From here and there, at least in part.

I was having a conversation today with a relatively new friend.  This is a  friend that has only known me for the last 8 months or so, during my breakdown, my confusion, my attempt at sanity, my fight with jaded-ness, etc. This conversation, and his opinion of my personality, brought a few things to light that I don’t think I wanted to see.  His assessment of me is not filtered by past success or failure. It is not seen in light of difficulty or struggle. It is simply who I am in his experience. It is normal to him. Only . . . I don’t feel normal.

I am reading a book right now that steps through the process of “personal enlightenment” (forgive the phrase) with a young woman. Her journey takes her to the pit – the point where you see yourself, the part you don’t want to see, and choose how to handle it, how to move on. This year has been about seeing the darkness in me. It has actively highlighted my tendency to be extremely selfish, condescending, judgmental, a big brat of a person. It has shown me that I am actually no-good at serving, loving or being generous – although I thought I was. It erased the list of things I had “done for the Kingdom” and replaced it with the emptiness that comes from knowing how far the trail still goes in front of me.

While I don’t know any of the answers to my questions about this personality conflict - how do I improve? where do I go from here? is it worth the effort? will i ever be a genuinely good person? - I am still going to try . . . bare with me, please.

(when I was publishing the shortlink for this blog, the verification code that I had to submit popped up Truthful Visitor. How appropriate.)

Update (perhaps I should put time stamps on these updates as I suspect this will be a continuing, daily process)

2:12PM

Upon re-reading this blog I realized how pitiful it sounds. I don’t feel pitiful, I am just expressing that ever present reality that must be accepted in order to improve. That deepest darkness that is the way up. That wrung on the ladder known as negative one.