This piece was written pretty quickly after “an inner need”, but not in response to the rhetorical questions it posed. Deep down I always knew what my fundamental problem was and I also knew that one day I would need to sharpen my focus on that problem - which was me. The only question was when that would happen.

 

I came to realize that I was not crying out to others for help, I was really just screaming at myself and demanding change. I was mad at my own actions, frustrated with my own behaviors, and too weak or perhaps immature to fix my own problems - choosing instead to blame them on other people and uncontrollable external influences.

 

At this time in my life, I was clearly not whom I wanted to be. I had stupidly invested my time and mental capacity mimicking people around me whom I thought were better, more intelligent, more fun, driven, happy, successful, and confident than I was.

 

But I eventually learned that they were none of those things. Though they might have appeared that way superficially, in reality, they were no different from me. No better, no smarter, no more experienced, no more focused. During this time, I did a lot of thinking and writing, much of which found its way into a trash can as I lacked the confidence and skill to know the difference between what was good and interesting and what was boring and naval gazing. Material that sounded good in the moment of writing, sounded trite a week later. My mind took me to a thousand different places, and although I enjoyed exploring each one through much thought and word exploration, I was also shocked by how little I knew myself and who I really was.

 

There was a lot of rambling involved, a lot of scattered non-sensical thoughts that I knew might never be used, but which actually formed a critical part of the process – venting, collating, refining, scrubbing, and eventually polishing my thoughts, and becoming stronger through that process. I started to recognize myself at that point, define who I was, and acknowledge that my thoughts were valid as long as I could articulate them cleanly and clearly, to accept myself as I slowly repaired the damage done in my early to mid-twenties, moving forward to better times. Thankfully, my self-respect returned soon after.