Friday, October 08, 2004

Fraud-ian Slips

My posts have been turning a bit mundane lately, so I decided to post something more blog-worthy rather than another update on my ongoing dilemma whether or not to get a new computer, which I have a feeling bores you to death. Uru!! Hrm well that aside, I was doing a little thinking on the way to school this morning, and as usual I managed to get myself totally lost in some complex logic loops again. I think I am getting too old to handle all this self-psychoanalysis thing already.

So I was sort of trying to figure out what my predominant attitude to life is, or to better describe it how do I approach things that come my way everyday throughout the course of my life, how do I face problems and try to solve them, how do I manage my emotions and my responses to things I come across? I mean, every person has a distinct personality which influences the way they come across to other people in the way they do things, like for example some people exude charisma and optimism and have great ideals, while others may be very meticulous, sometimes bordering on slight obsessive-compulsive behaviour, and some other people may take a more laid-back attitude towards life, taking each thing as it comes along, and not worrying excessively. I suppose there is no real classification for these things, since each person has a slightly different combination of personality traits (argh do I sound like a HRM lecturer or what).

And I was thinking to myself, I suppose my entire life I have been living in patterns that I follow, patterns that I map out for myself, because basically I am a very pattern-oriented person. I try to understand a pattern that exists in the world e.g. what time the MRT comes, what time the bus comes, what time would be a good time to take the bus to avoid the crowds and the traffic jams, which roads I pass on my way somewhere, people I see on the same bus everyday, mundane things like that. Then I structure my life to fit as nicely to the patterns as possible. I make my daily life a pattern built on smaller patterns, and in following these patterns as I lead my life I feel very reassured and safe because I always know what I am going to do next, plus or minus some random errors here and there.

I used to call it being a control freak, but in some ways I suppose it really is quite dissimilar. I do not seek to gain control over all unknowns, I just wish to have the reassurance and comfort of knowing roughly what will happen next. So I simply wish to know things, and not to change things to meet my needs, although I suppose making a daily pattern or routine kind of structures my life into a sequence of things that I wish to do. But all in all, I am quite amenable to changes in the pattern, since I am not mad (heh); I suppose you could say the patterns provide convenience, but I still live when some of them collapse. And most of the time my pattern as a whole bends to fit all these smaller patterns, so you could say I try to accomodate the external environment rather than seek to change it, and it makes me feel more at ease with the world since I seem to integrate into it quite seamlessly. (So I am just a gear in the system)

No, thinking about how I live my life was not my main problem this morning. I have always been plagued by the idea that somehow, in trying to explain all these itty-bitty intricacies of how I behave and how my mind influences my behaviour, I am just creating a pattern for my life to fit into, sort of like a higher-order structuring. When I think, Yeah, all my life I've lived in patterns that I recognise and change my schedule to follow and fit into, I feel that am providing an excuse to not change myself because I do not wish to leave the safety zone of my self-designed pattern. Because it did pop up in my mind that perhaps this pattern-thing was the reason why I dread change so much.

(Have I lost you yet? Hopefully not...)

It scares me that sometimes I have absolutely no idea whether the theories I come up with about how my mind works are true for me, even though most times they can sound perfectly logical (well, not perfect, but logical) to me, and I do wonder if all that I think up is a whole load of sophistry and B.S. that fuels false ideas. Because my entire life is built up of this foundation of what I think I know about myself, what if I find that all that I thought I knew is false, and has been created to build a me that is not really me at all? Does that not make all my life a fraudulent exercise based on lies? Sometimes I do feel like I am living a lie, that I am lying to me true self that this is the kind of life that I want to lead, so much so that eventually I got fooled by all the lies and started living this lie like it was the truth. Which then makes it paradoxical because how I can know that I am living a lie, if I am truly living a lie. I cannot possibly be frank about the fact that my existence is fraudulent, because a fraudulent existence naturally excludes any possiblity of honesty.

Okay that was a difficult line of thought to understand, and I do not expect many people to put effort into making sense of it anyway. Suddenly I wonder why I put all this down if I think that all the theories that come out of my head are lies that I am creating to perpetuate my fraudulent existence. But what else can I do, see a psychologist? No use, that. If I do see a psychologist, who is to say the psychologist will ever see past the wall of lies that I think I have built for myself, if I myself cannot see past that wall to know if it is the truth or if the truth is behind it?

Sometimes I find words so woefully inadequate in expressing concepts that you can feel so viscerally, yet you cannot even begin to describe with words because any language that Man creates is incapable of expressing the subtleties and amalgamation of all these feelings. Even if you find a way of expressing it that seems just right, another person may not understand it the same way because we all have different ways of intepreting words. A word that may seem offensive to me might just elicit a bland response from someone else; we all associate words and the meanings they represent differently. Words really cannot even begin to scrape the surface of some of the things that run through my head on a daily basis.

Now you know where all the white hair comes from.

Avaris / 10/08/2004 08:20:00 PM

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