self

My Late Twenties Confidence

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Audio version available here.

In some aspects, I’ve quite often felt like an older man in a younger person’s body. Perhaps it comes from learning one of the harsher realities of life from an early age. Or maybe it comes from developing an introspective mind. Or perhaps I’m just an idiot who thinks too much. But the fact of the matter is, I often catch myself ruminating on life as if I’m a scant few years from the end of it, rather than a fistful of decades.

On my walk home from work tonight I was thinking about human personality as a spectrum from “thinker” to “doer”. Now, I’m not saying that thinkers don’t do or that doers don’t think. Maybe most people exist in a healthy middle ground of both. But I’m certainly a little too far along the thinker end of this spectrum that I’ve just made up. I think myself in circles until I’m too dizzy to do.

That being said, I came here today to write about self acceptance. My reason for having such an introspective evening is that I was thinking back on my twenties so far, and comparing them against the rest of my life. I’ve still two years to live of this decade, but so far it’s looking like the general theme of this chapter in my life has been self acceptance. I hear a lot about how you spend your twenties figuring yourself out, and I think that comes from leaving education and leaving the established social routine for the first time in life. Who are we outside of school, outside of teenage society, with its hierarchy of popularity established through pre-empathetic judgements?

For me, I spent a lot of time in school being picked on and a lot of time afterwards telling myself I hadn’t had it that bad. But the more I age, the more I consider how I react to certain situations, the more I realise how damaging of an effect it is to be constantly told you’re not funny, not worth listening to, and being spun into the butt of every joke. As an adult, that has manifested in me as social anxiety, and paranoia that people are purposefully ignoring me if they don’t respond to messages. Even when my rational brain is able to assess my feelings as irrational and realise where they come from, it’s still a struggle to deal with.

The further away I get from school, though, the more confident I grow. There’s always that small, nagging part of me that worries about being the whelp of the social group, or gets irrationally defensive about “losing” a snark-off. But slowly over the years, I’ve come to realise that I’m quite universally liked at work. I’m not the weird outcast kid who makes jokes that need vetting from the popular kids before people are allowed to laugh anymore. And with that kind of power, the jerks who do come along hold less sway over me by being jerks. Suddenly, I’m not the weirdo for having my own hobbies and brand of humour, they’re the weirdo for taking exception to it.

Well… most of the time, at least. Turns out I’ve been cursed with a feeble human brain, and lessons learned aren’t always applied, depending on the day. Generally speaking, though, I feel like I’m changing as a person as I approach my thirties, becoming more myself than ever before. I have my limits, but those boundaries are moving and I’m feeling happier for the breathing room.

Before you head off, a quick note. Due to the creation of my writing blog, Excepts From A Multifarious Mind, I have also spun up a YouTube channel named Kritigri Writes. There, I post audio versions of my short stories. I’m now thinking of posting audio versions of these blogs posts there, too, so go subscribe if you haven’t already! There’s no audio version of this blog post at the time of publication as it’s currently 1am, but keep an eye out.

From Here Onwards

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I used to write one of these at every turn of the year, but it got a little exhausting talking about the past and the future at intervals where my life saw little change. Last year, I… did nothing, and this year I shall… hopefully do things! It began to feel like empty words. So, as we’re twenty days into January, please feel free to take this as a hint that this is not a scheduled yearly blog post, but one that I’m writing because I actually have things to say.

I’ve spent a lot of my twenties beating myself up about the state of my life. I grew up with grandiose ideas about becoming a world famous story teller who’d change the way people thought about the world! Fast forward to last year, when I’m sitting through a faculty meeting at work, listening to my boss tell us that we wouldn’t realistically be working here if part of us didn’t enjoy the work. No, I think, I’m working here because I’m trapped within my own limitations and only my friends here keep me sane. I still work there. I recently had an attendance review meeting because I took four unpaid days off in four months for being curled up in bed with the flu. It’s going real well.

So how come I’m not a world famous story teller? Well, I have a few theories about that (sans the world famous part). And this year… well, starting from the end of last year, because I wasn’t waiting for an arbitrary New Year’s Resolution before changing my life… this year I’m following up on my theories. For starters, I’m seeing someone about ADHD. I have nothing to share yet, so don’t assume I have it – there are people in my life who certainly don’t think I do – but personally, it’d go a long way to explaining why I have such difficulty not just with sticking to a single idea long enough to see it through, but also with plenty of every day problems in real life. Speaking of which, I’m also starting an online CBT course thing for anxiety! I won’t get into oversharing, but I think that a lot of my issues in life come from a generalised variety of anxiety, and so far it would seem that doctors agree.

