External or Internal Modes of Self-Image

Sometimes I’ll attempt to determine my internal state, my intentions, beliefs, sense of self-worth with mirrors. Through external means, the eyes of others, or even through the imagined representation of some other but absent person. Maybe even a group of collaborators to assess what in God’s name is so wrong with me. When I don’t trust myself, the quality of my heart, the sincerity of my values, the honesty of my self-awareness and accountability. I do so as an appeal to ‘objectivity', I suppose. If I can’t trust my self-image to be consistent with how I show up in the world, I might appeal to another’s judgement, even to my own self-criticisms through the imagined judgement of another. How objective is that really? People you love usually have a pretty good experience of your identity over time, a consistent and up to date representation of who you are. And yet, they're not living your internal life, they don't follow you into your dreams or to your job. How objective is this outsourcing of awareness? If you’re having trouble with a physics problem, are you going to ask the professor whose been familiarizing themselves with this problem for 20 years? Or will you appeal to the majoritarian opinion of the hundreds of students who take their class? What about another physics professor who specialized in a different region of physics?

Bad example okay, but you know what I mean tho? In my 23 years of life, no one has as consistent, familiar and as wide an access to my inner life as I do. While it’s important to consider how you show up in the world, how your loved ones know you, as well as maintaining consistency between our inner workings and our actions, it's also important to trust yourself about yourself. This trust is usually earned with ourselves by sufficiently practicing self-accountability and acceptance, making room for our fuck-ups so that we can more readily identify them and tend to them. Trusting yourself about yourself, investigating yourself and your memory banks, holding yourself accountable to your duties is far more gracious than doing all these things from the reflection of someone else’s eyes, or our imagined version of their eyes. Far more authentic and autonomous too.

This world is dirty. All the pearls and jewels will never distract from the fact that all life rises from the dirty, every lotus has to crawl out the mud, every tree blooms from the soil. Dirt is our real, based and sober truth, all our shit stank! We’re all dirty. That’s freedom.