I always believed that Jodi, as an adult, was quite aware of her underachievements in life and made a conscious effort in every way to portrait an image of herself to others that said she was anything but a high school dropout/professional waitress.
To be sure, she's sneaky and crafty. But was that "learned" behavior as she navigated through her teen years and beyond, or did that come naturally to her without any serious effort or conscious thought? Maybe a combination of both? "Learned" behavior out of necessity in her early teen years, and that behavior then became normal for her and, thus, she became oblivious to her own 'social performance'?
I honestly can't determine if she's wired wrong or not, but something led her down the wrong path in life.
I think she's really wired differently than most folks, if that's a suitable metaphor for a psychopath, which is what I believe she is. It's hard to get my head around, but I try. I try to get a picture of her world-view, trace her behavior back to a mind for which that behavior is natural, logical, explainable.
As far as where her psychopathy came from, I don't think it was a compensation for underachievement, I think it's much deeper than that. Most experts seem to think it's a product of emotional neglect in the formative years, with maybe a genetic component as well.
As far as the manipulative component of psychopathy, that's baked in, an integral part of it. In other words, she doesn't need to learn
how to manipulate, just
what (or who) to manipulate, in the latter is found the learning process for her.
As far as self-awareness of her underachievement, of course she has, but again, it's not like a normal persons. In a normal person, there would be a comparison with others
because they see others as at least potential equals, and new-found drive, or insecurity or something else would step in to compensate. This doesn't exist for her, there is no mechanism, no necessity, to compare herself to others, not at least with a view to achieving equality, or superiority, or awareness of inferiority. The only time comparison with others would present itself to her as warranted, necessary, or even
possible would be when she's maneuvering herself towards a gain, and she needs to be in the more favorable position. Of course this is a superficial comparison, involving superficial changes, and would have no actual effect on her psyche, create no real change.
All of this is because, as i've said before, she does not live in a world of equals (or potential equals). There is her, and then there is the world out there, and that world does not consist of beings like her. This actually is the difficult to understand heart of it. The closest I can come to describe it is, she's 3 dimensional, and the the world, everything else that exists, is 2 dimensional. It's not that she sees the world as unreal, or literally 2 dimensional, but there's a fundamental difference, an unbridgeable gap. she knows the world is real, but it's different than her, she's more real, and there is no possibility of it ever being the same, or of the world being real and she being a part of it, at least that's how she sees it.
