Tuesday, August 27, 2013

You Won't Like Me When I'm Psychoanalyzed...

I went to get the feedback from my psychological test results this morning. I took these same tests three years ago and we compared the results. I was not allowed to actually get a copy of the results because it might "freak me out too much." But thanks to my memory, I know what most of it said as it was read to me.

 

As you probably know, my official diagnosis is Aspergers Syndrome, but Aspergers itself doesn't present itself with a way of medicating and/or giving therapy to help with symptoms. Since all human beings display symptoms of Personality Disorders, using that method to see what I lean towards was the best option since I do have issue. 


If I were to be diagnosed with a Personality Disorder, it would be, without a doubt, Schizotypal Personality Disorder. This is what the tests [MMPI and another] concluded. This is at the same level it was when I was 14 and 18 - now I'm 21 - it's just my personality. I have had periods of functioning very well and functioning poorly since it was discovered that I fit into this category. So that isn't the issue at all. 




I will go through each PD and say what has happened since almost 4 years ago. My highest scores are in the "eccentric" cluster, the first one.



Paranoid - went up. My score in this area is rather high. This is probably due to the things that have actually happened to me in my life. My outlook on life is a bit paranoid, which makes me on guard and with good cause.
Schizoid - went up. I am much more detached from people than I was before, and not because of any avoidant features, just because I have literally turned my feelings off. 
Schizotypal - Same as ever, very high score, it's just my personality. 



Anti Social - went up. This goes along with having to watch my back, just like in the paranoia, but on the offense and the fact that I value objectivity which can blur "right and wrong."
Borderline - went down. I don't feel intensely enough to have this PD be very strong but some of my actual behaviors are in this category. 
Histrionic - went down and it was already low. 
Narcissistic - went up and with good reason. I'm fucking fabulous. 



Avoidant - went down in exchange for the Schizoid level going up. 
Dependent - was already so low it couldn't go lower. 
Obsessive Compulsive Personality (perfectionism, not to be confused with OCD) - went up a little. I have perfectionist tendencies that have gotten moreso with age. 



Anyway, nothing I'm shocked by. There's also a spot for "Sadism" which has stayed the same - I'm not sure if it's high or low but I'm pretty sure it's neither.

Basically, I'm an eccentric person who has an odd outlook on the world and prefers to spend time alone and keep people at a distance, and God help you if you cross me because I'm too fabulous for that bullshit and quit talking about me behind my back. 




LOL

Needless to say... everyone is a little off their rocker.





Dizzy


Tuesday, August 13, 2013

Alter Ego Joey And Self-Projection

I have had a very strong alter-ego since I was a child. My "default self" is simply too introverted to function in the outside world, so when I was young, being highly creative and writing my still-ongoing comic Swamp City, I developed another me. 

My initial alter-ego began easily as Joey, a name I picked for my female comic character taken from the name originally chosen for me which was Josephine. Joey functions as the "military" of the four friends, which is what I functioned as at school with friends and in the neighborhood [where, true to the comic, I only had male friends and was treated as a male.] 



So, in the initial "episode," called Killer Frogs, Joey wants the group nerd to help her turn tadpoles into frog-piranha hybrids to work as a little army. This isn't a far cry from something I did do as a child. Anyway, Joey is a relatively violent tomboy who carries a grappling hook and hides her horrible crush on William (the male character above and below who is scared to death of Joey. He isn't based on anyone, just a composite male I made up as a kid.) 
 [Everybody Hurts, Joey/William, when Joey begins lashing out at William more than usual in an attempt to lie to herself about her feelings.]
Joey is very proud Tomboy and thinks of herself as a male, although she has moments when she can't seem to live up to her internalized ideal of a male. These things usually involve William or when she gets PMS which she hysterically denies having. She denies having any feelings at all other than anger. Being an 12 year old girl, she has a lot of frustration with what she is known as and what she thinks she should be VS what she is becoming physically and romantically. 
She is so adamant about fighting her gender, she shocks everyone when she finally stop swimming in trunks and a tank top and buys a "sissy suit" aka a bikini. She further shocks the group, other than the *probably* gay Hunter who helps her prepare for a middle school dance in Joey's Lament, when she shows up looking better than the cheerleaders.

In my thoughts about the creation of Erika [my darkness personified] and Candice [me as an adult which I am in real life] I have been forced to look at Joey, the original alter-ego. Erika is basically Joey on a really bad day as a teenager, and Candice is Joey emotionally destroyed and in her 20's. Those two characters are simply variations of Joey. 
It is very interesting to me that I was using this as a coping mechanism as a nine-year-old. What is more interesting to me is the very few differences between my actual 12-year-old self and the alter-ego Joey I used to function with the Extroverted World. 