So I’m not promising to write a novel this year, because I tried brute forcing that last year and I got four chapters into my first draft before having a crisis of confidence and binning the thing. But I am promising to work on myself. If ADHD and anxiety aren’t the issue, something else is, I know that much by now. I’ve barely dipped my toe into figuring this stuff out but I already feel more confident for the small scraps of validation that my investigations have brought me so far. Maybe I’m not just shit. Maybe I’m facing some real obstacles. Maybe I always have.

On a lighter note, another thing I want to do in 2023 is read more books! I’ve become super engrossed in comic books these last few years, so it’s not that I’ve not been reading exactly, but on the novel front, I’ve been mired seven books into the Wheel of Time series for some months now. Unfortunately, this fantasy epic becomes a notorious slog for the middle three books, and in my stubbornness to not give up I’ve ended up forsaking almost everything else. Last year, I read four books, two of them Wheel of Time novels. (The other two were Good Omens and Sylvanas, a World of Warcraft tie-in novel. Both are excellent.) This year, my aim is to read 15 books by the end of the year, which may not sound difficult to you, but… remember the possible-ADHD thing? I use Audible nowadays to listen to books on the way to work, as I have a tough time keeping my attention on the real physical deal. Unfortunately, Audible only gives out 12 book tokens over the course of a year, so 15 books may actually be an issue! Ah well. I’ll figure it out.

Thanks for reading. I hope your 2023 proves as fruitful as mine is planning to be. I’m considering changing the name of this blog from Perpetually Perturbed to The Tombstone Project, after the real-time memoirs project that every blog post here contributes to. What do you think? Let me know!

What Am I Up To In A Parallel Universe?

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Something that I often think about is what alternate versions of myself may be doing in parallel universes. Assuming they exist, and assuming they exist in infinite variations from slight to severe, it’s often fun – or a little depressing – to consider my own path through life, and find points of divergence where I may have chosen a different path. Of course, with low self-esteem, it’s often tempting to portray my current self as one of the least successful or meaningfully defined versions of myself in these scenarios, but that’s only because I’m characterising other potential versions of myself as the embodiment of success in one of my potential paths.

The first and most obvious consideration is often the cruellest; what if I’d succeeded in establishing myself as an author by now? I’m quick to add that this could still happen at any time; many successful authors only found success when they were well older than I am now, and I’m not about to give up. (I should probably start before I give up, right?) But a part of me always desired to be a prodigy. Probably borne of no small amount of arrogance which I held before going to university, I initially dreamed of being a successful author at a young age. But looking back on some of my earliest short stories now, I can only wonder how that would translate to a more successful, published version of my 26 year old self. Would I be looking back on my earliest novels in alarm? Or would I have failed to learn some of the most crucial lessons I learned during university, and written stories of a lower quality than I’m now able to, should I apply myself?

Here’s something different: As I approached my late teens, I became fascinated with history, and this fascination feels like untapped potential to this day. What if I’d gone to university for a historical course instead of creative writing? How would my life path have been altered? Well for one thing, I’d have a different group of friends. I don’t do a good job of keeping in touch with my uni friends, but I’d be sad to have never met them. I also find it amusing that I don’t know what the average day-to-day life of a historian is even like, so it’s a little difficult to ruminate on where my life would now be. Maybe I’d combine my love of writing with my love of history and write historical fiction.

Anyone who knows me knows that my biggest hobby by far is gaming. I’m not only interested in playing videogames, but in how they’re made. What if I’d opted to put all my eggs in the game design basket? What kind of games would I make? Well, most games are made by teams, so it’s perhaps more apt to imagine myself joining a well-known developer studio after years of working my way through the industry. But, woof, I can smell the ignorance coming off of that last sentence. By all accounts, the games industry is a cutthroat workplace with all its layoffs and contractual positions. Even in this daydream what-if scenario, it’s hard to imagine myself settling somewhere and making a name for myself. With very rare exception, that’s just not how that works. All the same, I’d like to think I’d be working on some cool collectathon platforming levels, or maybe assisting in the world-building of some grand MMORPG.

