I wish I could learn to like people again but I can’t. That capacity has now gone from me; that aspect of my personality – the ‘liking’ aspect’ – has been lost to me. Permanently, as far as I can tell. It’s as if it had been surgically removed. Now, when I see people I am struck by how weirdly mechanical they are. Like so many insects. Chittering to each other. Preening themselves incessantly. Masticating their food. Jabbering away to each other like morons. Waving their antennae. Doing the inane mechanical things they like to do – like so many ridiculous, preposterously self-important androids. People leave me cold – they leave me profoundly emotionally disengaged. They are mere ‘things’ to me. They are worse than things…

I don’t even find them interesting any more, to be honest. More than this, I confess to finding people actually repellent. I find myself experiencing overpowering feelings of distaste, repugnance and disgust. People nauseate me, they sicken and revolt me. I have to struggle to make sure that the intense revulsion I feel doesn’t show itself on my face. I feel sometimes as if I am on the point of throwing up, and occasionally I even have to turn away and make the effort to swallow the vomit back down again.

This makes my job very difficult as I have to deal with the public every day. I have to attempt to be sympathetic to people when I secretly loathe everything about them. I have to listen to their pathetic problems all day long when the truth is that I couldn’t care less whether they live or die…

So how did this terrible thing happen to me, you may wonder. How did I become so incapable of even the most basic kind of empathy? What brought about this most unfortunate change in my personality? What went wrong? Was it the result of some kind of trauma or bad experience? Was it an accident? Was I the victim of a particularly vicious assault? Am I a victim of bullying? Is it perhaps the case that I have developed some rare form of late-onset sociopathic personality disorder?

The answer is a lot simpler than that. My problems with liking people first began when I started working for the Department of Social Protection as a Community Welfare Officer …