I don't like feelings. I have them, I just don't like them. Emotions, to me, are far more often liabilities than assets. Feelings are too dependent, too erratic, too unpredictable to serve a practical purpose in nearly any life situation. The fact is, if I'm being honest, that I am actually afraid of my feelings.
You look at me and you see a man who is more machine than human. You see a logical, calculating, hyper-literal robot who only shows his humanity when he's angry. You never hear me talk about how I feel, only what I think. You never see me make a decision based on my emotions, only on hard facts, logic and reason. All these observations lead you to believe that I just don't feel at all, except when I suddenly explode into a raging tempest at what seems to be little or no provocation.

The truth is that I do feel, perhaps more intensely than anyone else you know. My problem is that, instead of taking the time to examine my emotions and give them an effective outlet, I suppress them and operate based exclusively on what I determine to be the most productive thought about a given event. It's perfectly fine, even desirable, for a man to be able to think with the head on his shoulders instead of just following every passing flight of fancy he feels at the time. Unfortunately, it is detrimental to his mental and emotional health to do as I do: to not only think first, but think only, completely shutting down any emotional input from himself or anyone else. That is because no human being, aside from a sociopath, can truly exist without real emotions. Even sociopaths must cope with feelings of anger, despite having to fake all other human emotions. No one is immune to feelings.

You want to know how I feel. Well, I am terrified of nothing more than the idea of you becoming aware of all the things I feel. My thoughts tell me that these emotions I am experiencing are not appropriate to the facts of the situation. Logic, then, dictates that I should not act on said emotions and, by extension, that I should not value them. A man can only endure that kind of suppression for so long before the heart's reactor goes into full-scale thermonuclear meltdown. When that happens, all of those suppressed emotions erupt into the forefront of the mind, all at once and in no particular order, creating a very confusing and frustrating situation. All of these feelings, whose origins are by now unknown, lead to fear, self-loathing and resentment which all collectively manifest in the emotion most easily and efficiently expressed: anger.

Of course, this catastrophic reaction is devastating to everything and everyone around me. Nothing, however, suffers greater damage than the bomb itself: me. If you think my anger hurts you, imagine how painful it is to have such unfettered rage rending your mind and soul asunder to get out! Consider how miserable it must be to know that you are the single greatest source of misery and terror for everyone you love.

I have often wondered if I am, in fact, a sociopath. If I analyze the facts from the perspective of an objective third party, all of the red flags are there: the ability to effortlessly adapt to any social situation, a noticeable tendency to closely imitate the physical and vocal cues of others and a predictable pattern of extreme outbursts of anger when I don't get my way. That's textbook sociopathy. There is one ray of hope for me: most of the time, people with mental disorders are not self-aware. The fact that I wonder, combined with my ability to freely feel not only anger, but extreme guilt, leads me to believe I'm not a psycho. At least, not in the literal sense.

So, if I'm not a sociopath, what am I? Normal people don't behave the way I do. For the most part, people go through their daily lives with the ability to feel things, acknowledge them, talk about them and empathize with others' feelings. That isn't me. When I start to feel anything I don't think is good or right at the time, I shut it down immediately. When someone near me is obviously feeling a certain way, especially a negative one, I make a conscious effort not to let myself experience that feeling with them. I deliberately condition my desires, interests, tastes and habits to contradict those that are popular, particularly in my own social circles.

Everything about my personality is tailored to be just abrasive and controversial enough to keep people at a distance, but not to such an extent that they begin to dislike me. In fact, it seems that my efforts to hold others at arm's length often results in them placing greater value on my opinions and seeking my approval more diligently. It's almost as if my being standoffish makes me seem more honest and trustworthy. Now, in almost all situations, I actually AM entirely honest, regardless of whether it will be hurtful. I can be trusted implicitly with one's deepest secrets and will never divulge sensitive or privileged information without permission unless I genuinely believe another party deserves to know. If, for example, you tell me that you caught my friend's wife having sex with another man, you can be certain that I am going to tell him as soon as humanly possible.

On the other hand, I command an almost superhuman mastery and manipulation of the English language, as well as being extremely skilled in deception, guile, duplicity, misdirection, suggestion and outright manipulation. With only limited exception, if you catch me in a lie, it is only because I have determined that it is no longer serves my purposes or, in certain cases, because I don't want you to trust me. Every word that I speak is a meticulously calculated move in the world's most convoluted game of human chess. I do this to tailor my surroundings to my behavioral patterns and preferences. This makes it easier for me to avoid unwanted emotional experiences and it is something that I will go to absurd lengths to accomplish, even to the detriment of anyone close to me.

So, what am I? I fear this question more than any other because I am almost certain of the answer. I'm not a psycho, just an evil, selfish human being. I place greater value on my own comfort than I do on the mental and emotional wellbeing of others. There's just one insurmountable problem to this value system: in my efforts to condition my surroundings to my liking, I hurt the people I love. Like I said before, I do feel. I regulate most of my feelings with ease, but I am powerless to manage anger and guilt. So you see, all my efforts to keep myself emotionally comfortable are inherently self-defeating, thus I find myself in a perpetually downward spiral of rage and self-loathing. The guilt is unbearable.

Perhaps now you are beginning to understand why I see myself as this evil, monstrous person. No matter what I do, or to whom, none who walk this earth will ever hate me more than I do. Even more than the crippling weight of guilt, it is fear that produces this hatred. No matter how hard I try, no matter how long I calculate and analyze, I cannot determine why I continue to behave as I do when I know that it's never going to work. I simply don't understand it. Like most living things, I fear that which I do not understand and what I fear I come to hate.

I am absolutely afraid of myself. I don't understand what causes me to be the way I am and that frightens me. I hate it. I hate not knowing why. I pride myself on being an intellectual creature. Vast knowledge and an inhuman understanding of all that I encounter are the characteristics of myself in which I take sinfully great pride. It should make perfect sense, then, that my inability to understand the one thing that no other person alive is closer to, namely myself, is scary and not a little maddening.

Does it make sense to you now? Do you see why I'm afraid to feel and to let those feelings out? You want to know me, to understand why I am the way I am, but how can I possibly explain something in a few conversations that I haven't been able to figure out in nearly 33 years of intimate, firsthand experience? I don't shut you out because you are not important to me. I do it because I cannot overcome the paralyzing fear that maybe you'll see me the same way I do. Maybe you'll be as horrified as I am. If my choices are cold, heartless robot or pure evil prick, I'd rather you see me as a robot.

No one with two brain cells to rub together blames a machine for what it does. You don't judge a microwave for emitting radiation. You don't blame a drill for making holes. These things are just doing what they were built to do. We all, however, blame people for the things they do. Everyone blames a terrorist for blowing up a bus. Everyone blames a rapist for violating the body of an unwilling victim. When people do bad things, they are responsible. When machines do bad things, they are defective and simply need to be repaired or replaced, or they were not used properly and the blame lies with the operator.
These are the things that have been running amok in my head and, if I'm being honest, it's a genuine miracle I haven't been locked safely away from all human contact. I don't want to be this way, but I have no clue how to break this cycle. I don't know how to express my feelings. I don't know how to give a voice to my heart. All I know how to do is think, and what I think is that I don't know how to be a good person.