Sometimes I wonder what the hell happened in my life that made me so... paranoid. No joke, my sister could ask me an innocent question about what I'm doing, and before it was pointed out to me, I would go "And?" in the most distrustful, suspicious tone possible. I'd do this reliably. To my own sister, whom I trust and care about. I'm treating her like a stranger with that tone. Y'all don't hear (or read?) me act like that because I have time to think about my words. She doesn't get that luxury.
Hell, it's even invaded my vocabulary. I use "I suspect that..." quite often, even when the situation doesn't call for it. It's like everything's a murder mystery, but there's no murder, and no mystery. Either that, or it's probabilistic, uncertain in nature. "Likely", "probably", "maybe", all staples of my speech; you could write a Bingo card on my speech patterns, and those words would make up a good chunk of it. Just another way to cover my ass, as if anyone's actually gonna call me out on rough estimates made even rougher by those words.
I keep checking my posts for repeated topics via search, as if anyone's gonna notice that I've repeated something I talked about a year ago. Almost every time I check, it turns out that, no, I've never said anything about it. Not with the search terms I use. For the record, I don't think I've said this before, not in this way.
Like, I think the peak of my paranoia would've been around middle school. I was using Tor, didn't have any accounts on anything (not even an email). Hell, I probably would've used Gentoo (Arch has binary packages! Can't trust that!) with every hardening measure in the book had I been able to wrap my head around the install instructions. I think I experimented with Ubuntu for a little bit, which was as far as I could go.
And this was before the, uh, Betrayal (phrasing carefully to avoid triggers), so it was kinda ingrained in me. I mellowed out after that, actually. What the hell happened? How'd I end up this way? Was I born to be paranoid? In its current incarnation, it's paranoia paired with anxiety, but I wonder if the building blocks were already there before then.