composition

self-awareness is the experience of one’s own personality or individuality

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/self-awareness

Discussions regarding personal identity typically aim to determine the necessary and sufficient conditions under which a person at one time and a person at another time can be said to be the same person, persisting through time

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_identity

i don’t fully understand why i spend so much time trying to work out who or what i am. it doesn’t make a practical difference to how i live my life. i don’t need to understand who i am in order to go to work every day. but the fact i don’t know still bugs me.

i have spent much less time than usual on this bullshit journey of self discovery due to the fact i’ve been working 9 hour days (10.5 if you include travel) and also now have a child therefore i’m constantly tired and lacking my normal amount of brainpower well, moreso than usual so i’m no closer to an answer than i was a year ago.

maybe it’s simply the lack of an answer that’s frustrating me. maybe it’s the fact that i don’t know what to tell people when they ask about me, about who i am. yeah sure i can give the standard bullshit about my hobbies (surprise surprise, those are boring and basic too) but who am i beyond what i occupy my free time with?

am i a good person doing bad things, or a bad person doing good things?

Dexter Morgan

my brain doesn’t work properly all the time. i keep promising to change things about myself or my actions and at the time i entirely mean it, but somehow i end up drifting back. i want the people around me to have the best of their situation and to always have the capacity to improve the things they don’t like. sometimes i feel like i’ve just woken up for the first time in months, as if someone else was living my life and i look back on my actions and curse my past self for being a fucking idiot. i hope the best for the people who have left me behind, and whom i’ve left behind. when i was younger and people would ask me why i did something, a lot of the time i wouldn’t have an answer. half the time when i see a dead animal on the road, i apologise to it in retrospect/say a half-hearted pantheistic prayer for it, because i know it didn’t have the capacity to understand the danger of going near the road and so what happened to it was not its own fault. half the time i can’t even give an honest straight answer about how i’m feeling today, because there’s so much going on inside my head and i can’t sort it into piles and go through it to arrive at a conclusion.

i think the only description of myself i can put any faith in is “an imperfect machine, made from salvaged broken junkyard parts, held together with duct tape, chewing gum and good intentions”

i wonder how my friends would feel about that description.