Difficult Questions
Cognitive Psychological therapy, what most of us would just call therapy or counseling, is at its roots about difficult questions. I sit here, awake, again, because of one very important one.
Am I clinging to this?
I've been thinking a lot about baseline self image. It's an exercise that has been complicated time and time again by all of my thoughts about higher self, true self, etc. I have vast experience thinking about the self that I aspire to bring out of myself, but I haven't spent nearly enough time contemplating what I'd call my honest self. That is to say the person I can see myself to be with an honest, not overly negative or positive, evaluation.
One issue that comes up here is that because I've spent so much time in this meta-escapist conception of potential idealized self, and because the exact nature of that image is fluid, the honest self has gone largely undefined, and has actually be made actively nebulous by my mental exercises of identifying with any number of things. The one thing I keep coming back to though is the idea that I am a deviant. It's core enough, fundamental enough, that it's one of the few points that I can get a hold on when trying to think about how I think about myself.
I'm generally pro-deviance. Am, was, and will continue to be. However the change of lifestyle that I'm making is unquestionably a step towards normality, and I've begun to think that a major part of the problem is that I like being a deviant, and so much of what defined me as one is embedded in the problematic behaviors I'm trying to avoid. Who I am as a person hasn't changed but it's hard to be crazy when you wake up every day at 6. It's hard to keep your edge when you're getting regular diet and exercise, and it's quite near impossible to have a good "Darkened Lair" vibe going at 6 in the evening.
This leads to the real question. Is it time to discard those? Do I have to? The short answer is no, but that doesn't mean I can keep doing what I'm doing now, because what I'm doing now is being done at 3:18 a.m. and that's just too destructive. I'm not sure how yet but I'm going to have to come to some kind of compromise between my deviance and my fledgling maturity. Both of them are too important to let go.
Am I clinging to this?
I've been thinking a lot about baseline self image. It's an exercise that has been complicated time and time again by all of my thoughts about higher self, true self, etc. I have vast experience thinking about the self that I aspire to bring out of myself, but I haven't spent nearly enough time contemplating what I'd call my honest self. That is to say the person I can see myself to be with an honest, not overly negative or positive, evaluation.
One issue that comes up here is that because I've spent so much time in this meta-escapist conception of potential idealized self, and because the exact nature of that image is fluid, the honest self has gone largely undefined, and has actually be made actively nebulous by my mental exercises of identifying with any number of things. The one thing I keep coming back to though is the idea that I am a deviant. It's core enough, fundamental enough, that it's one of the few points that I can get a hold on when trying to think about how I think about myself.
I'm generally pro-deviance. Am, was, and will continue to be. However the change of lifestyle that I'm making is unquestionably a step towards normality, and I've begun to think that a major part of the problem is that I like being a deviant, and so much of what defined me as one is embedded in the problematic behaviors I'm trying to avoid. Who I am as a person hasn't changed but it's hard to be crazy when you wake up every day at 6. It's hard to keep your edge when you're getting regular diet and exercise, and it's quite near impossible to have a good "Darkened Lair" vibe going at 6 in the evening.
This leads to the real question. Is it time to discard those? Do I have to? The short answer is no, but that doesn't mean I can keep doing what I'm doing now, because what I'm doing now is being done at 3:18 a.m. and that's just too destructive. I'm not sure how yet but I'm going to have to come to some kind of compromise between my deviance and my fledgling maturity. Both of them are too important to let go.
posted by Max at 3:06 AM
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