Send in the Schizoid Kid: A Life Observed From the Outside

I found out I had Schizoid Personality Disorder by accident. I was fifteen years old, sitting in the waiting room of my psychiatrist's office. His door was open, and I heard him tell his secretary, “Send in the schizoid kid.” That was me.

Like most people who hear the word schizoid, particularly a fifteen-year-old in the early 1980s, I thought it meant schizophrenia. Nobody sat me down and explained the diagnosis. Nobody gave me a pamphlet describing what it might mean for the rest of my life. There was no internet to consult when I got home. There wasn't even much of a popular vocabulary for discussing these things. The diagnosis would not be formally revealed to me until decades later, when that same psychiatrist testified during my disability hearing and confirmed that Schizoid Personality Disorder was indeed what he had diagnosed me with as a teenager. By then I had already spent most of my life living it.

Schizoid Personality Disorder is a strange diagnosis partly because its defining characteristics involve absences: little desire for close relationships, preference for solitary activities, apparent indifference to praise or criticism, emotional detachment. Years ago, when writing about my book Submerged Structure, I described it as a disorder involving something missing, complicated by the fact that the person missing it may not miss it—or may not know exactly what he is supposed to be missing.

I don't know if I would describe it exactly that way today. One of the difficulties in writing about something you've lived with for more than forty years is distinguishing the condition from the person. Which parts are symptoms? Which are adaptations? Which are simply personality? Which resulted from experiences that had nothing to do with a psychiatric diagnosis at all? After this long, I don't know where one ends and another begins.

What I do know is that much of my life has felt like an exercise in observation. When I was younger, I consciously practiced behaviors other people appeared to perform automatically. Eye contact. Smiling. Shaking hands. Even walking correctly could become something to think about rather than simply something to do. I watched people and tried to determine what was expected of me. Years later I described this process as translation. Life required continually translating myself into a persona comprehensible to people who had never needed to consider that the social language they spoke naturally might be a foreign language to somebody else.

Then, in 1987, Star Trek: The Next Generation appeared on television. My favorite character was Lieutenant Commander Data. Data was an android. He was intelligent, capable and sentient, but he lacked human emotions and was fascinated by them. He observed the people around him. He studied their behavior. He attempted humor. He tried to understand friendship, affection, grief and all the strange contradictions humans accepted without seeming to notice them. I identified with him immediately. I wasn't an android trying to become human, obviously, but emotionally the metaphor was almost embarrassingly accurate. Data was doing consciously what everyone around him did instinctively. I knew something about that.

Today there is an enormous vocabulary surrounding experiences that barely had a public vocabulary when I was fifteen. Neurodivergence. Autism spectrum disorder. Masking. Sensory processing. Social communication differences. Spend a few minutes online and you can find thousands of people discussing experiences that previous generations might never have described publicly.

I don't know exactly what to make of it. When I later went to college and studied psychology, the profession seemed considerably more confident about these categories and their prevalence. Certain disorders affected a certain percentage of the population. Diagnostic categories had boundaries. At least that was the impression presented to students. Now reported diagnoses of autism spectrum disorder have increased enormously, and people publicly identify themselves as neurodivergent in numbers that would have seemed astonishing when I was young.

Why? I don't know. Diagnostic criteria have changed. Awareness has changed. Parents and teachers know what to look for. People who once would have gone undiagnosed can now be recognized. Stigma has changed. Self-reporting has changed. Whether those explanations account for everything, or whether something else is happening as well, isn't something my own experience qualifies me to decide. Nor do I know what diagnosis I would receive if I were fifteen years old today.

That question interests me, but I don't want to rewrite my life using terminology that didn't exist when I lived it. Schizoid Personality Disorder and autism are not interchangeable diagnoses. I can't travel back forty years with today's diagnostic manuals and today's understanding of neurodevelopment and submit the fifteen-year-old version of myself for reassessment. All I can report reliably is what the experience looked like from inside.

Increasingly, though, I can see what it did to my work. For years I made a distinction between the Outlaw artist and the Outsider artist. The Outlaw understands the rules and deliberately breaks them. The Outsider may never have understood why the rules existed in the first place. I once fancied myself an Outlaw. Eventually I began to suspect I had been an Outsider all along.

