Free Confessions of a Sociopath by M.E. Thomas Page B

ground while the chicken flapped itself to death. The whole process took no longer than five minutes. Instead I yelled at the chicken, causing it to scurry away. I gathered the remaining viable eggs and walked back into the house.
    I wondered if the chickens knew which one was the egg eater, and if they didn’t, what they would do if they found out.

Chapter 3

W E ’ RE C REEPY AND W E ’ RE K OOKY
    I grew up in a home with many siblings, but my favorite has always been my older brother Jim. When he was eighteen he snapped and became what he later called “the Lone Wolf.” On a trip with some of his friends he got sick and soiled himself in the parking lot of Walmart. The embarrassment and anxiety from this incident seems to have triggered a fugue state; he didn’t tell his friends or even have the common decency to go inside the store to clean up. Instead he stripped his underwear off and left it on the asphalt of the parking lot, and segregated himself from the rest of the group. After searching they found him wandering around a different section of the lot and with skill convinced him to return to the car. For the rest of the now-awkward trip he wore a single set of dirty clothes and refused to wash himself. For the most part, he couldn’t speak in coherent sentences, or really do anything to function like a human being. After a few days, he became Jim again, but he couldn’t answer questions about the Lone Wolf and still can’t.
    For lack of better words, I would describe the adult Jim asfragile. He is very sensitive to stress, easily overwhelmed by the most insignificant things, and almost consistently nervous. He acts like an abused dog that has been kicked one too many times in the stomach to feel at ease around strangers. Despite intensive therapy, he still can’t seem to keep it together and will lash out in passive-aggressive ways or retreat completely, leaving a shell of himself behind. When I look at him I sometimes wonder, is this what empath M.E. would have looked like? I could never imagine myself turning out like Jim, which makes me wonder—how did the same stimulation produce two opposite characters? I often think about Jim—my empathetic counterpart—when questions arise about whether I was born as a sociopath or made into this by the circumstances of my childhood. There is compelling scientific evidence to suggest that sociopathy has a strong genetic component. Studies also show that sociopathic traits are stable and consistent through an individual’s lifetime. Identical twins who share 100 percent of their genes have been found far more likely to both exhibit sociopathic traits than fraternal twins, who share only 50 percent of their genes. The closest thing I have to a twin is my brother Jim. At a little more than a year apart in age, we were often mistaken for fraternal twins. Jim and I did everything together. It’s safe to say that we had nearly identical upbringings and experiences, but we turned into starkly opposite adults.
    In a large park in the city where I grew up there was a giant concrete dinosaur, a brontosaurus. Most of him lay beneath the surface of the sandlot, his massive body never to be excavated. Only his long neck and purple tail stuck out into the world—perfect for us kids to climb and swing on. My brother Jim and I spent a lot of time with the brontosaurus inlate afternoons and early evenings—sometimes many hours—when my mother was meant to pick us up after school. It was near to the school but remote enough that it was out of sight of the school monitors. No one would suspect we had been forgotten by our parent, and we had prepared stories for ourselves in case anyone approached us: “Our mom is at the principal’s office discussing our progress,” or “Our mom was just called away for an emergency. She is having a neighbor come get us right now.” The truth is we had no idea why our mother never seemed to be able to pick us up on time, but we didn’t