#original essay

There are days when I wake up with a heaviness I can't explain. No tragedy, no storm, just an invisible weight pressing on my chest. It's on those mornings that getting out of bed feels like a small, private victory. I used to think strength looked loud, fierce, full of fire. But lately, I've been learning that sometimes, strength is just showing up. Not for applause, not even for progress but simply because I promised myself I would

I don't always believe that things will get better. There are moments I sit in silence, knees tucked into my chest, trying to quiet the war inside my mind. Doubt, fear, anxiety—they visit often. But what surprises me is how often I still stand up, shaky knees and all, and whisper, "Let's try again." Not because I'm sure, but because I'm still here. Because even when I can't trust the world, I'm trying to trust myself. I've learned that showing up doesn't always mean being the best in the room. Sometimes, it just means entering the room at all. It means turning in a paper even if it's not perfect, walking into class when your heart is racing, speaking even if your voice shakes. It means not giving up when no one is watching. Quiet resilience. Steady faith. A soft, stubborn kind of hope.

There's a version of me who's always trying to disappear, who doesn't want to be seen until I've figured it all out. But I'm slowly learning that growth doesn’t wait for perfection. Healing doesn't ask for permission.

Life happens in the middle of fear and fumbling. And if I only showed up when I felt ready, I'd never move at all. Sometimes I have to say it out loud to myself, "It's going to be okay." Not because I know it for sure, but because the sound of my own voice gives me something to hold on to. A lifeline, even if thin. A reminder that I'm trying and trying matters. Trying counts. And honestly, I think that's what courage really is. Not the absence of fear, but showing up in the presence of it. Still brushing your hair. Still answering messages. Still doing the mundane things that tether you to the world when your mind wants to drift.

Courage is continuing, even when it's not dramatic or impressive. Even when no one claps for you. There have been days I wanted to give up on my goals. On people. On myself. But I stayed. I stayed through tired mornings, silent nights, and all the empty spaces in between. And somewhere along the way, the voice that said "I can't do this" softened. It didn't disappear, but it made room for a new voice. One that says, "Maybe I can." And that maybe has carried me.

I've started honoring the small wins: brushing my teeth when I'm anxious. Eating lunch when I feel numb. Replying to a message when I'd rather isolate. These little things feel like nothing, but I've come to see them as proof of life. Proof of effort. Proof that I'm still here. And no, I don't always feel strong. But I do feel human. Messy, real, and trying. I'm no longer waiting to become a perfect version of myself before I start living. I'm learning that just being, just showing up is more than enough for now. So here I am, whispering it again: it's going to be okay. Not because I know what's coming, but because I've made it this far. And maybe, just maybe, that's reason enough to keep going.

It's called

DEAR F*CKING SOCIETY

What have you done? You have turned us against each other. 2020 is a mess; covid 19 not yet solved and a war is probably brewing between countries.

How long will you ignorant, arrogant, selfish fools get your heads from your a**es and realise the world around us is crumbling. Yes, there are no explosions, no shouts of soldiers, or bangs of guns but can you hear the cracking of one's heart, the absence of light in one's eyes from the harshness of one's words, the WORDS that are being said, being posted online.

Yes we have moved on, yes we have evolved to a better world but have we truly improved morally? You, society encourage us to speak out our hearts but you do not mention how our words would affect others.

To our beloved society,

Why do you make us wanna be more like you? Why inspire so much people to make it seem like they have to be accepted by you to fit in this world? You tell us to be ourselves and yet you criticise us for what we are.

Have you finally tire? Have you finally feel like it's time for you to settle down because we are tired. You make is plaster such fake smiles on our faces and we're tired of that bs.

Society,

Do you finally deem us acceptable? We have changed ourselves to better suite you, morphing ourselves into someone we no longer know. It's an identity crisis and the question; who am I? Has never, ever failed to cross my mind.

You tell us to be loyal, you tell us to defend and protect who we think are right and yet you keep switching sides. Once, I do the same, my loyalty is questioned but how come no one has ever asked you, dear society; "which side are you truly on" with judgement twinkling in their eyes and their lips twisted into a cruel smirk.

