I Am a Lie - Free Write

I pride myself on honesty but I am dishonest.
I tell others: it's so easy, do it this way!
I cannot do it that way myself.
I have accepted and allowed myself to not do it that way myself. I have accepted and allowed myself to believe that I am already doing it that way and therefore I can ignore it, it is moot.
Things are always easier said than done. And sometimes they're hard to say, too.
It is hard for me to say: I am not perfect.
It is hard for me to say: You're right.
It is hard for me to, when realizing and facing all of the ways in which I am not who I think I am, articulate those ways and what they mean. This is a brick in the wall of intimidation I wrote about yesterday.
It is hard for me to look at myself when it seems so much easier to look at others, as if they are not myself.

But pride is a weird tricky thing. Because while it is hard for me to say I am not perfect, I have also lived a devastating depression at times wherein I believe myself to be NOTHING, of no value, worthless, worth only death even. Worth only what others can tell me about myself, so it is tied to my need for validation, which is obvious because of what I used to do to try to get others to notice my pain, which is placing my pain above other pain as more important. But that very same need for validation cannot exist without a puffed up ego full of pride which must seek external evidence for its own existence. If I truly believed I was nothing, I would need no validation. If I truly believed I was nothing, I would have no pride.

And I used to cycle through depression and pride. I would by default exist in sadness, but through social interaction I would find it within myself to assert my self-interested dominance through humor, advice, accusation, or other extroverted behavior, and often something would happen where, at least in my internal feeling state, it would backfire. I would react with anxiety, with shame, with embarrassment, with regret, and so I would retreat back into depression and introversion, saying: "This is why..." giving the feeling/emotion power over me and my expression to shut me up and shut myself out. So really all along I haven't had the down without the up or the up without the down. And I am learning to exist somewhere in the middle, to find stability, to let my emotional reactions be indicators to me, ways to flag where I am not being honest, but not to let them send me into a chain reaction of subsequent emotions and behaviors and thoughts which will only perpetuate the pendulum's swings.

So, anyway:

I am not perfect.
I don't know what's best.
I don't have the answer.
I lie every day.
I am a lie. The person I believe myself to be, have believed myself to be, is a lie. Even my most honest explorations have been lies as they have been within systems of thought that are lies.
Depression is a lie.
Anxiety is a lie.
They are excuses. They are cycles. They are traps.

Trap of Dementia - Part 1

Thank you... for reading. For being. Just, thanks.