Of course, these all assume I’m going down one of the paths that still interest me. Once upon a time, though, I was interested in drumming, and while I only had a few informal lessons, I was told that I had potential. Assuming this was the truth and not merely the platitudes of my sister’s then-boyfriend to keep my interest, perhaps there’s a universe where I’m touring the country in a rock band? It’s… difficult to picture, but if the multiverse is truly infinite, as I’ve arbitrarily decided at the top of this blog post, then there’s also a universe when I’m a purple elephant tamer in the employ of the grand galactic army, so…

Grounding our feet firmly back in reality for the moment, let’s stop looking at potential presents and dive back into the past. I’ve already documented on this blog post about how cause-and-effect fascinates me, how the butterfly effect affects everything we are. So who would I be if I’d been enrolled in a different secondary school? Our teenage years are some of our most formative, and the friends we make are central to that transformation. My interest in writing was instilled from a young age, but not my interest in history. What interest might I have picked up if I’d been introduced to a different school, a different group of people? I’d be very interested to talk to that version of myself… but not to be that version of myself. I made friends at my secondary school that I wouldn’t trade any opportunity in the world for.

To finish things off, I’ll end on the reminder that yes, it’s fun to think about the different versions of myself that could be out there – assuming multiverse theory is true, which is quite the assumption. And it’s tempting to measure myself against them. But at the end of the day, they’re all me. All people I could have been, but also people I could still be, if I truly wanted. I still have time to be a novelist, and while it may be more difficult to change tracks now, I could still try to break into the field of history – although I certainly have no plans. I could be a teacher, or an artist, or a cook.

Or I could just be myself. And be a little of all these things.

But I would have to learn how to cook…

I Should Probably Say Hi

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It’s been nearly a year since I posted an update to this blog, so instead of sitting here like Spongebob trying to figure out what to write beyond the word “the”, I should probably crack on and provide a general update about my life. After all, this is not only a blog, but part of my Tombstone Project, a series of memoirs written during the years of my life instead of a hazy recollection at the end of them. If it’s 2084 and you’re reading this, hi there! I hope the planet’s slightly less on fire these days.

The reason I hesitate to provide an update for my life at this point is that I don’t wish to repeat myself too many times with “nothing much has changed”. My life – at least, in macro – remains in a sort of state of stasis. I haven’t met anyone new, moved anywhere or changed jobs since we last spoke. In fact, I recently received a badge for being at my current job for five years, something which was celebrated more by the automated system which generated the badge request and sent the thing than the recipient of it. You often hear about how five years is a sizable gauge of time in which to measure the movements of one’s life and personality, but the only thing that was really different about me five years ago was that I had a second job.

I don’t mean to be too down in the dumps about all of this. After all, it’s not like my day-to-day doesn’t have meaningful joyful moments, or that being the same person I was five years ago means I’m not a person worth being. In fact, quite the opposite – I think the fact that I’ve changed so little in so long is because I’m too comfortable. Beyond psychoanalysing myself and oversharing, the simplest and most innocent reason for my current state of being is because I’m too ambivalent about furthering my life path. But that’s not necessarily something I’m trying to solve by sharing it with you, it’s just something I felt necessary to put out there to contextualise the lack of change in my life.

As for world events, yes, I’m watching on in horror as the government continues to strip back anti-COVID measures. That “light at the end of the tunnel” post really didn’t age as well as I’d have liked it to. I’ve avoided it so far (to the best of my knowledge), although the rest of my family aren’t quite as lucky. Still, it’s not quite the scare it once was, being vaccinated and all that. I should probably free myself of the restrictions I place on myself – I’ve not seen most of my friends in years at this point and practically everyone thinks I’m absurd to still be hermiting it up as much as I am. I just can’t get it out of my head, the whole action-and-consequence thing, the butterfly effect of it all. As someone who’s mostly fine getting their social interaction virtually through text and voice chat and videogames, I hate the thought of putting anyone at risk – even the tiniest percentage of risk – because I wanted to go on a day out. But then, the rational person reading this would be quick to point out the countless other avenues in which we put each other at risk by pursuing leisure, and suddenly I sound mad. But even as I write this, I’m watching cases rise again…

