I don't know myself as well as I'd like to know myself. Fact is, I'm upset with myself for being so conservative, biting, cynical, and, more days than not, reserved in a way that does not bolster future prospects for action.
What I mean, precisely, is that, up until about a year ago, I held myself in disregard. Instead I told myself that I possessed certain traits. I was environmentally friendly. I was left of center. I was open and understood different cultures, and mostly found them more interesting than my own culture. Most of that just isn't true, at least not at first. The frustrating truth is that those items drive much more my consumption patterns than they matter externally for any of the issues I'd hope to impact with my beliefs. As a matter of policy, my ideas about racial segregation don't matter. My choice to purchase certain goods (real estate) do impact this topic, but they are mostly marginal--I only count for one extra unit. That's damn frustrating for someone that has spent a lot of time studying racial segregation. Like me.
What's also frustrating is that, despite the mountain of repetitious thought/studying/dogma/mantra that I've been telling myself, it remains a fact that I do get uncomfortable around people--not just people of different races, whatever that might mean--but anyone, period. And I've utilized my aggressive openness about culture to ignore who it is I am. That's not saying that I don't get to know people, adapt, relax and eventually learn how to have fun, though it is a process. I feel like a kid in my life generally lately, learning all the basic steps again, or for the first time. There's always a difference between living something and saying something--between understanding something conceptually and understanding something from experience. Sometimes the conceptual understanding folks can talk a good game, and the experience understanding folks cannot, so policies are made from concept and not experience. I hope that experience in concepts doesn't pass for real experience, but I also think that we've got to face some facts: the world is too complicated for us to synthesize, and we must rely on other people to navigate it. Because someone out there has been where we are now, and faced the type of problems that we have now (or can reframe our problems for us), and we need that person.--to survive.
But.
Being overt about our needs might not be the most direct route to getting those needs satisfied.
And yet.
I have been too flexible. Sometimes being an asshole gets needs met better than being an accommodating doter.
Anyway, maybe my biggest fear is that the "newer" truths that replace older truths are still lies, and that I'm not getting any closer to knowing my true self (while recognizing that my true self is not totally static, or that, perhaps, chunks of narrative cannot encapsulate my entirety, and all that other fluff). I do think that we're flexible. (Hard work produces results. The sheer will to adapt and get better at something impacts performance.). Our flexibility has limits, though, and trial and error (actually performance mistakes in real time) is beneficial, even thought it stings (and makes one feel like an enormous failure, and produces a severe uptick in cortisone, etc). One of the many pervasive narratives I have to warn myself against is the feeling that everything will be explained to me at some point, that there are pieces to a larger quilt that I cannot see, and generally that there is a strong level of determinism in the direction of my life. Feeling that way might help my motivation in the short term, sure enough, but it doesn't actually help me, because it makes me lazy (because it allows me to ignore aspects of the world that don't fit my personal narrative). Perhaps I'm being too hard on myself, but I don't see a giant thermometer of self-cruelty sticking out of my ass that's about to blow, so I wouldn't know.
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