How Much Do You Need to Know About Yourself?

Cool?
Check.
Arrogant at times?
Check.
Self-centered and/or self-absorbed?
I'm in the arts. Check.
Stubborn?
Check.
Intelligent?
Check.
Ability for list to go on endlessly?
Check. Roger. 10-4. Over and out.

Take any number of Facebook quizzes. Or the Meyers-Briggs test. Or the Enneagram. Or numerology. Or whatever. Take all these and somewhere in the middle you find yourself.

I was standing in my kitchen, which amounts to a two-and-a-half foot wide and six foot deep plastic surface and realized: I'm back. I'm me again, as much as I can be. Everything that's happened before now seems surreal. Maybe my conscience is doing some clean-up.

I'm at a point way after a failed relationship; I'll settle for calling it a “double fault.” I've lost weight. I completed a story. I left a group. I got kicked out of another group. My freelance movie critic contract got canceled.

A friend of mine, Sandy, said that one of these events alone would bury her under her blankets for a year, let alone all of them. There's something to be said for my resilience or rather my ability to keep going after the fact. Maybe I'm stubborn. Maybe I'm quixotic.

It hurts to think about these things. How do I not register them as failure? I remember at the end of my relationship with Jen I said, “Keep the good things.” It's funny -it feels a million years ago.

And I feel like a different person.

I spent so much time on the outside that trying to get in banged me up bad. I took time out to figure myself out, to figure out what I want, to figure out what I needed. It was like wearing a new suit and thinking I was six-foot tall and bulletproof. But I wasn't.

And so after getting shat on and booted, the soul-searching I did yielded interesting results. I figured out who I was and how I operated down to the minutiae. Why I react to things the way I do, etc. The problem is “what do I do” with an answer of “go out there.”

But seriously, I've digressed from my point: how much do I need to know about myself? Currently, I've got me down to a science. Knowing how something works is one thing; application is an entirely different beast.

On a different note, why is it that the more we unravel about ourselves the less sure we are of anything? Is it self-doubt? Is it conscience? Or are we making a facade real? I'll have a moment where I'm fine, where I've figured things out, then BAMM -a hole in the boat.

Questions and answers and more questions...