I want to add a little bit about the Russian invasion of Ukraine here, although I feel shitty doing so. In the context of a personal update about my life, including my reaction to these events feels like a selfish indulgence, because they don’t directly affect me. I have the privilege to sit here and talk about how awful it all is without having to deal with the horrors of it personally. And yet, it has affected me, as it’s affected all of us. I can think of nothing more vile than the outright murder of so many innocent people. It weighs heavily on my mind. In the earliest days, the weight of that horror was accompanied with outright fear as to the ramifications of this invasion on the rest of the world, and likely still should be. In time, of course, I became desensitised to that fear, partially through my own making, for the sake of my own sanity. But the weight of the horror is still there. If a future version of me is reading this, I hope that I am reminded of it. It’s not an event that can un-happen, and should not be forgotten.

I didn’t intend to make this blog post a marching out of all the horrors of the last year, but if I’m being pragmatic, it’s not been a year of much else, in terms of landmark events. As I alluded to earlier, though, my day-to-day has moments of joy and love, and I want to counterbalance with that. I may not have any major life milestones to give a tour of here, but that doesn’t mean I’m not smiling and laughing plenty at the myriad of little things which make up the tapestry of meaning in our lives. I felt that I should mention that. Because even against this backdrop of problems too large to be changed by everyday people like me, we still live.

I don’t mean to keep my life in stasis forever. I’ve got some stuff to work through – that thing about oversharing comes to mind again – but five years from now, I should be able to do that look-back-and-go-wow thing. I’ll probably even write a blog post about it. You’ll see. And I hope you’ll be there!

Year to Year: A Journal Through Time #8 – Read My Mind (11/3/19)

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Recent headlines:

World: Tim Berners-Lee: ‘Stop web’s downward plunge to dysfunctional future’ (The internet is still so relatively new. I’ve been saying for ages that we need to look out for long-term social consequences.)

Gaming: Halo: The Master Chief Collections gets weird Surface Hub listing (Where were you one year ago you ask, future Kristian? Never mind the text below this line. Mostly, you were frothing at the mouth for the chance to finally play Halo games.)

I’ve noticed that the littlest things in life now cause me to huff and let out a sarky “okay.” Drop my pen? “Okay.” Stub my toe? “Hmkay.” Technology glitches? “Alright.”

I’ve simultaneously had a productive and a frustrating week. On the one hand, I’ve had a small burst of inspiration and published a lot of videos to my gaming Youtube channel, as well as hosting a few livestreams. On the other hand, Thursday and Saturday in particular were riddled with moments of anger, frustration and occasional rage at non-issues and non-events. It got to the stage where even though I recognised that logically I had no reason to have these emotions and no source for them to stem from, I couldn’t combat my mood. And that was mildly frightening. I think it’s passed now, though.

I bring it up because towards the end of last year I acknowledged that I “probably have some form of depression”, after reviewing my behavioural patterns. After an uneventful couple of months to start 2019, though, I began to doubt my newfound confidence in that self-diagnosis, as I… felt fine, for the most part. And besides, I’ve read that depression isn’t typically a reaction to a negative life event, of which I had in surplus towards the end of 2018. Depression usually has no origin, I’ve heard. A little like those negative emotions of no origin I experienced last week.

I’m not drawing any conclusions. In fact, that’s kind of the point of this entry. A friend suggested I take this to a doctor, but I’m holding off for now. And until then, if ever, I’m going to try and not speculate about what category my mental health falls into, if any. There’s no use in telling people I think I have depression unless I’m concerned enough to ask an expert. In fact, lately I’ve been concerned that I’m more of a hypochondriac than anything else, and that is definitely something I wanna nip in the bud if possible. So, while I don’t think I’m mentally healthy per se, I’m not going to live my life thinking I can empathise with people diagnosed with depression.

The mind is an intangible, in-quantifiable concept, and the fact that we can only ever know our own makes it incredibly difficult to measure our health against others, among over things. It can be maddening, and I have to wonder at future scientific advancements that might further our understanding of the mind and self. I look at the way mental health is treated professionally today and I’m reminded of how physical illnesses were treated during history. In our earliest days as humans, we cut holes in each others skulls to excise evil spirits which we thought caused headaches. Later, we believed that the movements of the seasons affected our bodies, or that bad smells caused disease. In the context of our history as a species, it is only recently that we’ve begun to understand how to fix the human body when it fails, and we’re still stumped in many areas. Compared to physical medicine, treatment for mental health feels like this uncertain, nebulous stab in the dark that’s closer to ancient Greek ideas than modern ones. No offence to any psychologists out there. I’ve just heard too many horror stories of doctors throwing assorted pills at my friends and seeing what sticks.