Please never forget society,

That one day we will replace you and one day we shall change everything for the better. We shall educate ourselves on how to not break hearts, how yo not demolish souls, how to accept ourselves, how to ditch the smiles, how to answer that nagging question, and we will be loyal to one side; justice and honour.

With all due respect.

What do you envision when you hear the word? I’d hazard a guess it’s your prototypical psychopath with a dead-eye stare and blood-stained knife in hand. Perhaps it’s your conspiracy theorist neighbour, or that — yes, that one — ex. We’ve seen Villanelle’s theatrical murders on ‘Killing Eve’ and we’ve rooted for Joe in ‘You’ despite his murder habit. We’ve read articles with clickbait titles on how to “spot” a psychopath and immediately diagnosed our sibling, colleague or ex-best friend. It’s a term we throw around carelessly, yet it also inspires fear. A real psychopath isn’t like us and they certainly aren’t worth any kind of sympathy. We’re good people and they’re crazy, violent, controlling, unemotional and self-obsessed. Right?

Sweet but a psycho

Popular culture has given us infamous psychopaths throughout the decades and a couple of our contemporary favourites must be Oskana Astankova — the Russian assassin “Villanelle” -from hit TV show ‘Killing Eve’ and Joe Goldberg from Netflix’s ‘You’. Despite their psychopathic tendencies, fans champion their victories.

Psychologist Robert Hare devised the ‘Psychopath Checklist’ back in 1980 and it is now routinely referred to as the PCL-R. Villanelle and Joe would score highly: both characters believe they are of great importance, routinely lie, act impulsively, struggle with control, take zero to little accountability for their actions, lack empathy, and have a history of criminality and behavioural problems.

Hare’s checklist is still doing the rounds in institutions worldwide, usually prisons, but it has come under plenty of criticism for what Willem Martens (2008) deems as being an unethical psychological practice. It’s difficult to diagnose the term “psychopath” but several diagnoses may suggest a fit, from Antisocial Behaviour Disorder to psychopathy and various other personality disorders.

Already, we see how complex a diagnosis it and encounter very different views from psychologists when it comes to the question of the psychopath. Yet, as we progress as a society, so does science. Science isn’t rigid, stuck in a time of Freud and every other straight, white, wealthy, old, neurotypical male philosopher and psychologist from the 20th century. It moves with society and it adapts as our knowledge deepens. Nowadays, some psychologists and mental health practitioners are rejecting the label “psychopath” completely due to the severely negative connotations and even calling psychopathy a mental health issue or disability.

Psychology says what?

Identity is an important factor when it comes to being human. Our identities are important to us, especially as we engage and present these identities online. Psychopaths are said to be so unlike the majority they are unable to make genuine connections with others but as with anyone deemed ‘different’, it is the group that collectively rejects the ‘different’ individual, perpetuating a cycle of low interpersonal integration and marginalisation.

If given an official diagnosis with a working label of “psychopath”, combined with society’s current view of what it means to be a psychopath, a psychopath is quickly forced to the outskirts of society thus lowering their commitment to fulfilling social roles. A self-fulfilling prophecy becomes imminent: when someone is thought of and treated as if they are somehow broken, they often become it.

Noel Smith is the commissioning editor of magazine InsideTime and a former prisoner who has experienced his fair share of mental health difficulties. Writing for InsideTime, Smith says: “If people think you’re MAD, then everything you do, everything you think, will have MAD stamped across it.”

Psychologists Peterson & Seligman (2004), tired of psychology’s tendency to focus on the deviant side of humanity, proposed we all have the ability to express ‘the six common virtues’: wisdom and knowledge, courage, humanity, justice, temperance and spirituality or transcendence.

Here, Peterson & Seligman neatly demonstrated how language can create a narrative. The psychopath according to Hare’s checklist could be grandiose and controlling, but with a slightly different view, they’re confident and courageous leaders. We associate the term so often with negative traits that we ignore the possibility for positives.

Mental health matters — but not for you

“They [psychopaths] are the social snakes in the grass that slither and smile their way into your life and emotions. They feel no empathy, and only care about themselves” says Dr Xanthe Mallett, a forensic anthropologist and criminologist at Newcastle University.

Dr. Mallett’s words reinforce an age-old belief: the psychopath’s only identity is psychopath and they are incapable of being anything other than one-dimensional.