There are very few. My actual self was more introverted, obviously, which is how Joey even came into be. My actual self had [has] a lot of paranoia which I projected through the Joey personality as aggression. If you knew me as a pre-tee and teenager...well, you would know I was extremely aggressive and still am in many instances. I may have been less violent than the Joey personality, seeing as I never actually assaulted anyone with my grappling hooks [I still love those] and if I had been in as many fights as Joey or burned down buildings or a regular basis I would be locked up somewhere, but I was definitely aggressive. My actual self spent a lot of time....drawing and reading and writing, obviously, and Joey is shown mostly as being outside in the wild [what I did when I wasn't being a geek], hiding her artistic abilities and intelligence in favor of looking like a badass. 

 [Such a Time As This]

The main theme of Swamp City is that these four misfits are constantly harassed by the Duck Mafia [a thing that actually happened at my highschool, basically angry intolerant rednecks] and when they are united as friends in the above scene by the leader of the Duck Mafia, who happens to be William's older brother, kidnaps them for questioning about their "not being right." William's intelligence makes him a target because he refuses to participate or fit into the redneck agenda. Joey is a target because she has single handedly taken on each member of the Duck Mafia after they beat her up for being a "he-she" when she was younger. Colt is Creole and therefore looks odd, being basically black with red hair. Hunter is flamboyantly pretending to not be gay, but everyone knows he is, which rednecks obviously hate. You get the picture. This is a decent representation of how my pre-teen years were well into college. 

[Joey planning an attack alone in Such a Time as This]


Outwardly, there are no differences between my actual self and Joey in looks or behavior other than things that limit me because she's a cartoon and I am not. And the more I look into this and the concept of alter-egos, I realize that as she developed in Swamp City over the years, there aren't many internal differences, either. 

[Everybody Hurts.]


You're not getting away this time, Jupiter. You've been using emotions I don't even have to gain information on my people, and let me get this straight and let me tell you a thing, you don't fuck with my people and you don't fuck with emotions I don't have. - Joey, "Burn It Down."

Dizzy.








Saturday, August 10, 2013

I, Cannibal.

We are cannibals. 

This statement is meant in more than one way, and the statement itself is going to make you want to debunk me, but you really cannot, because you're the shock-ee and I'm the shocker (code for scientist and/or philosopher.) 
Welcome to planet Earth. 



The way the food web works on planet Earth, where most of you are from, is cannibalistic. This was explained to me at a very early age by The Lion King, but it extends to humans and to our behavior. 
The modern homo-sapiens have been in existence for an estimated 6 - 7 million years. That is quite some time, although not long compared to this planets actual existence, but definitely long enough for quite a bit of decomposition to happen. Every human being that has ever lived has or will die, and their bodies are burned or put into the ground. 
In less (supposedly) civilized times, humans did not put their dead into the ground as we do now. Bodies would be left behind, put into the woods away from the tribe, or, in many cases in every race throughout human history, eaten. 

This still happens. Many cultures eat their dead or eat their victims they kill in battle, sometimes in full view of the grieving enemies. I'm not going to go into all the different rituals, all the reasons, who still practices blatant cannibalism or where it is still a social norm. The bottom line is that you are a cannibal. So am I. 



Everything we consume physically was once a dead body. A dead lizard, dead bird, dead tiger, dead dinosaur, and likely, due to where we grow our food in already populated areas, dead human beings. Your green beans are the product of you g-g-g-g-g-g-g-g-g-g-g-g-g-g-g-g-g-great grandmother. Your steak was fed off of grass that was fertilized by a distant cousin. You're consuming other human beings. 
And that is the natural order of things. 

Examine this further with a psychological bent. Have you ever heard someone tell you that a problem was "consuming" them? That your own eating disorder is "consuming" you? That someone else was emotionally consuming everyone around them? 
Part of being a social creature, as humans are, is that we feed off of eachother. Sometimes this is done in a healthy way, but when it's actually mentioned, it is never healthy. We cannibalize ourselves as often as we do others, allowing our problems to destroy pieces of our identity, turning us into something else. Just like eating a deceased relative would keep them in you and a part of you, an honoring of them, we let our circumstances come into us and alter us; it becomes a part of you. This is our inherit narcissism that cannibalizes us. 
When others do it, they become a part of our lives in a way that we cannot function as ourselves - we alter ourselves so that pieces of our identity (money, emotional, or otherwise) can be used by someone else, altering them for their benefit - just like eating a deceased relative was never really an honor for them, as a comfort for those left living. 

In the majority of societies today, cannibalism is looked down on and feared, despite that fact that every single one of us participates in it on a daily basis, save those who don't eat and don't interact with the outside world, which are few and far between for obvious reasons. The Church of Euthanasia is the only pro-cannibalism group I can think of off the top of my head, and their reasons are related to population control, as well as their anti-child and pro-suicide ideas. 
We often fear what we are. At the beginning of human time, we were cannibalistic, either in a grief-driven or battle-driven way (other than the times it was used for survival only) just as we were murderers, just as rape was the most common form of sex. 



Human beings greatest fear is not death. The greatest fear we have as a species seems to be something we are in constant denial of - what we really are by nature. Our greatest fear is what we have lurking in our brains, what we would have been if it weren't for how we were governed by birth. In nature VS nurture, our greatest denial is exactly how much of us is being suppressed by the latter. 

Cannibals.