn't know what it was for?

III.

I won't go back to the psych system. You'll have to drag me kicking and screaming. A court order won't do it. I have traits of antisocial personality disorder. I have denied this for years. The stereotypes of the literature plagued me: I was not brutally abused, I never killed small animals as a child, I felt love and other emotions, there was no way. But I went to a funeral, recently, for somebody I cared for a lot, my grandmother. And I couldn't cry for her. I cried because I owed her my tears, in exchange for all she did for me and how I never was able to pay it back when she was alive. I cried because I was ashamed I could not feel the grief I was so sure I finally would. I feel nothing but numb when I think that she is dead. I just know that I'll never see her again, not in this lifetime. This is not the first time I felt nothing for the dead. I keep expecting it to hit me that any of them died, but it never does. I feel like a monster. I want to tell my family, but everyone is still grieving and I don't want them to hate me or call me out on or god forbid pity me for being what I am. Today as my mother was leaving, teary-eyed, to go to my grandmother's apartment, I was struck by the thought: did she leave her grandchildren any possessions or money in her will? And I felt sick with myself. What an utterly self-absorbed and soulless thing to think. I wish I was normal. But there's no cure for me.