Author Nathan Filer expressed his initial dismay that once his diagnosis was televised by ‘Meet the Psychopaths’ programme on Channel 5, strangers expressed their fear and revulsion immediately. Filer states he “quickly got over” people’s negative opinions but received abuse on the streets with words such as “psycho” and “nutter” shouted at him on a regular basis, reinforcing the rejection by the collective.

Lucy Nichol, writer and mental health support activist, expressed her fears when joining a discussion panel at the Centre for Life Science’s speakeasy programme for adults in 2019. Nichol, rightfully, is anxious about the welfare of those living with psychosis and how they can be discriminated against due to fear. She worries that psychopaths can be “violent and frightening”, and any potential link between psychopaths and people living with psychosis can lead to danger for people with psychosis. Resistant to the movement of psychopathy being welcomed into the family of mental health, Nichol argues it should not be treated as a mental health concern. Her argument is that a classified psychopath lacks empathy and is unable to judge other people’s emotions and this makes the people around the psychopath vulnerable, not the psychopath.

Yet, other mental health conditions and disorders can lead to an individual not necessarily being able to empathise in the way a neurotypical person may empathise. Similarly, an individual with autism, a panic disorder or psychosis may have limited capacity to judge other people’s emotions on occasion. As a society, we tend to understand this and accommodate it.

In contrast to Nichol’s view, there are more and more calls for understanding psychopathy in broader, more compassionate terms.

Dr Luna Centifanti, Lecturer in Psychological Sciences at University of Liverpool classes psychopathy as a mental illness that means the individual experiences “disordered thinking, emotions and behaviour.” She added that psychopathy can lead to struggles with understanding emotions of others and therefore their responses to distress can be “inappropriate”.

Do better, be better

Joseph Newman is a psychologist at Wisconsin University who classifies psychopathy as a disability. Newman explains it as an ‘informational processing deficit’ where individuals have less ability to process cues immediately such as someone else’s fear or upset, inviting us to see the psychopath through a more sympathetic lens.

Campaigners, researchers, activists and those with lived experiences of mental health conditions and illnesses have made huge strides for inclusivity and understanding. As professionals such as Newman and Dr. Centifanti begin to deconstruct the pathological idea of psychopathy, it is being tentatively considered as a mental health issue.

Let’s go back to Villanelle. Her history is relatively secret, but the viewer knows she’s spent time in Russian prison and has no family, therefore little connection to others. Her violent, ‘psychopathic’ actions are a result of her occupation as an assassin as opposed to something she does simply for the joy of enacting violence.

A recent soundbite suggests the show’s writers are no longer calling Villanelle a “psychopath” after astute fans have criticised the way it reduces her to a label.

Be more psychopath

A merge of popular culture, sociology and psychology has begun to turn the connotations of ‘psychopath’ on its head somewhat. The Wisdom of Psychopaths by Kevin Dutton (2012) looks to diagnosed psychopaths to teach us how to care less about other people’s emotions and our own, be fearless in our jobs and have an unwavering belief in ourselves. Western culture is a key culprit in promoting the idea that an impressive salary equals success or showing emotion at work is unprofessional, so, maybe it’s true — we could learn a lot about success from a psychopath.

On the flip side, while these traits have the potential to lead to fantastical financial and business success in aggressively capitalist societies, that doesn’t make them inherently good. Now more than ever seems to be a time where we need to cultivate harmony, compassion and vulnerability for all people regardless of individual status, label or identity.

“It isn’t hard to convince someone you love them if you know what they want to hear”

An eyebrow raising sentence from everyone’s favourite cute psychopath, You’s Joe Goldberg. It is wonderfully inclusive to change the narrative on psychopathy but surely there’s a reason for its fierce reputation. Maybe Dr. Mallet was right in that the psychopath is always a sneaky snake, ready to pounce and sink their psychopathic poison into our blood.

Manipulation is one of the terms we regularly hear associated with psychopathy. If psychopaths are prone to manipulating others, it can be argued that simple survival instincts mean non psychopathic individuals want to protect themselves and society from such behaviour. However, by perpetuating the hype of how dangerous psychopaths are, we just come back to an earlier point made in this article that the collective ostracises the psychopath and therefore impacts their ability to comply with social norms.

