No One Keeps Score Like I Do

Schizotypal personality disorder can make relationships difficult in ways that are easy to flatten into a list of symptoms. It involves severe social anxiety and mistrust, along with a tendency to find unusual meaning in ordinary interactions or withdraw from people you genuinely love. Affection doesn’t make any of that disappear, unfortunately. If anything, the more someone matters, the more room there is for fear to interfere. Closeness raises the stakes, which is rarely when my thinking becomes more reasonable.

The ugly truth is that I’m not the only victim of what this stupid disorder does to relationships. Loving me has cost other people things too. I’ve disappeared when someone needed me, then returned with an explanation as though understanding why I did it could make the absence hurt less. Depression could leave me unable to answer even the people I missed. Paranoia could make me find hostility in something ordinary and lash out at someone for something they hadn’t actually done. I’ve kept pushing after the warmth had already gone out of a conversation because I was too convinced by my own reading of it to notice that the other person was no longer comfortable. Sometimes I only recognised the change in their tone after I had already made them regret being open with me.

Whatever made sense inside my head was invisible to them. They only knew how I made them feel. I left people believing they hadn’t mattered enough for me to treat them better. I know what that does to a person because I still carry it from the people who did it to me. I hate knowing that someone else carries me in the same place. I hate that I’ve become the kind of person I’m still trying to recover from.

Some losses stay with me because I know exactly where I failed. I treated someone’s affection like something I could damage without losing. I kept assuming there would be another conversation and another chance to show them that I cared more than my behaviour suggested. I didn’t realise I was using up those chances while I waited. I was sorry - I still am. But by the time I found the words, they no longer trusted me with them.

That is the point where schizotypal thinking starts turning regret into its own private theory of cause and effect. I start believing that the people who hurt me aren’t simply making choices of their own, but somehow delivering the punishment I earned by hurting someone else first. Every loss seems connected to an old failure, and cruel endings begin to feel too precise to be accidental. I know how easily I assign meaning to things that may not have any, but knowing that doesn’t help much once the pattern feels real. The universe doesn’t need to keep score. I’m perfectly capable of doing it on its behalf.

Apparently the word for this is karma, which is awkward for someone who considers the whole idea nonsense. People often seem surprised by that, as though schizotypal disorder should have arrived with a complimentary belief in cosmic bookkeeping. I don’t believe suffering is distributed according to moral merit. If it were, several people from my past should be having a considerably worse time. My principles become strangely flexible when the subject is me, though. Karma is ridiculous right up until something painful happens and I can point to it as proof that I had it coming.

The practical result is that I start building a case against myself. I go through old mistakes until I find one serious enough to explain why this person got to hurt me. There is always something I regret, which makes the process horribly easy. Their choices slowly disappear from the story, while everything I’ve ever done wrong becomes relevant. In the end, I can make almost anyone innocent if I hate myself carefully enough.

I still haven’t worked out how to take responsibility for the harm I’ve caused without making myself responsible for everything that has ever hurt me. There should be some distance between accountability and self-hatred, but I rarely seem able to find it. Either I defend myself so fiercely that there’s no room left for what the other person felt, or I accept every accusation until their pain becomes proof that I was the problem all along. Neither is honest. I’ve been difficult and unfair to people who cared about me. I’ve also been hurt by people whose behaviour was theirs to answer for. Holding both truths at once should be simple. For me, it feels almost impossible.

I wish I could end this by saying treatment has made relationships easier, but it hasn’t. I go to therapy and take medication, and I’ve spent years learning how my mind works without ever feeling any less trapped in it. Knowing its preferred methods hasn’t made closeness feel any safer. I can recognise paranoia and still believe it. Affection can be obvious and still frighten me. Sometimes all treatment has given me is the awful clarity of knowing what I’m doing while I’m still doing it.

People like to insist that things get better, usually with the confidence of someone who won’t have to live inside the outcome. From what I’ve experienced, this disorder either becomes stable enough to endure or keeps taking more from me. I may become better at hiding how much it affects my life, but I won’t become free of it. This isn’t a period I’ll eventually look back on from somewhere safer. It is the condition under which the rest of my life will happen. Anyone who loves me will be affected by it too, even when I do everything I know how to do. I didn’t choose that, but I’m responsible for limiting the damage wherever I can. The illness is permanent, so the responsibility is too. There isn’t anything reassuring to add after that.