Callow

One of the loneliest and saddest things about being schizotypal, at least for me, is that people often stop seeing you as a person and start remembering you as an experience they had. They remember the strange parts. The frightening parts. The parts of you that made them uncomfortable, confused, guilty, or scared. Years later, you can come back with insight, treatment, language, humour, softness, self-awareness - and still realise that someone isn’t looking at you. They’re looking at the worst period of your life and calling it you.

I was a strange child. I know everyone says that about themselves, usually right before describing something completely normal, but I mean it. I felt strange before I had words for it. Before schizotypal, before paranoia, before a psychiatrist could sit across from me and make it sound clinical. I just knew that other children seemed to understand something I didn’t. I was bullied too, which didn’t exactly help. It made me understand, very early, that other people could sense something was off about me before I understood what they were sensing. They noticed the strangeness first; or maybe they just knew I was an easy place to put their cruelty. Either way, I learned that being around people could mean having parts of yourself pointed out to you before you even knew they were there.

Somehow though, in the middle of that, I had a best friend.

We were similar in some ways. Both a little strange, both a little outside things, though I was probably stranger in the way that eventually becomes medical paperwork. But with him, I didn’t feel like I had to explain why I was like that. I could just be weird and not immediately hate myself for it. That was what made him my best friend, I think. He made being me feel a little less embarrassing. At that age, that was everything.

I remember going home with him relatively often after school. He had a dog - the sweetest miniature poodle - and I was terrified of dogs back then, so naturally I told him I was allergic. I don’t think he bought that for a second. Children are bad liars, and strange children are probably worse, because we’re already using so much energy trying to appear normal that even our excuses come out crooked. Still, he let me have the lie. He didn’t make me feel stupid for needing it.

For a long time, I don’t think I felt safer with anyone. That is a dangerous thing to say about another child, because children shouldn’t have to become shelter for each other, but sometimes they do. Sometimes one person becomes the place where your nervous system stops bracing for impact. He was that for me.

Then puberty happened, and things got worse. I knew I was unwell, but I didn’t know any of it was schizotypy yet. I just knew I was getting sadder and more uncomfortable around people, and that being seen started to feel like something I had to survive. Somewhere in there, self-harm became part of my life too.

I leaned on him more than I should have. I know that now. But at the time, I wasn’t thinking, “here is a fellow child I can make responsible for my survival.” Back then, I think I just wanted one person who didn’t make everything feel worse.

I was twelve the first time I remember seriously thinking I didn’t want to be alive anymore. That is a horrible sentence to write, mostly because it feels too normal to me - and no twelve year old should even have that thought cross their mind. There were attempts after that. I’m not going to describe them in detail for obvious reasons. They were bleak and stupid and sad, because I was a child and should have been thinking about literally anything else. It was frightening and lonely, and that’s all there really is to say about it.

By the time my symptoms worsened, death had already become a thought that knew where I lived. It wasn’t always loud. Most days, I wasn’t actively planning anything, really. I was just living with the thought. Going to school with it, eating dinner with it, answering people while it was still there somewhere. He made those days easier to get through.

I ended up changing middle schools a few times, so the whole timeline is annoying to explain. He and I went to the same school for a bit. Then later I ended up at another middle school with people who would eventually become part of his high school life, basically. And I didn’t get along with them. Like, at all. By that point, paranoia was already starting to creep in around the edges. Nothing like what came later, but enough that being around people who could be warm with me one day and distant the next made me question myself constantly.

When we were around sixteen, right after starting high school, he stopped answering me. Not after a fight. Not after some dramatic ending I could point to and say, there, that was the moment. One day he was there, and then he wasn’t. If you already have a fragile relationship with your own perception of things, a shift like that can make you feel completely insane.

At the time, I didn’t understand why. I thought I was doing better. I was still depressed and weird and not exactly thriving, obviously, but I thought I was less bad than before. His silence undid that belief very quickly. I had been paranoid before, but this was the first time I remember it properly taking over my life. He disappeared without explaining why, and my mind did what it had already learned to do. It started making reasons out of nothing.