I never thought I’d use information from the Medicine Through Time GCSE module ever again, but man, would my history teacher be pleased that I retained any of it.

Further reading:

The Weekly Deathmatch #46 – Quake Champions – Everything Is Fine (Everything was not fine)

Trepanning – A Wikipedia Article (I wasn’t joking about cutting holes in our heads, this shit is fascinating)

Ancient Greek medicine – A Wikipedia Article (GCSE flashbacks, oh my)

Medical Renaissance – A Wikipedia Article (Remember kids, never reference Wikipedia articles in your coursework. Especially not your dissertation. Just… reference their references!)

Happy New Year

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So at the beginning of every year I like to make a blog post covering a retrospective of the last year, or a target for the next year. First, though, I should probably address the fact that I’ve not written or published anything here since July. This is for a few reasons.

First of all, I’ll mention that I do run a gaming blog, where I’ve published four (and a half) posts between July and now, including a recent 3.5k post about my top 10 games of the year. So technically I have been blogging, but not in a fashion that’s relevant to this particular space. Gaming is easier to write about because it’s a hobby and it’s what I know. And I’ve actually done a lot of it in the past year. Unlike writing.

Additionally, I did write a blog post for this space at the beginning of the December. A very detailed, very pragmatically written account of grief that I put a lot of work into and was very proud of. After much consideration and reflection, however, I decided that this was ultimately too personal to publish as a public piece and sent it to some friends instead.

2017 also saw me pick up my second job. With the two jobs combined I work 29 hours a week, mostly as split shifts and at one point, often without a day off throughout the week. This is fine, but it’s not a lifestyle that encourages the pursuing of personal projects in my downtime. When I have free time, I want to be gaming. I still love writing, but it’s ultimately a difficult and productive activity which detracts further from any relaxation. (Suck it up, right? Sure.)

But the biggest contributor to the emptiness on this page is motivation. It’s probably also the most boring thing to read about, so I apologise, but I’ll be attempting to go into detail here.

Throughout the years my motivation to write and produce content has been running at an increasingly lower ebb. This isn’t because I don’t enjoy it, but because – as well as the reason of busyness above – a sort of pit of cynicism and disillusionment grows within me with each passing day. Actively I stray from it, guiding myself to continue believing in things and enjoying events like Christmas and so on. But passively, as a default, I find myself having a hard time bothering to produce content because of a combination of prior failures and the sheer amount of people like me making content and going unrecognised by the world. I tell myself that talent rises to the forefront of creative industries, but then I find low quality content dominating the mainstream while anything thought-provoking or legitimately engaging is buried under a sea of neglected media. In this day and age it’s impossible to tell whether you’re somebody with talent who’s work has never been acknowledged, or another of the mediocre millions who waste their time giving themselves to thin air before finally falling silent.

So why bother when I could find guaranteed gratification in hobbies instead?

Nothing really happened in 2017. I got a new job. I enjoyed my hobbies. I got angry at politicians. I met nobody life-changing. I don’t particularly feel like doing a reflective blog post due to the alarming stagnation of my life. I don’t have a resolution for 2018. I don’t really want to think about it.

Happy New Year.

Big Mouth, Small Audience

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Before starting this blog post, I’d like to remind my readers that this blog will soon be changing to the domain name kristianrichmond.wordpress.com. If you frequent this blog via bookmark or web address, be sure to adjust your navigation accordingly.

I have a feeling that this will break a multitude of links across my blog posts, where I refer to earlier blog posts. Please bear with me if this happens.

I’ve been churning out all sorts of content on the internet for almost a decade now, from the honestly too-young age of 12 to the 21 year old creature that I am today. And whilst a decade might not seem like long for other age ranges, teenage years are extremely formative and developmental to who you ultimately become as a person, and therefore much of my growth as a person and as a creator has been documented across various stations of the internet throughout this half of my life. Many of these have been deleted, privatised, or otherwise locked away never to see the light of day again – much to the benefit of anyone who would stumble across the inane blatherings of my teenage self. Others still exist.

