Today I’m in my mid-forties. Since my first day of therapy at age 20, I’ve been trying to figure out what ails my mind. There’s this “thing”: an independent, almost living entity with a mind separate from my own, that has a tendency to ravage social situations I find myself in.

When I talk about “thing separate from my own mind,” I don’t mean I have split personality or anything (psychotic) like that. What I mean is, whenever I find myself in certain situations (e.g., situations with other people, or thinking about someone close to me), another mind takes over. Its thoughts are faster than my own, which gives it an edge over my own controls. It causes me to say and think in ways that, while they may be remotely natural to me, are not what I would have intended had I had a chance to think a little about the situation, or frame it within the perspective of my own understanding.

Let me give an example. I always wanted a hand-tailored business suit, so I found a tailor to make one for me. He was a nice guy, and we talked in friendly terms as he was fitting me. I had to keep going back to his shop, for weeks it seemed, and a part of me began to feel impatient.

One day I was reading an article in Bloomberg about rising prosperity in India and how tailors there were beginning to create suits for men with expanding waistlines. I thought wow, that’s an article I can tell my tailor. Now, it must be understood that he was older and had a protruding belly in relation to his body shape. I could imagine him as a young man looking slim and tall. But today he has a big belly while his limbs are still slim.

When I went to his shop I commented on the article and emphasized, “I thought it’s something for you.” While it’s true that he and I sometimes discussed his view of business opportunities in other lands like America, I didn’t realize (at the time I was telling it) that he seemed unenthusiastic about my story, and grew quiet. When I went back for fitting a few more times, I didn’t understand why he suddenly became distant, whereas before we had conversed with enthusiasm.

When he showed the final version of the suit and let me try it on, I thought it was perfect and began to take it off. He took the suit and said he must make a final alteration. Afterwards he called me to pick it up.

When I needed the suit, I tried it on in front of the mirror at home and saw the left sleeve was two inches shorter than the right. But even then I hadn’t realized the gravity of what I had done. Because I had to travel soon, I put it away and took another.

Later, I found myself preoccupied by the sleeve. The guy’s supposed to be an expert tailor so why was one sleeve shorter than the other, as if it had been purposely chopped off. Then it hit me.

In fact, I wasn’t angry at him (despite the suit’s cost), but felt a deep shame about what had happened, about what I had said. No matter how much I turned it in my mind, I could not bring myself to accept what I had done.

The dilemma

A dilemma is generally any difficult or perplexing situation or problem. But I never forget the prefix “di” embedded in the word. It suggests not one, but two equally undesirable alternatives. That’s my life, in the sense I can seek total, or draconian control over this inner mind so that I don’t blurt out stupid things and don’t feel intensely inferior to others (by leveraging narcissim and supressing my own wants and needs), or I can go ahead and try to accept myself, but then also accept the devastating costs of doing so.

This dilemma surfaces in my life again and again. It’s a constant pattern since I can remember, and it will continue to be so until the day I die. That’s the price of my life; some pay a different price but that’s the one I’ve been awarded.

The discovery

Until about half a year ago I used to think I had some kind of extreme introversion, coupled with an odd Tourette-type syndrome that made me blurt out self-defeating statements or act in socially strange ways. I’d read a few psychology books, and these tended to describe depression and anxiety (for which I’ve been treated by psychiatrists and psychologists). Mental health professionals gave me the pills and talk sessions and I always came away hoping my symptoms would disappear (certainly the depression and anxiety gradually dissipated), but I found myself always going back after terminating treatment, trying to get at something that bothered the hell out of me while stunting my growth in life.

Last year my family was away on vacation and as I had a lot of work, I decided to stay home. Always interested in Ted Talks, I watched one presentation about narcissism. That’s something I can identify with, I thought. I was aware that I used narcissism as a crutch in social situtions.

I watched the video, fascinated, then looked it up on Wikipedia and other sites. I had never known it was also an official DSM-sanctified personality disorder. But although I could identify with having narcissistic traits in myself, my overriding problem was quite the opposite. Trying to think of myself as better than everyone, when I feel uncomfortable, is always a wish but never a reality (unless I can convince myself otherwise, but then that wears off rather quickly).

I felt however that I was on to something, and spent several evenings digging through all the articles and forums on personality disorders that I could find. I read them and tried to see myself in them. At times I could see traits but then quickly moved on as I found a characterstic to disprove it.

In a decade and a half of interacting with the mental health community, I’ve learned the pitfalls of self-diagnosis. Mental health issues are often very hard to pin down as a firm diagnosis, and the DSM manual sometimes has to be updated and revised with new knowledge and research. In other words, a diagnosis you might have had 10 years ago might have a different name today, or may not even exist anymore (that’s right, you may never have had an issue after all).

Something about the title of avoidant personality disorder caught my eye however. I said to myself, if there’s anything that describes me, I’m an “avoider” in all things. I avoid intimacy and even success in order to be alone.

In fact, reading other avoidants’ descriptions of themselves described my own worldview and collections of beliefs and behavior almost too perfectly. From the strands of compensating narcissim to the crummy childhood and emotionally distant parents, from the four years of constant bullying by my school peers and consequent social isolation, to the behaviors of my adult self and my everlasting need for isolation at all costs (despite having a family). And on and on. It’s all there, wrapped in a neat package for me to untie.