I once had a profound habit of keeping a journal to myself, I would write on the Yahoo! Blog religiously about the problems in my daily life, complain a little bit about how the world is unfair to me (sometimes), and also try to enter the bits and pieces of other people’s lives hoping to see the same pain in them that I feel. I think that’s where I picked up the skill of talking to myself, which is both a blessing and a curse to me at times. Cause while I write new blog posts then I sometimes also look back at my old posts and tried to argue with that person (old me) pretending if I was another person with a different point of view.
Anyways, I even edited the backgrounds of my blog, and added background music to it (in Hong Kong – or at least in my social circle – we used this web called Yahoo! Blog instead of MySpace, but I guess it’s kind of the same thing?), because we would mentally compete against our classmates’ blogs haha. Later when I felt the urge to learn English (but also wanted to show off) then I started typing the blog posts in English haha.
Unluckily, one day the Yahoo! Blog community just started falling apart (I can’t remember exactly why, maybe Yahoo! Blog lost popularity against NeoPets and other fun html games at the time?), then I just stopped blogging and even though I’ve made attempts to write journals and diaries afterwards, all were loose and inconsistent. Nowadays it even consumes your energy sometimes – instead of brightening up your day – to put your thoughts into words. I think it got progressively worse throughout this whole journey called “the education system”, where words were converted to the marks on your exam paper. Words became heavier than gold because at that time I was a competitive kid at school trying to get higher marks than my classmates and I would get very upset whenever teachers deducted points from me because of my writing style, grammar, spelling, and even penmanship.
I started to feel like I wasn’t writing for myself but I was just using writing as a tool to achieve other purposes.
“Writing”, thus, lost its purity in my heart.
That’s why writing slowly changed from a positively rewarding activity to a negative experience that discourages myself from doing again. I guess that’s why in my adulthood now I can only write when I have energy, instead of writing to restore my energy by talking to myself like the way when I was 11 years old and chatting with myself through the Yahoo! Blog.
“Luckily”, as an innate manipulator, since childhood I have always used a psychological trick on myself. It’s a trick that I derived from my self-constructed psychological theory after reading the life stories of two-faced religious, political figures or celebrities.
“If you starve yourself of a net-negative experience enough, your brain can falsely register such experience as positive.”
For example, that’s why the occupational need of a political figure to be “socially positive and just” is actually both an effect and a cause of their unavoidable attraction to those exact socially unjust opposites. And that’s why a “celibate” pastor can store a surreal amount of unreleased libido under those pants for example.
So, basically what I do to myself is that I would prohibit myself from performing a certain action (e.g. clean the house, talk to people and in this case, write) long past the equilibrium line so then my mind starts to develop a pressure to want to perform those actions even though my mind thinks that the costs of those exact actions outweigh the benefits. For example, if I want to write but my current energy state is not high enough for me to pick up the pen to write, then I’d force myself not to write (even in situations where I absolutely need to write) until my brain starts recalculating:
“Damn writing is energy consuming… OH Wait… DAMN not writing is even worse now 
“
Which is why sometimes I can be two-faced too. I cannot and will never achieve this consistent, constant and, zen, state that everyone dreams of. But in my redemption, I do manage to self-manipulate myself using this stupid psychological trick (that might perhaps only work on myself) to rebounce my behaviours back to the “right track” and approach this mathematical “limit of being a socially acceptable human” by creating this “dynamic equilibrium” made up of the alternations of these extreme behavioural states.
Which is why sometimes I write a lot and sometimes I don’t reply to messages at all. That’s why I work very hard sometimes and do absolutely nothing the other times. That’s why I can be very listening and attentive one day and become completely foreign and cold the next day. To be honest I don’t even know why my brain registers human interactions as a negative biological stimulus (cause humans are supposed to be social animals right?), but anyway somehow it just, does.
But that’s also why I can finally confirm that I am the average of the averagest person.
Because I am just the same as you.
You, too, are just as self-contradictory as me.
Unexplainable destructive actions (e.g. ignoring, distancing) and unexplainable negative feelings (e.g. jealousy, fear, hatred) towards another person or group of people are natural in all of us; and yet, you would never reveal those “wicked” feelings to your closest friends and loved ones. Have you ever felt tired of human interactions? Have you ever felt like you are wearing makeup on your heart to pretend to be a better version of yourself?
But now look at societies with a “macroscope” – I mean macroscopically – imagine each role and identity that is tattooed onto you. An Asian. A young adult. A Low-income Bracket. A Student. A Scorpio, A Daughter/Son. A Hardworking Male, A funny neighbor. A good team player that always follows the Manager.
Now imagine each of these roles and identities is a single-celled organism on a petri dish. I think I’ll probably see these different organisms extend and expand. I think I’ll also see them try to fight, kill, and procreate with other cells. That’s why I imagine that if you dissect your brain according to the different emotional and psychological segments of yourself, it’ll probably look just like that Petri dish.
Perhaps these self-contradictions are healthy after all if you had just tried to look at them as part of a thriving ecosystem instead of making it so black and white on paper?
So maybe it would actually be a good thing if we start sharing these insecurities and different versions of our ideal selves with other people? Maybe we never had to hide our hearts behind so many curtains and blinds after all?
It seems like the art of being a “normal citizen” and an individual with a “consistent personality” is impossible for any of us to perfect after all.
That’s why,
there are different sides of us that are self-contradictory to each other.
That’s why,
we need to accept that we are still flawed individuals even though we want to be perfect.
That’s why,
sometimes I am very chatty in person but I never reply to messages.
And that’s why,
I seem to overcompensate not writing by writing a lot, and then I write a lot; and then I dive back down into my vast pitch-dark ocean with my Gam of Whales.
