Time for more auto-extispicy.

Been pondering the nature of my intelligence and the way it influences how I interact with people today.

The fact is, no matter how gentle and kind and considerate I try to be, it will always be somewhat rough for people to be around me because of how I think and the swift incisive way I have of coming to conclusions that are almost never normal or typical, but instead hail from the cold dark chamber of truth within me.

So I am always going to be sort of strange and scary to people. I have hidden this fact from myself two ways : one, by hiding away from the world, and two, by interacting with the world via an online persona that is far less serious and shy than I am in the real world.

I also have managed to arrange my life so that the people I interact with most, namely my friends, are also highly intelligent intellectuals, and so are more receptive to my usual mode of thinking than the average citizen.

And this has done wonders for me. But it’s not enough. I am still pretty scared of having to deal with normal people. I don’t want to feel that vast screaming void opening up between us where I can’t relate to them and they can’t relate to me and I feel like some kind of repulsive creature that should just crawl back into its hole.

And sure, intellectually, I know that if I was simply to get out there and get enough social experience, I would presumably learn to adapt and develop social interaction skills to make the whole thing a lot less awkward.

But the fear is still very intense and it’s a hard thing to get around. I wish I could convey the kind of cold hard terror that fills me in those situations. It is the sort of fear that displaces all your powers of reason and leaves you terrified and panicked like a wounded animal.

I know all this coldness is coming from myself, not them. But when those old tapes start playing, it doesn’t really matter where it comes from.

But back to my brain.

Looking back, I feel like I have inadvertently hurt people by being like this. They ask my opinion and what tumbles out of my mouth is a highly perceptive, incisive, unusual, razor-sharp analysis that is far more than they bargained for and quite hurtful to boot.

I feel that due to my isolation and lack of social experience, I have a very poor sense of exactly how much other people perceive, and therefore when I point out what seems obvious to me with my over-sharpened mind, I am often cutting people to the quick, or at least just giving them a lot more than they can handle.

And I know I am doing this. I often dread being asked what I think by people I don’t know very well for that exact reason. I don’t want to hurt anyone, but I lack the social skills to know how to modulate my perceptions and express them in a way that is more socially acceptable.

Deep underneath this line of there, there is also a pale remnant of the arrogance of my youth as well. Part of me really doesn’t want to restrain itself. It wants to deliver nothing but the white hot truth to everyone, and if they are hurt by it, so be it. They will get over it, and be better for the experience.

But I don’t truly believe it. That’s just my id rebelling against restraint. Everyone has a side to them that wants to ignore all limitations and just do exactly what it feels all the time.

But you have to be rich to get away with that.

Nevertheless, I feel a dark shadow of anger stirring within me lately. The urge to be brutally sarcastic and bludgeoning is something I deal with on a moment to moment basis.

I know this is just part of learning to integrate the hot circuit of raw emotion into my cold dead mind and make myself into some semblance of a three dimensional human being. And I knew this would be rough and that I would have to wrestle with myself a lot before the deed was done.

I have suppressed my emotional self for far far too long and thus been denied its strength, its power, its toughness, and its warmth. I need to tame and harness the fire inside me, not just douse it all the time. It’s the only way I can become whole and strong and capable, inside of fractured, weak, and incompetent.

And as I integrate, I become capable of a greater level of awareness of my surroundings, and that’s the first step towards dealing with them better. This will, in time, make my personal world a lot less harsh and then hopefully I can finally walk into the sunlight and leave this lonely cold cave of my own devising.

But Oh Lord, it will not be easy. I think I am past the worst point of dealing with the anger inside me. I am not feeling like doing crazy things lately. Wrong things, for sure, but nothing that would land me in jail or make me a monster. Just things that would make me an asshole.

And I could be such an asshole.

Before I forget, here is my video for today. It’s a talker.

It’s a biologically strange thing that we can live so close together. In order to achieve it, we had to develop some highly complex and sophisticated coping strategies.

We don’t look at it that way – fish don’t know they’re wet – but we all have a whole suite of perceptions and responses custom tailored to life amongst hundreds of strangers.

From the point of view of a state of primal savagery, it is astonishing that we can commingle in such a way that respects everyone’s personal space and that implies such a profound trust of your fellow humans (all of whom are dangerous and intelligent predators armed with evolution’s most powerful and adaptable bodies) that you can treat them like they are not even there.

Just faces in the crowd.

We don’t give ourselves enough credit for that, I think.