…Is that one would think, after my having been praised for so many years as an uncommonly intelligent person, I ought to have superior capacity to reason as to how to most effectively dig myself out of such holes. When adults have read my writing or heard me speak, they’ve oft-commented that I ‘have the mind of someone much older’ or that I’m ‘possessed of wisdom beyond my age’. Those praises start to ring infuriatingly hollow once I’m grappling with such seemingly easily solvable problems. It’s mostly about growing-up, which means most adolescents probably go through similar trials, but when I’m in one of those moods where I’m inclined to severely and harshly critique myself, it reads like weakness and inferiority, abdication of moral responsibility, refusal to live up to ethical principles. Flowery rhetoric without the concrete action that would validate any claim I might have to being a truly good person. And given how highly and how extravagantly I’ve been praised, by many people and over the course of many years, as being an intelligent and good person, the contrast between the high expectations for my achievement, the seemingly ceaseless confidence that I am to achieve exceptional things, and my intractable shiftlessness, self-involvement and avoidance of responsibility creates a huge cognitive dissonance that I find hugely taxing to deal with. In short, I get told by most that I’m the greatest guy in the world, but more often than not, I look to myself like a person falsely assumed to be good who’s actually a cretin, a pretend-ethical piece of shit. That’s an argument I commonly levy against myself; I just stated it with a venom I’m not unused to unleashing against myself. And it’s probably not productive, but it’s human.