That distinction changed how I understood my poetry. Much of my writing has involved looking at ordinary human behavior as though it weren't ordinary. Customs, relationships, ambitions, status, work, sex, religion, death, possessions—the peculiar machinery of being human becomes visible when you aren't completely absorbed in operating it. Eventually that same observational habit moved increasingly toward the physical world: birds, roads, weeds, rivers, abandoned buildings, animals, signs and objects people have discarded. The bicycle somebody pulled out of the Rock River. An office chair sitting strangely in a window. Things encountered while walking through Rockford that thousands of other people may have passed without needing to stop.

Haiku turned out to be particularly compatible with that way of experiencing the world. You don't have to explain everything. You notice. That is essentially the method behind Hike You!, the six-year walking and haiku project I've created with photographer Ryan Davis. We walk through the city. We encounter something. Ryan photographs it. I write about it. It sounds almost ridiculously simple. Maybe it is. But I've come to realize that observation has been one of the continuous threads running through my life. When participation isn't automatic, observation becomes unusually important.

The same contradiction appears elsewhere in my work. Someone reading the diagnostic description of Schizoid Personality Disorder might reasonably expect me to have spent my life withdrawing from other people, and certainly I've done plenty of that. Solitude isn't something I tolerate until something better comes along. It is my natural state. Yet I founded Zombie Logic Press. I edited Zombie Logic Review. I've published other writers. I've organized projects. I've participated in Rockford's literary and artistic community. I've collaborated with artists. I've spent years documenting the history and peculiarities of the city where I live. Those things require other people.

The younger version of me once wrote something that is difficult for the older version to dismiss: “I want to be with you. I want to be part of the scene. I want to be human.” I don't think I'd say it quite that way anymore. I no longer believe there is some examination in human behavior I'm required to pass. But I recognize the person who wrote it.

What I've actually done, perhaps without realizing it, is construct alternative methods of participation. Writing is one of them. Publishing is another. Collaboration is another. Walking through a city with a photographer and returning with a poem is another. They allow connection without requiring me to experience connection exactly the way someone else does.

That brings me back to Submerged Structure. There used to be a sign along Route 72 between Byron and Oregon, Illinois, beside the Rock River. I saw it repeatedly when I was young. It read SUBMERGED STRUCTURE, warning that something was underneath the water. You couldn't see it from the surface, but it was there and needed to be accounted for. I couldn't stop thinking about those words. Eventually they became the title of a book.

At the time, I thought the sign was a nearly perfect metaphor for Schizoid Personality Disorder. Something was submerged within me. Maybe it had broken away. Maybe it had never developed. Maybe it remained somewhere inaccessible beneath the surface. Other people couldn't see it, and I couldn't adequately explain it. I am less certain now that anything needs to be recovered. That's one of the things forty years can change.

I don't know whether today's explosion in the language of neurodivergence will ultimately make these experiences easier for younger people. I hope it does. I hope a fifteen-year-old sitting in a psychiatrist's waiting room today doesn't have to accidentally overhear what someone has decided is happening inside his own mind. I hope somebody explains it to him. I hope he gets to ask questions. And I hope he understands that a diagnosis may describe something important about him without necessarily providing the definitive explanation of who he is.

I don't have a program to offer people with Schizoid Personality Disorder, autism spectrum disorder or any of the other conditions we now gather beneath an expanding vocabulary of human neurological difference. I'm barely able to understand my own experience. But I have forty years of evidence: poems, books, photographs, strange little observations about human behavior, publishing projects, collaborations and walks through Rockford. There is a book called Submerged Structure. There is even an old poem called “Away Message,” in which I imagined myself in geosynchronous orbit around a lost moon of Jupiter—present, but very far away.

Maybe that's what my work has been doing all this time: sending messages from wherever I am. I don't know whether someone younger, newly diagnosed or simply struggling to understand why the world seems to operate according to rules everyone else received in advance will find anything useful in those messages. I hope so. I can't give them a map, but after forty years of wandering around out here, I can leave a few signs.

Pin It