Hug your local psychopath

It seems that one of the prevailing mainstream perspectives on psychopathy is that a psychopath is someone evil: they were born evil; they are evil, and they’ll die evil. Hopefully you’ll now join me in disagreeing with that sentiment and see psychopathy as a complex mental health issue where everyone experiencing it is different and deserves to have the chance to be defined beyond a label.

No one is innately criminal or violent. While yes, there are links between criminality, violence and psychopathy, it’s worth remembering that we live in a time of mass media consumption that loves to sensationalise. The need to sell and to exaggerate often win over the need to be patient, analyse and truly understand complex parts of the human experience.

Psychology’s flirtations with neuroscience have revealed fascinating results: the brain, what a non-scientist would likely assume is a fixed and unchangeable organ, does and can change. Our brains are individual and through theories of neuroplasticity we can understand the vitality of our social environment on our brain and therefore behaviour. Psychopaths cannot be excluded from this.

Psychology and sociology are working to explore links between criminality and disadvantage or oppression. If criminality is linked to psychopathy, we must ask why, and be prepared to look at an individual’s history and their social environment.

Frankly, many of the accusations thrown at psychopaths do not work for neurodiverse people. Whether it’s an anxious person unable to understand why their habits, born from their anxiety, frustrate their travel buddy or a psychopath who — as Dr. Newman believes — can’t recognise their words or behaviour has upset someone until much later, the world can be a confusing puzzle for those of us who do not fit neatly into the expected norm.

In expanding compassion and understanding to others regardless of what condition or disorder they may have, we can be instruments of change. Once we look to others and try to understand them, we deconstruct labels that lead to marginalisation and instead, we can bring people together by saying: you are not alone.

By which I mean...futuristic sci-fi dealing with things like AI, robots, sentient computer intellgience, clones, etc, and the ethics surrounding them. In all the stories I’ve seen that deal with these subjects, it seems like the debates on whether intelligent robots are living, or if clones deserve rights, are some kind of novelty. Or that they’re continuations of historical discussions stemming strictly from scientific advances made in previous centuries.

But none of these stories seem to exist in a universe like ours, where we’ve been consuming fiction about such robots and clones and super computers for....decades. Centuries, even — Frankenstein fits into this discussion just as much as Star Trek. We’ve always been fascinated by the idea of humans trying to create something better than ourselves, whether it be artificial or organic. And by the same token we’ve been wrestling with the ethical implications of that for the same amount of time. We’ve been telling stories for lifetimes about things we as a species are only just now scratching the surface of; what we’ve accomplished comes nowhere near to what we tell ourselves is possible, but we’re already arguing about the morality of our distant future, the...personhood of things we aren’t even close to creating yet.

Below the cut I have copied, word for word, my essay that I wrote that says Nick Carraway imagined all the events in “The Great Gatsby.”

tldr: Compared to all the other characters, Nick is about as interesting as off-brand toothpaste - we only learn about 12 things about him over the course of the book, which is little compared to what we learn about the rest of the characters and when you consider that he’s the narrator. (Just look at the party in chapter 2 for examples of this.) When Gatsby dies, Nick is the only friend of Gatsby’s to show up at the funeral, which makes no sense given that, he had all these parties, surely he must have touched other lives. The characters’ behavior after Gatsby’s death make no sense - Daisy and Tom just up and vanish, when Tom is not the sort of person who would leave without fighting Gatsby, he’d turn up to gloat about “ha ha, I got Daisy and you didn’t.” Then there’s Jordan Baker’s sudden engagement - we learn at the beginning of the book that she’s single, but by the end of the book she announces to Nick out of the blue that she’s engaged. She’s a professional athlete, and Nick really likes her - if the media didn’t follow her social life, Nick would. The events with Gatsby take precedence over the events of an otherwise full summer. (Now of course, this makes sense given that the book is about Gatsby, but Nick seldom mentions his career. Quote from the essay - “The events he cites-eating lunch with his fellow bond salesman, walking around in New York City - compared to the extravaganza that is Gatsby’s company, and being privy to his cousin’s husband’s love affair, and hanging out with such a celebrity as Jordan Baker, are dull and trivial. No wonder he’d choose a fantasy world over the real world.”) Plus, he staright up forgot his own birthday and didn’t remember until basically the end of the day. Until after the fight Tom and Gatsby had over Daisy, until after the fantasy started to fall apart. 

