I wanted only to try to live in accord with the promptings which came from my true self. Why was that so very difficult?

Anyone who escapes the ordinary categories and distinctions by which we define ourselves and each other indirectly threatens the identities of other people, who are likely to react with a violent impulse to reenvisage this defector from the identity regime. By refusing the distinctions of prestige and status, you threaten to reveal their arbitrariness to the world, and those whose very being depends on those distinctions will fight to prevent that, without even knowing what they are doing.

No one listens to a thing I say. Although I speak all the time. I am a lump of beeswax shaped in the image of a newborn child. I am no more than what may melt and stiffen again in the night. No one comes to me here…And still I speak…But who does it interest? Children should be seen and not heard, as they say. But then I’ve already told you, I am not a child, only something that looks like one. Something that longs to be one. I’m an internal event.

“I knew that in many dreams one must disregard the appearance of people, who may be disguised or may have exchanged faces with one another, like those mutilated saints on the fronts of cathedrals which have been repaired by ignorant archaeologists in a jumble of mismatched heads and bodies, attributes and names. Those we give to characters in our dreams can be misleading. The one we love can be recognized only by the quality of pain we feel.”

I confessed that I had the burning desire to be excellent but no faith that I could be.

Some of you are not introverted, you’ve just been forced to shrink yourself and second-guess your existence in the context of groups, forcing you into isolation, social anxiety, and a visceral rejection of the very thing that ignites your soul: meaningful relations with other human beings.

ENDING MY NEGATIVE SELF TALK:

“I keep quiet as is proper For a man who has learned that the human heart Holds more than speech does.”