Self Reflection

You know when you read biographies of people long since dead and someone says something like "it's interesting how kind he was to his employees but was so cruel to his relatives" and you think, man I wonder if they ever questioned themselves about that. Or you read memoirs and the person sort of casually mentions how it took them twenty years to realize they were a workaholic or half a decade to figure out that they hated their life and the other half digging themselves out of that impossible hole.

I think a good, but unending job is to endeavor so that no one ever questions something about your life that you haven't already fully turned over in your head from every possible angle. That you should never realize something about yourself in some momentous epiphany because you've institutionalized incremental reflection. The role of a biography is not to work out the problems that you've been living every single day because in fact, that's what every single day is for.

The exercise then is to consider what a stranger would think if the facts were all laid out on the table. What would they question? What have you missed? Finally, what can you do now that would cut off their assumptions--to answer their doubts with actions and avoid the surprise of a cliché?

I never really write about my past relationships on here and it's strange because they have definitely shaped and influenced who I am today.

I will be the first to admit that I have made really shitty decisions, ones with no real winner and enough of them for me to learn what not to do.
But looking back there are quite a few decisions I made that I am not proud of. Priorities and internal logic that were embarrassing at best and disturbing at worst.

There is a good line in Meditations where he says something like never do anything that you will worry about remaining 'behind closed doors'. I think the same goes for how you treat the important people in your life. And when I look back on things, there's a lot I could never justify to a third party. I regret that and it's something I'd like to put an end to doing.