This year has been confusing.

I have to admit that I haven't been wholly honest with whoever may have read anything prior to this.  Not that I was lying at the time that I said anything, but it would not be truthful to say that I was enjoying myself by writing.  I enjoy writing, yes, but I was realizing more and more as time progressed and I became more and more fucked up in the head (which, by the way, has mostly been rectified, thanks to the standard one-two punch of prescription drugs and counseling) that the less I was enjoying my own life, the less fun it was to talk about myself.  I suppose this would raise questions as to my perception of myself relative to everyone else (I tend to think that people love to complain - which I don't) but that's exactly what got me into the mess I found myself in.  Life is not a competition, despite the fact that every institution and/or authority figure in this free market economy would have you believe it.  It occurred to me that one should never evaluate oneself relative to other people.  At any given point in time, any two people can never be compared on equal terms.  As a familiar example, I may be better or worse than my friend in a class - but that doesn't necessarily mean that I will end up the better student, or the better person.  In fact, better is a word that we mostly apply arbitrarily due to the fact that we live in a society that wishes for us to compete against one another - it makes it easier to assess the individual abilities of a group of people at a given snapshot in time.  The problem is that we only use that snapshot when evaluating an individual.  More often than not, that snapshot is a completely inaccurate assessment of an individual's skills.  Does a standardized test score really give an exact portrait of a person's abilities throughout their lives?  Not even close.

I'll stop rambling about semantics.  The point is that we so often apply the word "better" in work and academics - just because it's easy to describe people in that way when you apply a scale on which you evaluate people - that it secretes into our personal lives.  Losing a game turns into "I'm no good at this.”  Watching even a close friend succeed where you fail sends the message, "My friend is more successful than me."  This wouldn't be a problem if our memories were fluid - if we were able to forget this assessment as soon as your respective values of success returned to neutral.  But instead, we define the people in our lives based on these snapshots in time at which their lives experience an extreme - if only temporary - shift in value.  This is why we are so entertained by stories.  The action in stories is defined by a comparatively fast-paced shifting of values, because those are the aspects of life responsible for the majority of our long-term memories.  If an office worker living a monotonous, repetitive lifestyle is suddenly transported into a magical world and saves a kingdom and a bunch of cool shit but doesn't learn anything in the process, our perception of them is likely grounded in the adventure rather than their routine.  The reason this is important is because our self-awareness leads us to perceive our own lives based on our routines rather than the value-altering events.  This is why we tend to perceive everyone's lives as being "better" than ours, when in reality they are more or less the same - just remembered and experienced at different moments.

My big problem was that I was - and really, I still am - far too invested in the "story" behind people's lives rather than their actual persona.  As a result, I consistently evaluated myself on unfair terms.  In other words, because I selectively identified people based on the most significant value-shifts in their life and instead identified myself based the current state of my values (which were more often than not unwavering), I had no way of telling myself that I was "better" or even "on par" with people without being self-deceptive.  I think this might be true for many people, which is saddening.  To be truthful, I'm still not wholly over this perception, either.  Just because I've identified the error of my ways doesn't mean I've identified the proper method of correcting it.  It's really hard to define people by anything but their most memorable moments.  In fact, it's really hard to define people anyway, because those value-shifting events are often accompanied by a shift in self-perception.  Our self-perceptions and others' perceptions of are at odds with each other as it is - the more this changes, the harder the time we have trying to piece together an accurate, dynamic portrait of a person - ourselves included.  Sometimes even we are limited to defining ourselves based on the events of our lives rather than our normal value-states.  Such is the tragic case of far too many victims of rape, molestation, bullying, etc.  Maybe it's just a memory that one is most ashamed of - it doesn't matter.  We wish to limit our identities of ourselves to as close to a "snapshot" as possible, despite the fact that anybody with a life worth living will never be able to accomplish this. 

So don’t compare people to each other.  That was probably the most significant realization of this year, although I have yet to enact it, based on the fact that my life has, for so long, revolved around comparing people to each other, comparing myself to what I perceived as “normal”, etc. 

