Inner Conflicts

I find writ­ing pub­licly like this to be a tad strange. In a way, know­ing this is pub­lic forces me to write, which allows for both an improve­ment in my abil­ity to write, and the gain­ing of knowl­edge. I’m quite cer­tain that if I were writ­ing in a jour­nal, I would be writ­ing for very dif­fer­ent rea­sons (and thus, nei­ther improve my abil­ity to write, or learn). And yet at the same time I seem to con­stantly remind myself, ‘what’s the point?’ The ‘point,’ which I agreed upon with myself, is sim­ply to write and learn. I don’t know quite near enough to make any seri­ous con­tri­bu­tions to any­thing, and so I don’t attempt it. Why, when I know that this is more for me than any­thing else, do I feel so much oppo­si­tion from within myself? When I started writ­ing I didn’t know, but now that I’ve fin­ished — and edited this line — I do. At first I might think, “you’re 23, you should know much more than you do — why are you both­er­ing with this?” but then I might think, “you’re only 23, you’re young still and have much to learn — why are you doing this?” I crit­i­cize myself for not know­ing enough, or for hav­ing to learn — even though this point of this whole exer­cise is learning.

I sup­pose that in a cer­tain way I mud­dle over “what’s the point?” My writ­ing abil­ity may greatly improve, but there will always be oth­ers who are far bet­ter. I may greatly “increase in knowl­edge,” but again, there will be oth­ers who know far more. I might become wiser, but never to the point of con­sid­er­ing myself “wise”. I might become “great” at what I do, but there are oth­ers who have been greater, and there will be oth­ers who will be greater. The fur­ther I exam­ine myself, and think about the desires I pos­sess, the more I learn that I’m either vir­tu­ous, or sinful.

I have the awful habit of com­par­ing myself with oth­ers. I deter­mined at a young age — after some very poor expe­ri­ences with my peers — that I would know more than them, be smarter and wiser and more intel­li­gent than them. The “prob­lem” was that for a few years, I was home schooled. Dur­ing that time I was con­stantly being reminded that aca­d­e­m­i­cally, I would be grades behind my peers. The “friends” I had tended to remind me of that. I remem­ber tak­ing a manda­tory test in grade 8 to see where I ranked com­pared to other grade 8 stu­dents. My read­ing com­pre­hen­sion level was that of an under­grad­u­ate stu­dent, but in every other area I was graded at a “grade 3 / grade 4″ level. Again, it only made me more deter­mined and in any case, when I did attend high school I dis­cov­ered that I was ahead — quite ahead — of my peers. But “it’”s a funny thing, you never feel like you’ve done enough. Now I am in uni­ver­sity, and it isn’t my peers that I com­pare myself with, but pro­fes­sors.  Talk about unre­al­is­tic expectations.

“It” being pride, hence my either being vir­tu­ous (Aris­to­tle) or sin­ful (Chris­t­ian teach­ing). I’m quite inclined to agree that it’s a sin. I won­der why I’m wise enough to know the cause, but not to over­come it. It’s a funny thing, that pride, show­ing up where I didn’t expect it.