I did get really depressed after that. For a long time, actually. I hate describing it as ghosting, because it makes the whole thing sound so stupid and unserious for some reason. But I was sixteen, and he was my best friend, above everything else - and I didn’t understand what I had done.

We also didn’t go to the same high school either, so there was no easy way to ask what had changed. I knew one of the girls from that environment had ended up at the same place as him, so one day, because apparently dignity had already left the building, I asked her if he was alive.

That sounds dramatic now. It wasn’t dramatic to me then. It honestly didn’t even occur to me that he might’ve just been ignoring me. That is how much I trusted him. In my mind, if he wasn’t answering, something horrible must’ve happened to him. I wasn’t trying to force contact. I wasn’t trying to insert myself into his new life - I just literally wanted to know if he was alive and okay.

She told me he was fine, with just enough condescension to make me regret asking. It was the kind of thing teenagers can do without ever saying anything openly cruel. Somehow, in the space of one answer, she made caring about him feel humiliating. As though I had accidentally admitted that I was still waiting for someone who was perfectly capable of answering people, just not me. I think that was the moment I stopped being able to pretend his silence meant nothing. It was a choice, and apparently I was the only one who hadn’t understood that yet.

At some point, I saw photos from his birthday party. I wish I could say I handled that normally. I didn’t. It broke my heart in a way that still feels embarrassing to admit - and this was years after the random rupture of our friendship. For some reason, I still followed some of those girls on social media, because apparently I believed exclusion should come with a newsletter. So eventually the newsletter arrived, and there he was with people who had spent years making me feel like there was something inherently wrong with the way I existed.

It’s funny, in the bleakest possible way, because again, he and I had always been similar. We were both strange children. Maybe I was more visibly strange, more eccentric, more doomed to eventually receive a clinical name for it, but still. Anyone who befriends me is automatically eccentric by association. Apparently eccentricity was perfectly tolerable when it came in someone they liked. Mine had simply been interpreted less generously. I think that was one of the first times I understood how arbitrary social cruelty can be. People will convince you there is something fundamentally wrong with you, then happily embrace the same qualities elsewhere and never notice the contradiction.

My aunt had died only a few weeks before I saw those photos. I think that’s part of why they destroyed me the way they did. I’d always felt like I belonged with her in a way I rarely managed anywhere else, and then suddenly that place was gone too. Seeing him surrounded by people so soon afterward hit something much older than jealousy or a birthday invitation. He’d once been another person around whom I felt like I had a place in the world, and now both of those places seemed to exist only in the past. There are only so many places you can lose before you start wondering if you were ever meant to keep one.

Safe to say, between my aunt dying and seeing those photos, I think I just lost whatever grip I still had.

I know life is random. I know that is the real adult answer. Things happen, people get sick, people leave, and none of it means anything in particular. But I don’t think I’ve ever fully believed that. Some part of me has always felt like certain people are unlucky in a way that follows them around. Like a curse, almost. And I still think I’m one of them.

And birthdays are symbolic, if you think about it. That isn’t just me being mentally ill and looking for hidden meanings where there are none. Birthdays are rituals of belonging. They show who gets invited, who gets remembered, who is allowed to stand close enough to be photographed. A birthday photo isn’t just a picture; it is evidence that someone had a place there. And I didn’t. Even though I had once been close enough to think my absence would mean something.

After that, I finally blocked the girls. I had already humiliated myself enough by watching people belong somewhere I didn’t. At some point even I, with my impressive commitment to psychological self harm, had to admit that maybe I didn’t need a front row seat to my own exclusion.

But I never stopped thinking about him.

I think that is how I know he really mattered to me. He would pop into my head at the stupidest times. A joke, some weird little thing that happened, something I knew only he would understand. For half a second I would want to tell him, and then I would remember I couldn’t. That part always felt so pathetic. It is embarrassing, really, the way love can outlive the practical conditions that made it possible. Nobody wants to admit they’re still carrying a person who put them down years ago.