The second most important step towards ensuring my happiness is that expectations are bad.  Goals are good, and predictions are important when analyzing risks.  But living the future in your own head just for the sake of forming goals or predictions is never beneficial.  Reality only matches the expectations of the clairvoyant.  Even for the pessimist, the vision of the future one forms in one’s head is likely the most fantastic – the one with the most ideal outcome.  Alternately, it could be the worst.  A nightmare.  Should one’s expectations be positive, any deviation from the plan in one’s head will be automatically disappointing.  Should one’s expectations be negative, one is prepared to avoid disappointment by nature, but the psychological consequences of anticipating the worst of every situation is bad.  And it applies to me. 

My problem is that I do not live in the present.  Every moment I’m not dreading the future is a moment spent soaking in regret.  I have always been this way and I do not foresee anything about that changing, and I suspect it will be the eventual death of me.  Pessimism is a defense mechanism at best, and the inability to not form expectations about life is a weakness that I find exploited with every thought I’ve ever had about what I want to do with my life, instigated by the pressure over choosing a field of study – with every moment of eye contact with someone, and with every word spoken with me in mind – with every criticism of every ounce of media I ingest on a daily basis, and even the criticism that I begin to form in my head before I finish ingesting it.  And when it isn’t pessimism about the future, it’s a progressively skewed vision of my past.  All of the best moments of my life have been mulled over so much that they’ve been warped by my negativity into a bastardized, nightmarish version of what they once were.  And to cap things off, I’m embarrassed both by the fact that I acted the way I did in those good times and by the fact that I considered them good in the first place.  In other words, I manipulate myself into thinking I’m ignorant – an act which is, in and of itself, ignorant. 

Essentially, the achievement of this second step is impossible, which is why I don’t think it takes as high a position on the hierarchy of things that are wrong with me.  But I need to try.  “I don’t know anything else” isn’t a justification for blatant self-destructive thoughts, because for those increasingly rare moments where I am lucid – where I am experiencing my life in the blissful “ignorance” free from the active and retroactive judgment of my own brain – I am not being self-destructive.  I am living life through from the same perspective that normal people do – and should.  Just not nearly as often. 

The third step I feel I must take to become happy is, ironically, to cut out the sensitivity.  Despite what my masturbatory deconstructions of my own emotional states may suggest, there is more to life than constantly finding the best way of living it in order to never feel sadness.  The trick to never experiencing negative emotion is to never experience emotion – something that for an especially sensitive person like me is impossible.  Emotion is a spectrum – for the normal person, it is a balanced spectrum; for me, it is skewed in favor of negative emotions that facilitate self-destruction. 

It is likely a combination of immaturity and introversion that lead me to be emotionally self-centered.  As I think (and hope) I’ve noted previously, empathy is one of the human traits I admire most and I am tragically empathy-deficient.   It may seem counter-intuitive to think that becoming more empathetic will enable me to cut out the reactionary, over-sensitive part of my brain from dominating my life, but I believe that since all the trauma in my life is self-inflicted and since I am so self-centered, taking a deeper look into the lives of others will help me – or at least distract me. 

I have said this for ages and it may come as a shock to some that I’ve actually been looking into the best ways of learning to think empathically, and the conclusions I’ve reached generally revolve around Buddhism and the practice of meditation.  Effectively meditating involves intense concentration, and intense concentration involves thinking outside oneself.  Identifying the true nature of things – including the true nature of others – means objective thinking, and since I am currently incapable of looking at myself objectively, I can’t learn to think empathically and think introspectively at the same time.  I’m not converting to Buddhism or anything – I’m just trying to put some of their ideas into practice to try to better myself. 

Regardless of whether or not my self-loathing is justified, one thing is clear – I need to be better.  I refuse to accept myself as my current “snapshot” because it’s not what I want to define myself by.  I am a dynamic portrait of a human being and although I am the sum of all the individual moments of my life, changing now means that I no longer have to look at myself as a self-destructive fuck-up whose only redeeming quality is his intelligence.