Know Thyself
Most people would—and in fact some of my teachers did—say that my self awareness is a gift. It makes sense, of course. If you’re aware of your mistakes, it becomes that much easier to correct them.
There is a mild shift in this equation when you’re an asshole.
When you’re an asshole, your mistakes are so precisely redirected that it’s somehow not your fault. You fucked up because your coworker was crying about her cancer on the phone. You’re late because there was a funeral march on your way to work. Your tongue got burned because that poor dick in the barista outfit doesn’t know what the acceptable temperature for a machiatto is.
You can locate every mistake and how it correlates to you. You just choose to not be held accountable for them.
So yes, I suppose you could call my self-awareness a gift, if it tickles your fancy, but from my point of view, such an assessment is shit.
Do you know—and I mean hard numbers— how statistically likely a person who considers themselves ‘self-aware’ go on to either be the most pompous, exaggerated, sob-story decanters, or they simply jump off a bridge?
There is no in between.
In both aspects, you perceive the same information and process it in the way it regard to you, but the bridge-jumpers absorb every bit of negativity that an interaction can have, while the pompous ass will simply deflect everything, and he will do it so well, shit, you might end up believing that it _was_ your fault that the chemistry lab caught fire 20 years ago.
But all of this is redundant.
In fact, the whole subject of conversation is rather dull, isn’t it?
Yes, this is exactly the present those teachers gave me so long ago: the never ending task to continually think, over and over, to decide what my fault is, and what it isn’t.
I call it anxiety. It’s got a nice ring to it.
Its fair to say that I usually handle anxiety very well. I smile tightly, I nod, I laugh awkwardly and pray to any existing deities for another drink.
And then along came Emily and fucked it up.
