“I’m indifferent to things, not actively malevolent.”

I think I first knew I had an issue with Conduct Disorder (as much as I could know anything, honestly) in the later years of elementary school.

I knew that other kids seemed to get bothered by things a lot more than I did, and I was way less afraid to get into physical and verbal fights with other children than they were. I remember before the end of elementary, I had started gathering other children around me to assist in altercations and just to have around as a numbers advantage, things like that. Of course, I didn’t actually think of it like that back then.

My family didn’t notice anything was wrong with my behaviour. I was with my grandparents at the time, and they honestly weren’t paying much attention. One of my teachers noticed, but she had already not liked me for seemingly unrelated reasons, so my family shrugged her off when she raised concerns. I couldn’t tell you why she thought that way, honestly. There would have been plenty of officially valid reasons for her to get onto me if she’d have just waited.

Having conduct disorder made it harder to put energy into relationships I was trying to develop in high school, which felt odd compared to the relative enthusiasm everyone else seemed to have for it. School was much the same. I do genuinely think I had what it took, intellectually, to do well. I just couldn’t bring myself to consistently put effort in a lot of the time.

This also translated to the working world after I was diagnosed with ASPD. I think it actually made work easier, to be honest with you. My first job was tech support for a tech corporation, and being able to not care about strangers actually helped a lot.

As I’ve got older, I’ve had to learn the rules of society. I had to manually learn pretty much everything, and a lot of stuff I solved by just not talking to people for a long time. It’s only really through questioning close friends that I really started understanding people.

I’ve also been running into evidence that I likely have low grade prosopagnosia as well which hasn’t helped. A lot of the face reading I’ve heard of other people with ASPD using isn’t really available to me at all. I’ve had to learn a lot of stuff through pattern recognition in speech, mostly.

Mechanically speaking, it’s extremely easy to mask. Emotionally speaking, it’s exhausting, though how hard it is depends entirely on who I’m around. I have an extremely close-knit friendship group that I’ve put a lot of work into maintaining and I’d probably class them as top priority as far as people go.

In terms of my ASPD diagnosis, I technically got told by a psychiatrist that I have it, but out of concern for myself due to the general outlook on the condition, we decided not to put it to paper. I also got administered the PCL-R by the same psychiatrist and an assistant, I believe. That may or may not be related depending on how one views the psychopathy/ASPD situation. I remember being affectionately referred to by my psychiatrist as, “The one with dead fish empathy”, (which I didn’t mind, I thought it was funny).

Probably the biggest misconception is that I have some intrinsic desire to cause harm. I’m not going to pontificate about being ‘one of the good ones’ that believes in morality or whatever – I know that I’m entirely amoral. But that means that I’m indifferent to things, not actively malevolent.

I tend to act in ways that will benefit myself and people I care about, and overwhelmingly that’s things that most people would be fine with. Living in the real world just isn’t conducive to creating cartoonishly evil behaviour.

The second biggest misconception is that I’m perfectly stone cold and smoothly behaved all the time, which is very false. If I’m going to get into trouble, it’s going to be due to anhedonia, which will cause me to act out to gain stimulation in any way possible. This is when I’m at my least logical, because it’s the point when I’m not going to care much about how I get that stimulation. Fortunately, I can surround myself with outlets that give me plenty of options when I do have an anhedonia episode, so I can usually avoid any harm.

I guess one thing is that I don’t really consider ASPD a disability. I’ve always considered it more like something with pros and cons, and trying to live as a neurotypical tends to make the cons more obvious. That said, like with work, and my friends, there are places where the pros can be maximized instead. It just takes a lot of work and finding the right environment.