Because he never gave me an explanation at the time, I eventually made one for him. I decided he had disappeared because I had leaned on him too much. Maybe I had frightened him. Maybe I had become too heavy. Maybe I had asked too much from another teenager who was never supposed to become a crisis line with a school schedule. But I had to arrive at that conclusion alone, and that’s what hurt the most.

Years later, when I finally got proper treatment for schizotypal personality disorder, I told my psychiatrist about him. About the friendship, the disappearance, the years of not knowing. My psychiatrist told me I should send him a message.

I thought this was a ridiculous suggestion, obviously. Insane, even. Very bold of a mental health professional to look at a woman with paranoia and say, “have you considered placing your dignity directly into the hands of the person who once vanished with it?” Still, the thought stayed there.

By then, we hadn’t spoken in about six years. Six years, and I still didn’t know if I had actually meant anything to him, or if I had just made it all weird in my own head. At some point I got tired of wondering. I thought, okay, fine, maybe I embarrass myself. At least then I’ll know. So I wrote to him.

The message was very normal. Annoyingly normal, considering how much emotion I had stuffed into it. I was so nervous sending it that I quite literally sweated my palm tattoo off. I basically just said I had thought about our old friendship lately and hoped he was doing well. That was all, really. A small, polite little message carrying six years of grief behind its back like contraband.

Sending it took more from me than I think most people would understand. I hate feeling pathetic more than anything, so sending it felt awful. I had already been ignored by him once, and now I was voluntarily putting myself back in a position where he could do it again.

Shockingly though, he answered. He said it was a lovely message to receive.

Then we talked about what had happened. I told him I never blamed him. Which was very generous of me, and also not completely true, I admit. I did blame him. Not completely, not cruelly, not without understanding that we were young. But sixteen isn’t six. At sixteen, you know that disappearing from your best friend will hurt them. You know enough to write them one sentence.

I think I just wanted the good parts to still be true. That is probably it. He had been kind to me once, and I didn’t want to believe I had carried that around for years for no reason. So I made excuses. He was young. I was a lot. It was complicated. Whatever. I gave him more understanding than I think he ever gave me.

I also think he was probably my first love. I cringe saying that, because it sounds much more dramatic than it was. Nothing really happened. We didn’t date. I didn’t get to call him mine. I mean, best friend is probably the easiest word for it, but it has always felt a little too small. I think he knew that, because he accepted the way I described it later. It was just this strange, formative unnamed thing that mattered too much. More like he was the first person I attached that much feeling to. The first person whose presence made life feel a little less awful. And when you’re young and already not doing well, that kind of attachment gets messy very fast. It isn’t just love - it is fear, shame, relief, dependence, loyalty, all of it mixed together.

Anyway, after that, we kept talking.

It was strange at first, in the way impossible things are strange when they start behaving like ordinary life. We found out we still had a lot in common. A love for animals, especially. He was in medical school. I told him I was proud of him. He told me he was proud of the progress I had made. We sent each other small pieces of our lives, old memories, jokes, tenderness. I kept having these moments where I would remember that we were actually speaking again, and it felt absurd. If someone had told me a year earlier that we would reconnect, I think I would have found it more believable that I would be struck by lightning in a grocery store or something.

However, the more we talked, the more the old resentment came back. Not all at once. Just in little moments. I would be enjoying the conversation, and then suddenly remember that this was the same person who had left me with no explanation for years.

So eventually, we talked about it. Properly this time. We had long conversations about those years, and I told him what they had actually been like for me. How I had blamed myself, because clearly that was easier than accepting that someone I trusted had simply stopped answering me. And hey - to his credit, he seemed genuinely remorseful. He listened. He even said that he had been waiting for me to tell him what it had really been like. He said the right things, and appeared to mean them. And I believed him. I think I needed to believe him. I was still being nice about it too. Too nice, probably. He had left me carrying that pain for years, and somehow I was still sitting there trying not to make him feel too bad about it. But for a while, I really thought he got it.

