Guess who's back!
It's me. I'm the one who's back.
This post is (naturally) a continuation of the last one I wrote, so if you haven't read that post yet then you should go and do that now.
Now that everyone's all caught up, let's begin.
After everything that's happened, I'm feeling a little lost; I had a big fight that revealed a lot about myself and what's expected of me, and that ended in the violation of my ideals.
These 'ideals' I speak of are what make me who I am, and without them I'm gone.
A useful analogy for this principle are 'spren' from the Stormlight Archive series. A spren is the personification of a fundamental force; like the wind, or gravity. These creatures are bound by rigid and inflexible rules; if you drop a rock then it must fall. This rigidity is because the rule is all that the spren is, and if a spren were forced to violate this then it would die.
I based my entire identity upon useful philosophical principles that I gained from my experiences; truths such as, "Authenticity over belonging," or, "Find comedy." When I broke these 'oaths' it felt like I had lost myself, like I had died.
Now, I'm trying to rebuild an entire person (myself) from scratch.
Obviously, this is quite a daunting task, so I reached out for help. I spoke to a counselor about the whole debacle, and he thought I was being outrageous; he said I was holding myself to too high of a standard, people can't always have full control over their every action.
This makes sense. I'm not a spren, I'm a human. Humans change, and make exceptions, and tell half-truths. This is annoying because I really like absolutes, but it's not any less true because of that annoyance.
I learned a while ago that I'm in burnout, my expectations are far higher than my abilities. I thought this was just because I was doing too many things and pushing myself too hard (and that's true to a degree, I'm working on it) but really I just fundamentally overestimated myself.
A revelation such as this has been immensely useful in the creation of my new ideals, mostly because I now know that maybe the ideals aren't so important. Nobody else I know binds themself to such rigid and well-articulated rules, and society goes along just fine.
What would happen if I simply used my principles as guiding wisdoms that help me make my own decisions?
Not only would this allow me greater freedom, it would also just be a much more versatile system; Different wisdoms could be applied to different situations.
All is well! That was really quick, I guess it's not that hard to rebuild a whole person from scratch. There is a little more work left, I'll finish that up in the next post (which will be the last of this 'blogging trilogy').
That's all for now.
Goodbye from Sam.