Skewed Vision

20 years ago, had someone told me that I would one day live alone with four cats and have intense rage and hatred towards most people (internally, not externally), I wouldn't have believed them. The words hate and rage were not part of my life back then. 20 years ago, I started my law enforcement career.

It has become increasingly obvious over the last several years that my desire to interact with other human beings is all but gone. Where once I could find something good in the worst person, now even the good people are seen as inherently bad.

As the days, weeks, months and years fly by, this social "problem" I'm having is only getting worse. To the point that I am starting to question myself. If I was sad about being alone and being friends with only the people I work with, I think the solution would be easier found. But I'm not at all sad. I have told you here, more than once, that I LIKE my solitary life. A LOT. The less I have to interact with people, the happier I feel.

For a while, and on very rare occasions even now, I blamed this closed off version of myself on the bad break up I experienced in... 2003? HA, I can't even remember the year any more. The rational part of myself realizes that too many years have passed for this to be a real cause of my horrible outlook on life. And it's got absolutely nothing to do with my aversion to going to the grocery store, driving anywhere, going outside to get my mail, taking my trash to the curb.

I've never been a big fan of self help books. Like the psychologist I once went to, I feel silly paying somebody to tell me things I already know and it's frustrating when they (books or psychologists) can't give me an answer to any of the questions I actually had.

A friend recently lent me a book after a conversation we had about my unsociable behavior. Not only did this book clearly define my life now, but it answered a question I had long ago accepted as unanswerable. That question was: Why did he leave me? It was an answer that even the man who left couldn't give me.

This friend of mine, tying to help my people hating skills, inadvertently answered the BIG unanswerable question and with it, gave me some tools to help curb this anger towards people in general. The book is called, 'Emotional Survival For Law Enforcement / A Guide For Officers And Their Families', by Kevin M. Gilmartin, Ph.D. This book was written with police officers and their families in mind, but worked well, obviously, for this dispatcher... who was once PART of an officer's family and who deals with a lot of the psychology of working in law enforcement on a nightly basis as well.

I am not, by any means, miraculously healed. But my mind now understands that "it" was not my fault and that in itself has released a burden that I have been carrying around for many years. The culprit was ignorance on both of our parts... not so much about the end of the relationship, but why we got together in the first place and why it ended the way it did. I'm still working on the hating people part. That's going to take some work.