Who is Trueself’s True Self?

I hear/read over and over from people who know me and/or read my blog that I deserve better. I scoff each time this assessment is offered, probably because I know me so much better than they do. No matter how well they think they know me they don’t know all the darkness that lies within me. They don’t know that if it were all laid out in front of them that they would think I deserve even worse rather than better. I feel quite lucky to ever have anyone’s attention, and no amount of persuasion has yet to make me feel differently.

You don’t know.

You simply don’t.

As much as I lay bare here on the blog there are further evils lurking below the surface. Oh, I skim past them occasionally in a post here or there, but I never really delve too far into them. It isn’t so much that I want to keep you blind from them but to keep myself from having to face them. They are the demons within, the impulses upon which I act seemingly without remorse (but which eat at me from the inside out), the secretive, manipulative, and hurtful actions which I take.

I have recently come as close as I ever have to sharing those things. I have the feeling that to correct them, to atone for them, to heal from them, it is necessary for me to expose them, if not here then somewhere at least to myself. They need to be laid out in the open, confronted, acknowledged, and changed.

That’s the heart of it right there that last word of that last paragraph. There are things I do that I know with certainty are wrong or bad. I know I need to change. I’m afraid I won’t change, that my selfishness and self-centeredness will prevent me from making the changes that I need to make. They say (and in this case “they” are various psych types from whom I’ve sought counsel through the years) that a person chooses a particular behavior because they get a pay off from it. It works for them at some level. It isn’t easy to give up the behavior if you don’t find a substitute behavior with equal or greater pay off. I guess so far the payoff of better moral character and higher self esteem hasn’t been enough to make me change.