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November 10 - December 4, 2021
“We need people in our lives who don’t expect us to be anything but what we are,”
“Did you know a high percentage of serial killers were abused as children?” He did know that. The fact that he had pored over research on violent antisocial personality disorders was no secret to anyone in this house. And it was true. Genetics loaded the gun, environment pulled the trigger.
“The Hare spectrum is a twenty-item checklist. The top score is forty. For reference, Ted Bundy scored thirty-nine.”
“We need people in our lives who don’t expect us to be anything but what we are”
Empaths tended to think that Gretchen was teasing whenever she said what was on her mind. It was a nifty trick that she’d managed to hone over the years, injecting just the right twist to her words for them to come off as lighthearted instead of vicious.
Empaths liked to dress things up, but when it came down to it, everything was about the cost-benefit ratio.
Assumptions made the world go round. They were easy and frivolous and dangerous and essential to operating in a society where the vast majority of people seemed to intrinsically grasp the complexities of being human.
There was so very little he controlled about his life. More often than not it felt like all he could do was react to the chaos and violence that surrounded him and hope it didn’t rip him to shreds in the process. Living like that frayed a person down to their most fragile of threads.
Was it possible to recognize that you were the bad guy in a story? Reed hadn’t thought he was, but how long could he deny that every person around him seemed to have cast him in that role? The problem with accepting that fact was that if he started to believe them, he wasn’t sure what would stop him from proving them right.
Psychopaths read power the way empaths could read body language. Instinctually.
No one was unequivocally moral, flawless, mistake-free. And yet empaths always seemed blinded to the faults of those they were closest to, while unable to offer understanding to those they didn’t know.
Lena always claimed you could be good for only so long before you had to be a little bad. Otherwise, once you got a taste of something other than perfection, you’d never want to go back.
Wasn’t that funny? How one person’s earthquake went undetected by someone who should have felt the shaking the most?
“There are brains that are more prone to illusory pattern perception,” Gretchen said instead of acknowledging it. “More prone to finding connections in unrelated data. They’re simply wired that way.” “All right, so what brains are prone?” “People who have an excess of dopamine pumping through their gray matter,” Gretchen said, popping a slice of decadent duck into her mouth. “It’s the reverse of low dopamine in addicts. That deficit makes them think that nothing matters. For someone with high dopamine levels, they think everything matters.”
“Pareidolia,” Gretchen said easily, snagging the last pierogi without shame. “That’s a fancy word for humans’ tendency to find significance in something where there is none. Like kids finding shapes in clouds. We do that a lot. And that technically is a subset of apophenia, which is the tendency to find connections where they don’t exist.”
Organized psychopaths didn’t break their patterns, even young ones.
Life wasn’t always about making the right choices. Sometimes it was about making the wrong ones just to see what would happen.
From that first time he and Claire had met, Reed had known this one, this one—well, they would burn each other to the ground.
“Moral codes don’t need to be innate to be effective.”
“All right, take religion,” Gretchen said, decidedly climbing on her soapbox. Empaths were no better than anyone else just because of their particular brain chemistry. “There are plenty of moral codes built into religion that are far from innate. Mormons aren’t supposed to drink coffee. Jewish people aren’t supposed to get tattoos. I don’t think any person, empath or not, was born with such outstanding moral fiber as to think that maybe they shouldn’t indulge in lattes or get inked. Yet millions of people abstain because a book written thousands of years ago tells them to.” “Because they want
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“Just because I wasn’t born with some magical feeling that tells me it’s wrong to kill people doesn’t mean I am going to kill people,” Gretchen said, exasperated.
Empaths on high horses rarely saw when their own knees were buried in the muck.
“I think it’s the people who pretend they’re not as ugly as the rest of us that are worse.”
“Humans are terrible creatures held together by the illusion of civility,” Gretchen agreed.
There was darkness at the edges of even the brightest soul, and empaths just didn’t like to think themselves capable of it. The monsters knew different.
“Do you think we did the right thing?” Marconi finally asked, the question somehow layered with every emotion ever felt by an empath in the eternity of the universe.