A few months later, I brought up the other thing. The birthday photos. The girls. The fact that he had somehow stayed near people who made me feel horrible, while I was the one who disappeared from his life. He seemed to understand that too. Or at least, he said he did.

Then, almost on cue, his replies started slowing down.

It messed with me immediately. We had literally just talked about what silence did to me, and now I was sitting there again, waiting for him to answer, trying to act like I was fine. I kept telling myself, don’t start. Don’t make this weird. Don’t be insane about it. But sitting there waiting for him again felt far too much like being sixteen again.

Eventually I asked him outright if he had a problem with me, and whether there was something I was missing. There are probably more graceful ways to ask that question. Paranoia has never made me particularly graceful.

And I mean, I guess I was right. Obviously. Because then the message came.

By that point, we had been talking for over six months. We had planned to meet. We had talked about hugs so much it had practically become its own subplot. We had told each other we loved each other. Not in a romantic way, but still. Those words had been said. Warmth had been exchanged. Trust had been reopened.

Suddenly he revealed that it had been hard to get close to me again. The whole time we had been in contact, actually. He also brought up something from when I was younger and suicidal, and how much it had scarred him. I’m not saying it didn’t. I’m sure it did. I’m sure it was awful for him.

But it was awful for me too. That part seemed strangely easy to forget. I was reading about one of the worst periods of my life, and somehow the main tragedy had become what it did to him.

I wish I was twisting this to make it sound worse, but I’m not. He said, verbatim, that he still couldn’t see me as who I am now. He saw me as the version of myself I was when I was at my worst. Not as a friend. As a responsibility. That is one of those sentences I think I will hear in my head for the rest of my life. I don’t think some words ever stop hurting - I think you just get older while carrying them. This is one of them for me.

He even said his life had become harder after we started talking again. Which is a really insane thing to say to someone who already has to fight the feeling that she ruins things just by having a pulse. But of course, I’m sure he meant it as honesty. People often do cruel things under the noble little banner of honesty. But there is a difference between saying, “this reconnection has been difficult for me,” and saying, quite literally, “my life became worse when you came back into it.” There’s something deeply impressive about writing a sentence like that and still seeing yourself as the measured one.

That was when I started wondering if I had been wrong about the whole thing. I thought we were reconnecting. I thought it meant something. But maybe he was just using it to feel less guilty. Like if he could talk to me again, be kind to me again, then maybe what he did back then wasn’t so bad. Maybe I was useful as forgiveness until I became a person again.

He also said my compliments had made him uncomfortable, which was interesting, because this hadn’t been mentioned at any point while the compliments were being received. Apparently they had been filed away somewhere, waiting to be used later as evidence.

I suppose schizotypal personality disorder has its charms. When I think something is wrong, I become unbearable immediately, which is considerate in its own way. No one has to wait six months for the director’s cut. No one has to discover, after being affectionate with me, that I was secretly building a silent little museum of everything they did wrong.

Some people, apparently, prefer a more delicate method. They let the closeness continue. They return the affection and give no indication that any of it is a problem. Then, months later, they unveil the hidden terms and explain that the friendship they helped build had been quietly unbearable all along.

What I still can’t get over is how much moral credit he seemed to expect for finally saying it. As though honesty becomes admirable once it arrives with the goodbye. He was sorry for ghosting me when we were teenagers, apparently, but also made it clear that the friendship would’ve ended anyway. Ah, yes. Nothing says deep remorse quite like clarifying that the loss itself had always been correct and only the method needed work. I do admire the efficiency of making an apology sound even more insulting than the original disappearance. A fascinating thing to say after speaking to me like a friend for seven months, but alright.

Then came the part where he said he had been reading symbols and hidden meanings into my messages, which was a nice little twist. For a second there, I did have to wonder which one of us had the schizotypal diagnosis. I say that with love, obviously, by which I mean not at all. It would be funny if it didn’t make the whole thing so much sadder. The entire time I thought we were having the same relationship, he had apparently been interpreting an entirely different one. The one time I refused to let paranoia do the reading for me, I should’ve taken notes from the future doctor instead.

