Anyone who knows me – heck, anyone perceptive who reads these blog posts – will probably notice that I’m plagued with self doubt, paranoia in its most self-destructive element. It is something which, when editing myself, I become highly impatient with, as the self doubt of the moment is typically edited out later without much further thought. The reason you see it in some of my blog posts is that some are written on the day they are intended for release.
Last fortnight’s blog post, Devil’s Advocate, for example, originally began with this line: When reading this blog post, I’d like you to regularly refer back to the title, so as to remember that I do not necessarily agree with the viewpoints I am discussing. In editing, this was removed, as it was redundant and written as an in-the-moment reflection of a fear that my point would not be portrayed effectively, and lead people to believe that I preached what I regarded with disapproval. In retrospect, of course, I realised this was unnecessary, and through the magic of editing it was removed.
The other day I made a series of tweets, the first being a sarcastic comment about not needing a Facebook quiz to tell me my personality was superb, the second to clarify that the first was sarcasm, and the third to comedically reply to myself, chastising myself about my self doubt. In the end, it was a hideous mess which I just deleted, not out of shame, but because of my newfound decision to edit myself down a bit more in social media so as to put out things people actually enjoy reading, or which state an emotional response if necessary.
Day to day speech cannot be edited though, and I am constantly lacing my discussion with disclaimers and clarifications which I’m entirely sure that people around me become exasperated with, albeit not to the point of having a problem with me. So I suppose, if I’m going to have a New Year’s Resolution (which I’ll probably blog about and defend the notion of), it’ll be to be more confident in my speech and less paranoid about the misgivings of those around me.
There are many other examples I could pull up of my lack of self confidence, but I think you get the gist of it. One of more interesting ones, though, was a dream I had last week in which my talented friend Jak was dragged away by bandits in a post-apocalyptic landscape of my hometown, and I was powerless to stop them. That’s realistic to a point (I’m not exactly a tough guy), but it was a dream of my own making, meaning I was powerless because I dreamed myself to be so. A humorous situation, but an eye opening one. The kicker was another day when, out of the blue, my mind whispered to me that the only person who ever criticised me in the way I so frequently feared was myself; for instance, only I have ever raised the possibility of me being pretentious.
Perpetually Perturbed 