It all began with my Youtube channel back in 2007. Youtube was a very different place back then. Monetisation wasn’t really a thing, and the idea of a single Youtuber having a million subscribers was ludicrous. It was more of a hobby. And 12 year old me wanted in on that hobby. And so, with no video editing or creating experience, none of the necessary equipment to do so and being far too young to create anything watchable, I set out on my mission to become one of the popular Youtubers I aspired to and watched. The results looked a little like this feat of video-making ability. Oddly, this Youtube account amassed the largest audience I’ve ever received for my content, and whilst the videos obviously improved in quality over the next 5 years before I shut it down, it’s still something I find strange. I use the account nowadays to upload 30 second gaming clips for my own archiving purposes, and to share.

It didn’t stop there. I won’t bore you with a full account but my creative instincts caused me to branch out into contributing to short story and poetry websites and starting multiple blogs (none of which were as well maintained or frequently updated as this one). I also discovered social networks along with the rest of my generation and joined Facebook for my ‘real life’ contacts, and Twitter to create and voice my internet persona. Twitter is, I think, a keystone for the topic of this blog post.

I’ve been tweeting for nearly nine years now. According to my profile statistics, I’ve tweeted a grand total of 32,708 times, but for all of those tweets across all of those years, I’ve amassed only 200 followers. And as contradictory to the existence of this post it may seem, I’m perfectly fine with that. I value my followers. I’d probably still be tweeting if I had 10% of that number. And that, finally, is where the name of this blog post comes into play. The question I ask myself every six months or so. Am I just simply talking to myself? I have a low interaction point with my 200 followers. This blog has been updating almost weekly for a year now and it has little over a hundred (very much appreciated) readers. Blog statistics tell me that each blog post gets less than 10 visitors, and whilst I’m aware that many people read from their feed or their emails, I’d be lying if I said that this statistic, among others, wasn’t disheartening. It’s easy to interpret these as being signs pointing towards me being boring or unlikable, and on some days this is all too believable.

But enough whinging. Rationalism tells me that people like myself form the bulk of the internet’s content creating community. It may feel like there’s an abundance of successful people with large audiences, but that’s merely because you don’t hear about or see those with followers in the hundreds. And whilst part of me does wish for an audience to give my words and creations some gravity, a larger part of me acknowledges that most of what I do is out of either enjoyment, practice or ventilation. Even if I did feel defeated at the notion of talking to myself, I’ve proven to myself before that just giving up these outlets for discussion and creation causes me to slowly crumple inwardly, making for more moments of anguish and irrational upset than before. So hey, if nothing else, it’s therapeutic!

Aspects (A Discontented Ramble)

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When I was younger – say, sixteen – I held the belief… the unconscious assumption that life could be figured out, and that a state of self-acceptance and happiness could be achieved. And whilst I’m not quite jaded enough to say that this is an impossibility, I’m growing to realise that 100% self satisfaction might be as much of a myth as the perfect human being. And that’s because of how self contradictory we are in nature. For instance, I’m an introvert who prefers their own company most of the time, and at the same time I want more friends. I’m creative, and I’m lazy. I have ambitions which require lots of work, but I’m easily distracted. I get bored of things I’m passionate about. And I believe I am no different to anyone else in regard to this inner contrast.

In the last few years I’ve come to believe – or understand, or realise – that we (or at least I) aren’t simply one person, as one might find in a work of fiction. We’re multiple people. Or, if you want to be less poetic about it, we carry within ourselves different aspects which, depending on who you are, can drastically affect your personality depending on the situation. The most extreme and easily relatable example I can think of would be the difference between yourself when you’re at work, and yourself when you’re out with friends. And this is, of course, no great revelation, as most people are familiar with the concept of professionalism. But taking this idea further, I believe that we are on a subconscious level made up of multitudes of aspects, and we can’t always control who we are at a particular time. I can’t decide to always be the happily introverted gamer / writer when sitting at my desk at home. And while this isn’t an issue most of the time, when your aspects are as self-contradictory as mine currently are, it can leave you in a mess.

