Something happened recently that has me wondering just what kind of a person I am, and I thought I’d share the story and the thoughts that stem from it with my readers.

I’m totally addicted to an online game called Dungeon Fighter Online. It’s an MMPORPG that operates like those old “brawler” games like Final Fight and Double Dragon, but with a lot of RPG elements as well. So I spend a fair bit of every day beating up (and in my case, shooting, for I am a Gunner) various monsters and bad guys who represent the Implacable Forces of Evil, and in doing so, fulfilling quests, gaining XP, going up levels, getting loot, and all those other things that make RPG life fun.

Being a nonjoiner, to me, these types of games might as well be single-player. I don’t join guilds or parties or clubs. It’s just me, the monsters, and my love of kicking ass on evil.

And up until recently, that didn’t really bother me. A lonely childhood and an almost as lonely adulthood has made me the kind of person who just wants to do his thing by himself and get it done.

I always loathed group work in school.

And until recently, that worked out fine. Occasionally, some random stranger would send me a guild invitation, which just shows up as a window saying “Do you want to join X Guild?”, and I would click “no”, and go back to my monster thrashing.

(Seriously, does that ever work? Who joins some organization with who knows who in charge just because they were randomly asked? The same people who buy things from spam, I guess)

But yesterday, in the game, someone messaged me out of the blue to ask me to join his guild, and that made it a lot more personal. I had to turn him down to his face, in a virtual sense, instead of just clicking “no”, and that made me really think about why the hell I am so antisocial, and how conflicted I feel about it.

I didn’t turn him down right away. That would have been rude. Part of the conflict in me is that I am not your archetypical antisocial person. I am not grumpy, brusque, hostile, or even a little surly. In fact, in demeanour, I am quite friendly and pleasant, if a little aloof. And I like that about myself.

But the thing is, that’s just the social mask. I am friendly and polite, but I still don’t want to join your thing, and I am not terribly interested in your party or the night your band is playing at a club. I politely decline.

I am just not a joiner. But why? Why the hell not join? What’s the deal?

And I have thought about it, and the thing is this : I just cannot stand being subject to the will of others.

Sounds impossibly arrogant, doesn’t it? But it’s true. Perhaps if I had been properly socialized as a child instead of being bullied and ostracized, it would be different. I would have learned I could still be free while being part of something.

But I never had those experiences. So now, to join is very frightening to me. The idea of joining some group, with rules and relationships and expectations and all those other things I don’t know and don’t pick up on easily just sounds like a massive recipe for social suicide to me. I would inevitably just make people angry by making a lot of ignorant faux pas type mistakes because I don’t know how these things work, and it would just lead to me being rejected and ostracized once more.

That’s the tape that plays in my mind when the possibility of joining comes up. That’s the source of the deep panicky fear I felt when this random person asked me to join their guild. I hemmed and hawed and asked him a few questions about his guild, but I knew damn well I was not going to join.

There’s just too many variables. And when there’s too many variables, it comes down to trust. Trust in people, or trust in the benevolence or even the neutrality of the universe.

And I just don’t have any of that kind of trust. I only trust what I can understand. If I can’t compute all the variables in my mind, I have to just leave it be.

I believe they call the kind of trust I lack “faith”.

And I don’t have any.