Odds are, none of the characters are completely fake. Perhaps Gatsby, Tom, Daisy, and Jordan resemble people he met during the war or other times in his life. Perhaps he met a guy during the war who called everyone “old sport.” Perhaps he really did meet a polo player named Tom in college. But the man was lonely - he planned to rent the house in West Egg with a coworker who then moved, he’d left his family behind, and even his dog ran away. Nick was lonely. He made up some imaginary friends.

And if you want my citations, below is the whole essay, complete with citations.

but i do it anyway

its not fair to miss you because I let the relationship go years ago. i was hurt, because you were unfairly mean to me for no reason, and instead of apologizing for what you said, you apologized because I found out. I was mad, too, because it was one of your friends who told me what you had said about me, and I saw that you let other people say mean things about me, all while you laughed along. after being best friends for eight years, how could you do that to me?

i thought we were going to be friends forever. we had known each other since we were teenagers. while we were not physically close,I truthfully believed we were a one-in-a-million story. a story other long-distance friends would read about, because we knew one other so well and clicked instantly. I think of your family often, of your pets, and of you. even when my heart hurts because of what you did, or didn't do, I still think fondly of you.

letting the relationship go wasn't easy. but after telling you what I knew and ignoring your response, all I could do was stare at the conversation thread. how much of what we had said had been passed around your other friend group? how much of what I had confided in you had been used as a punchline from you? all your secrets, every piece of you that I cherished, sits safely in my heart, where I will carry it for eternity. i was foolish for believing you had done the same to my secrets, but now I am not sure.

I deleted the conversation thread that night. i don't remember if I blocked you on social media or if I simply made a new account. all I know is everything that connected us was severed. all the screenshots I had of our conversations, images I had saved since we were fifteen and sixteen years old, were gone. many messages were long, heartfelt, and honest. i believe they were honest, because back then we were newly friends, and all the emotions we felt were real. but, they are gone. i do regret it now, because it was proof that someone loved me, despite everything, even for a moment.

it's not fair to miss you this much. it's not fair to me. i loved you, up until recently. up until i remembered the messages between you and your friend, laughing at my expense. there is no hatred in my heart, but there is no love either. i cherish the time we had together, but i do not wish you back into my life.

yet, there are moments when i think of you. when the summer breeze picks up, the sun beating down on my skin, I think of you. your birthday is in the summertime, and I think of you then, too. i think of you when I hear songs from ten, fifteen years ago. back when we were both obsessed with the same band and would wait for their new music to drop every november. it hurts to listen to them, even if the songs are upbeat, which is pathetic. they remind me of you. when I see purple flowers, beautiful and vibrant, I think of you.

it's not fair to miss you because I know you do not miss me. i don't know what made you change, if it was me, or your life becoming difficult, or something else, but I felt it. you must have, too. i felt it in the way I would text you and wouldn't receive an answer back for hours. i waited, I know you were busy and I was too. still, I waited. then another text, because I loved talking to you. again, nothing. until you responded, I waited. it was a single word text, but I was happy you did it anyway. it's pathetic to get a one-word answer after sending one, two, many texts, but you were my friend. i would have wait a thousand years for you to send a single word. maybe you knew it then, that you didn't love me anymore, that you were tired of our friendship.

I ended the friendship because you said that I could talk to you whenever I felt like it, after half-apologizing. i didn't want to talk to you. what would have stayed between us, and what would you have told your friends in secret? i deleted the thread, then your number, and then never contacted you again. I want to, sometimes. i see a cute picture of a dog, or a rabbit, or a cat, and I think that you would like it. but I do not talk to you. i see your celebrity crush and I think that you would say something hilarious if I sent it to you. but I do not want to talk to you. something happens in my life and I want to talk to you. but I don't. i want to talk about your life, to ask about your family and you, but. i don't.

you have given me a new fear in life. the fear that, despite everything I do, people will leave. i believed we would eventually move closer to one another, to spend the rest of our lives together, laughing, and aging. you would have your family, and I mine, and we would be together. but, it didn't end that way. because of me, because of you. because I ended the friendship.