I'm not a sociopath. In truth I never was.
When I was eight years old, I had a dog. I loved that dog more than any proper child should. It wasn't that I had a neglectful family, in fact they were painfully attentive to my recollection, but out of all of them I admired that dog the most. He was so content to spend day after day laying in any patch of sun he could find, running through the field behind our estate, or mopping up after mummy's botched attempts to teach Mycroft any kind of homemaking skills. I imagined our lives were reversed. He was the one who was pushed through the halls because he'd rather spend recess reading in the science room than pulling little girls hair as some sort of wooing technique. He was the one who got yelled at because he told his older brother that, if Mycroft was going to murder him for taking the last cookie, it would have been cleverer to lace the next batch with arsenic than attempting to beat him to death with weakly landed blows to the arm. Most of all I imagined that I was the one lounging in the sun, wind in my face, with simple thoughts of peace without the prison of a relentless, and ever more enlightened, swirling mind. My time with him allowed me that fantasy. Then he died.