Unedited

Is being yourself a legitimate reason to be a bad person?

It's easy to enumerate the ways in which I might improve myself -- it's a long list, but I'm well aware of my many personal shortcomings -- but somehow, much more difficult to do it.

This may be because I'm intrinsically lazy, but, oddly enough, I think it's more due to the fact that, in this respect anyway, I'm almost too proactive.

I know how to present myself to individual people to make myself more attractive to them, but I rarely do. I don't quite understand it, but something in my head always -- especially of late -- tells me to be myself. It's complicated, because apparently hours of daily introspection lead to more confusion than clarity in self-awareness, but oh well.

But can you think too much?

As I was driving PSSC delegates around this morning, I listened to a radio program that said hyperanalytical, introspective people (ahem) are apt to develop ridiculously low self-esteem by sheer virtue of misinterpreting the vast majority of social cues.

Wow.

So, every social situation in which my brain is consumed with developing a million things to say, analyzing, selecting, deselecting, assessing potential reactions, planning how to react to reactions ... every conversation is like a chess game, and I have to move several steps in advance, and it's exhausting!

So, I quit. No more will I be concerned with how to make a better Tessa; no more will every action be pre-thought out in triplicate.

Somehow -- though it surprises me continually and to no end -- some people seem to think I'm relatively capable. While this remains a cause for concern, maybe I won't be concerned about it.

Okay, so the tone of this entry is like a fucking see-saw, but so what? At the risk of abject positivism, and definitely at the risk of changing my mind, I'm okay with that.

It just seems, for once, that the more I think about it, the easier it is.