Untangling

10:06pm. The Basement of the Marist College Library in Poughkeepsie.

I’ve been thinking about myself a lot this past week – about who I am and who I want to become, about how I handle situations, about how much I think. I’ve been thinking a lot about last week’s blog too. So many people I love called, emailed, and texted to tell me how wonderful they think I am, how much they love me and how deserving they think I am. One person in particular, however, one that I love very much, told me how right I was. How arrogant, how undeserving, how terrible, how selfish. It was tough to hear because as much as I knew these things about myself, as much as I could write them down and post them on the Internet for all to see and comment on, I didn’t (and in ways still don’t) want to recognize them myself. I wanted to kick my own ass and then have everybody who loves me tell me I’d been too hard on myself. I love to be right but I wasn’t prepared to hear someone say I was right about this.

Back in Italy I wrote a post about reaching a piazza in my life and I pondered the extent to which I had allowed my world to shape me as opposed to how much I’ve allowed myself the opportunity to shape my world. It makes me feel like I’ve gotten nowhere to be reexamining this concept 8 months later. But here I am. This is what it all comes down to this week (and probably, to my great displeasure, for many weeks to come). What hurt wasn’t that someone agreed with me about how little I felt I deserved my car and the people in my life. What hurt was that it made me realize the extent to which I allow the feeling of others to shape my world, my perceptions and my actions. And I came to this: for all the self-reflection I do and despite all of these blog posts – I don’t know much about me. I got so hung up on how others would respond, if they would care or agree, that I didn’t take into account how I felt about me. And in the end, I’m the one that has to be with myself day in and day out, so, how I feel about myself matters. It matters so much.

Don’t get me wrong; I still care about everyone else. Their feelings still matter. But I am responsible for me, so I should know how I feel about myself. Even as I write this, I was only prompted to do so by someone else. The fact is I don’t know what I think of the person I am, which is a little sad considering I write about her every week.

Maybe I don’t always think I’m so awful, maybe some of you out there agree that I’m not, maybe you disagree. Right now, this week, I don’t care. I’m just trying to figure out what it is I think about me. There are many people out there who are self-aware. Maybe you’re one of them. Lucky you (and also, bite me – but I love you because you help me know me, but also please stop that). If you’re not one of these self-aware people though, if you are just like me and you’ve been winding your opinions of yourself so tightly around others opinions of you to the point that they are one frighteningly entangled mass, then my advice to us is – perhaps we should stop. It’s really advice to myself (as I have no authority upon which to give advice to others). Life is an ever-flowing, ever-changing river; the people we love won’t always be there to keep us straight. Self-reflection and self-progression, in the end, can only be done by oneself. And it’s so hard sometimes to do things alone. To be alone. But it’s so important and it’s so underrated. I think. Maybe. I’m trying to figure it out.