Ar this point, I’m going to stop pretending that this blog post isn’t about me, and my discontent. And with that, I’ll segue into talking about how discussing states of personal being without the safety of anonymity is greatly uncomfortable for me. But recently, and for reasons of my own, I’ve found myself without an outlet or point of discussion for my feelings, and found myself wishing I had some sort of an audience to share these thoughts with those who weren’t people that I knew in real life. And then, of course, I realised how unhealthy and unfair that is. So here we are.

I really like my job, but I’m not earning enough. I’m looking for another, but I’m finding nothing. I dislike social outings, but I want to meet new people. I love my family, but I wish to move out. I want to make my own way in life, but I’m frustratingly poor. I want to write, but my ideas disinterest me. I want to be confident, but I don’t find myself likeable. In short, I’m not unhappy, but I am discontent. This is not a cry for help, but an exercise in sharing. The most I can ask of you is your patience.

The Other Side of Narcissism

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Before I say anything, I’ll just say that this honestly isn’t a criticism I’m levelling at anyone I know in my life. Nor is this post against those with problems of self-imagery, or other mental health concerns. I’m discussing mostly myself and the music I listen to in this blog post.

Narcissism is something that most of us harbour to an extent in today’s world of selfies, but it’s generally something that we strive to keep to a minimum. But when you think of narcissism – of self-obsession – you always tend to think of people who are self-complimentary, or who spend an unhealthy amount of time on their appearance and trying to manage how others perceive them. But something that’s been on the edge of my mind for the last few years – and something that’s only fully hit me as I’ve revisited some heavier music that I’ve enjoyed over the years – is that hating yourself can be just as narcissistic as loving yourself.

So I’m listening to this Beartooth song for the first time. It’s called Loser. And for the most part, it’s a good song. But there’s this one lyric that stands out to me: “I was born just a little bit different.” And it gets under my skin.

Now, to be fair, I don’t know the context behind this lyric. It might be referring to a medical condition of the singer’s (or songwriter’s) that has affected their life for the worse. It may be referring to a situational disadvantage in their upbringing. But on a personal level, it reminds me painfully of my teenage self. Not to delve into too much detail, whilst I was never born into disadvantage or apathy, I lived through a personal tragedy at a young age, and was – and still am – actively aware of how it shaped me as a person going forwards. Which is fine. But I also became obsessed with comparing myself to others and discussing, at length, my emotions and how I was different to others in my fledgling literary works growing up. If I could go ten years back in time to give myself some advice, it’d be that going through a tragedy doesn’t make you any wiser, any more intelligent, or any more complex than those that you condemn as being “normal”.

I’ll be honest. I don’t entirely regret those years of self-evaluation. It was therapeutic, and laying down the metaphorical geography of my mind was probably essential to my development as a human being. But it was also an exercise in narcissism. A man who studies himself in the mirror for hours, whether he is practising his smile or spitting on himself, is still a man who studies himself in the mirror for hours. And, as with anything else that becomes the sole focus of your attention for an extended period of time, you lose the ability to view it from a fresh perspective, thereby blinding you to many issues that you’re spending hours of your life looking for.

I feel like a lot of people don’t realise that self-hatred can still be a self-obsession, if not moderated and managed. I know that a lot of the songwriters of my favourite music have analysed themselves in as much unhealthy scrutiny that I have. And whilst self-criticism and evaluation is always important, the point of obsession is as unhealthy to those around you as it is to yourself. Not just by voicing your self-remarks, but by thinking about them for hours and hours.

One more thing. I’m not saying that self-hatred or issues of self-image are a choice or a product of a changeable attitude, or anything remotely like that. To think such things would be to blatantly disregard the complexity and seriousness of mental health. I speak more directly of those whose self-evaluation is more about reasons of a selfish nature, as mine was. I’m nowhere near qualified or educated enough to speak intimately of such matters, but I believe there is a fundamental difference between issues of mental health, and issues of personality and attitude. But that’s a whole other blog post.

Well… this unasked-for blog post of commentary on self-obsession all came about when I decided to simply change my Twitter bio. I realised that I’d spent eight and a half years trying to sum myself up in less than 160 characters, growing more uncomfortable with each attempt; it is now suitably unspecific. But then, this mere self-analysis of the dangers of self-analysis only goes to show that following your own advice is as difficult as ignoring the face in the mirror.