Today, I've been thinking about lying, mostly about lying to myself.
I think it's funny when people describe maturity as "getting to know yourself better", or when something shitty happens a layer of meaning will be created since someone somewhere got to know themselves better. It is strange on two levels: 1. this discovery assumes that there is an essential self waiting to be unearthed (much like religions that yearn for utopias or neo-classical economists who yearn for utopian free markets); 2. it assumes that the self is a stable destination/experience/object that can be arrived at/experienced/sensed. This process seems to be linear, as in as I get older, I "get to know myself better", and it also seems to be an unachievable goal. I can never seem to know myself well enough and that sucks, I guess.
I think the quest to know me is strange and I don't really see much of a point in it, although some person perched on a couch in an office somewhere is probably mourning my loss.
I think I am going to start thinking of "knowing myself" as being honest with myself. I have said this before, but it was much more edgy to be honest with myself, it was the part of my story where I needed to trust my doubts and intuitions when I hadn't in the past. I suppose this time it feels more like being honest with my shit, and not assuming that everything I have categorized as such, is such. I am scared to acknowledge the lies I have been telling myself about what I want and what I don't want, and I am ready to stop playing hide-and-go-seek with what I am.
I feel 23 right now, and this post makes me feel much like I am saturated in mid-twenties existential shoe-gazing.
I want to get into the practice of being honest with myself, and I want it to be something I am good at. Maybe it will negatively effect other people, I don't know, but I know that even when I am offended by someone who is being brutally honest, I always have a twinge of jealousy too.