He also said that the AI pictures I sent him confused him. I still have no idea what he meant by that. In the middle of a message about trauma, suicide, responsibility, and cutting contact, the alleged AI pictures made an appearance, which felt almost generous in its absurdity. Between that and the retroactive complaint about compliments he had never objected to while receiving them, it felt like he was trying very hard to make the exit sound justified. A little comic relief, provided by the same person currently explaining why being in contact with me had made his life harder.

He had once said the raccoons I photographed looked unreal, so I suppose I’ll take it as a compliment. Maybe my wildlife photography was simply too powerful. Honestly, I needed the laugh. That accusation was really, really funny. Especially considering the fact that he literally requested the animal pictures.

I had actually been going out of my way to look for animals because I thought it would make him happy, so it was a lovely little surprise to find out later that even that had somehow been repurposed into a reason to distrust me. I already second-guess kindness when it comes from other people. I didn’t realise I was also supposed to second-guess my own, just in case something small and affectionate might later be made to look unsettling. But the more you know, I guess. Useful information for next time.

So, that was that. Half a year down the drain because someone couldn’t manage to be honest until the honesty had become a closing statement.

Friendship, as you can probably imagine, has never been easy for me. I do have a best friend from high school, though. I met her after switching schools because I was miserable at the first one, which was unfortunate but, in this one very specific instance, useful.

Anyway, her name is Ivy, and she has seen me at my worst in ways most people only claim they can handle until handling it requires actual follow-through. I love her to death for that. She was pissed about this reconnection from the beginning, mostly because she has the annoying gift of literally always being right. She knew it was doomed. I thought, very bravely and very stupidly, that maybe this time would be different.

I don’t believe friendship is impossible when you’re schizotypal. I have proof. It is difficult, yes, and often humiliating, and sometimes it feels like trying to build a house on top of an alarm system. But some people are real. Some people don’t treat your trust like a charity project. Some people know the worst parts of you and still manage, somehow, not to make your life story about their inconvenience.

This is no offence to medical students or doctors, but she and I have a running joke that the worst person you know is either already a doctor or on their way there with excellent grades in med school and a devastating lack of self-awareness. I’m aware this is unfair. But I’m also aware that life keeps sending me supporting evidence, so I mean… come on now. But maybe I’m just bitter and miserable. Maybe I should become a more generous person. Or maybe the raccoon was AI. Who can say.

What I do know is that people have done things to me I can’t imagine doing to anyone else. Not because I’m morally superior, God knows that would be a bold claim, but because there are certain cruelties I can’t understand performing and then walking away from as if they were just difficult but necessary acts of self care. This was only the most recent example. Not the first. Not even the strangest. Just the newest addition to a very stupid archive.

I honestly don’t know how to end this neatly. I spent years learning that being frightened of someone doesn’t necessarily mean you understand them. He seems to have reached the opposite conclusion. Perhaps that is one of the privileges of being considered psychologically healthy: nobody tells you that your interpretation of another person might also be distorted.

I can live with the fact that knowing me affected him - what I resent is being made permanently responsible for the fact that he never seems to have worked out what to do with that afterward. At some point, another person’s unprocessed fear stops being a biography of you.

There is something almost funny about being the clinically paranoid one and still somehow ending up with more suspicion toward my own conclusions than he had toward his. Almost.

I also don’t wish being on the receiving end of that on anyone. I know it can be confusing. I know it can be heavy. I know loving, knowing, or even just witnessing someone like me isn’t always simple. But I also know there is a difference between being overwhelmed by someone’s pain and completely reducing them to it.

That is the part I keep coming back to. I can be older now. More articulate. More self-aware. I can go to treatment, learn the words, regulate myself better, make jokes before anyone else can, write all these dumb articles trying to turn the mess into something readable. I can do all of that, and still not be able to control what version of me someone else decides to keep.

Maybe that is the saddest part. Not that I was once unwell. I know I was. Not that I scared people. I know I did. The saddest part is surviving the worst period of your life, only to realise some people still found a way to make it about what it did to them.