My story, for whatever it's worth (part 1)

A reader writes:

I wanted to thank you for the blog. It’s been very helpful. I understand what I want now. It’s what I call the inner essence of the goal that I want, the thoughts and feelings I want to experience. I want power because I want to experience more freedom in my life. I have existential freedom of course. We all do. But I have not made good use of it. What I didn’t get before was that if I cannot make use of the power I could potentially have in the here and now, then getting to the top of any kind of organization will be for nothing. You know the old saying: wherever I go there I am. I haven’t taken advantage of the opportunities all around me because I’ve been too busy figuring myself out. My life up to this point has really been designed to keep myself afloat with minimal drama and effort while I focused on unraveling the mystery of why I was so ‘different’.

My story starts like so many of the other stories that you’ve featured in your blog and in the comments. I was a typical outsider. I knew I was different from my peers and even my family. I just never understood exactly what that difference was. I was never a shy kid. I was mostly indifferent, especially after I proved to myself that popularity could be had with just the right facial expressions, words and a few well placed actions. The social scene at school stopped being mysterious and became merely boring. And yeah, I pulled a series of stunts that would have gotten me a nice stay in prison if I’d been caught. I got over all of that in my early 20’s when it dawned on me that I was empty and that I had nothing I needed to do or had to do. I was without purpose or meaning. Yeah, sex is fun, no question, but orgasms only last so long. And I still didn’t get why I was so different? Not only did I not get that I would never be one of them, I didn’t even know why. So I went searching for answers. It took a long while. There were loads of false starts, dead ends and misunderstandings along the way. Finally, I was able to discard some false beliefs, start fresh and reexamine things. When I did, I was finally able to see where the differences were. I was able to put a name to the face. Those differences eventually lead me to study concepts like sociopathy and psychopathy. I read a lot of the popular work and some interesting articles on the internet. My Googling lead me to your blog and the comments. It was your unique take on all of this as well as some of the smarter commenters that lead me to see that I’d finally figured it out.