Know Thyself

    As people, we can tend to be pretty poor at knowing where exactly our skills, and especially our flaws, lie. This is because we might overestimate our abilities in some places and underestimate them elsewhere. Because we are dealing with ourselves, it is naturally quite difficult to objectively measure us. In my experience the really tricky part about knowing your own flaws is that you have to be careful not to exaggerate just how bad you are at something. Underestimating is not better than overestimating, they are both bad in their own ways. Both can result in low self-esteem and hurt your chances at trying new things. The buzzword for finding out where you excel, where you fall short, and where you are pleasantly mediocre is introspection; however, I do not think that it is as easy as sitting down and trying to sort through the cobwebs in my brain to get to the truth of who I am. In order to find where your strengths, weaknesses, and average talents lie is unfortunately through trial and error. Of course, this is also applicable to social skills. Your ability to listen to and empathize with others is something you can only get to the bottom of if you spend time with other human beings, and how you manage stressful social situations can give you a clue as to how adept you are at many parts of socializing. It is difficult to put a price tag on self knowledge because of how ambiguous it can be, but its practical applications are almost limitless. For starters, if you have the prerogative to improve or accept the parts of yourself you are not proud of, then you become a less self conscious person and you will probably be a lot more likable and carry less anger around with you. There is nothing wrong with feeling anger about things like homework or stubbing your toe on the same part of the coffee table three times in a day, but anger towards other people should usually be about things they do that you can move past. It should not be about parts of their personality. Self-knowledge is simply the first step to accepting yourself and becoming a productive member of the world, but it is invaluable.

    To my understanding, not being aware of one's past has much greater consequences for a group of people than for an individual, but of course as we see in Oedipus Rex it can be detrimental to people on the personal level as well. The main point to studying history in school is so that we can learn from what our predecessors did to avoid their mistakes. If we as people are unaware of what we did in the past it could possibly lead to unnecessary war or famine. For Oedipus, this plays out in the worst way because his ignorance to his true parents kept him from realizing he had married his mother and effectively made his family tree circular. Not only this, but because he was unaware that the travelers he had killed had included his own father, he had much farther to fall emotionally than he otherwise would have. He accidentally put himself on a pedestal, or a throne, without fully understanding how he had achieved it. This meant that when it was time for him to be brought back down to earth with the truth of his actions, his shock was much more intense than it had to be. This plays back into the hands of history class because if an American takes great pride in how we were the first nation to get to the moon, it might be an intolerable thought that we used former Nazi scientists at NASA to do it. Great accomplishment for the country? Absolutely. But to get to our Oedipus like throne we had to make deals that many find rough on the palette. How we define our identity needs to take our past into account because if we ignore our flaws or our flawed decisions, the artificially inflated sense of self that we get will end up being much too vulnerable for comfort.

    My own worst quality is most likely that I can tend to overthink things and end up catastrophizing everything which makes it very difficult to take decisive action. When I say overthink I don't mean that I try to comprehend something from several planes of reality, that might warrant some type of medication. Rather, if there is something I need to make a decision on I will run through several different iterations of what could happen and how other people could react and how I would react to their reactions. And of course, every scenario I work up in my head ends poorly. This method of approach is insane and it often leaves me panicked and pacing silently around the living room in the wee hours of the morning. The main reason I do this is because a lack of control over a situation is scary, and I obviously cannot control other people. So instead I try to come up with every single thing they could do so I am prepared for every contingency. It probably is not surprising to anybody reading this that my contingency plans are hardly ever necessary. What can also happen is that if there is a situation I need to react to, I will try to figure my way through it in any way I can think of, make pros and cons, comparisons, all of it. The issue with this is that if you spend your whole life making a decision it never actually gets made. I am not a huge fan of taking unnecessary risks so I like to minimize my chance of failure, but you cannot just always be optimizing how you will behave. I have tried to open myself up more to the idea of failure in the past, which I think has helped a bit with making, dare I say it, a decision that has not been vetted for the minimum window of four days. But I definitely still have work to do.

    As difficult as it is for me to try to face my own worst qualities, it can be even more challenging to come up with what I am best at doing. I think if you were to ask people I am close to what my best quality is as a person they would say that I am empathetic and can listen without judgement. The interesting thing is that this is very similar to my worst quality. Funny how that works. Because I have so much practice trying to work my way through problems from different perspectives, it is easier for me to get an idea of how my friends are feeling when they describe something to me. I like to think that this helps me develop closer bonds with people I care about. I would say that this also helps to keep me objective, because I let myself try to see situations from other perspectives. This is also very helpful because during a disagreement it is never beneficial to wall yourself off from the possibility that you are not 100% correct. Meeting in the middle and finding common ground is a much more valuable skill than it seems, and I think that trying to understand other perspectives helps to achieve it.

    The difficulty in coming up with my own strengths and weaknesses is that it can be incredibly challenging to view myself objectively. I am myself, so my idea of who I am is biased by who I want to be. If who I am and who I want to be are different, then my last two paragraphs could be completely useless. It makes me quite uncomfortable to write about this sort of thing because, while I am a person and therefore by nature imperfect, it still feels odd to face those imperfections. I am an only child, which tends to lend itself to narcissism, so that does not help either. On the other hand, I do not want to come off as somebody who feels he has no room for improvement because I clearly do, which makes confronting my better traits uncomfortable. Further, I fear that resting too heavily on my good qualities can foster laziness, and that is not how I want to spend my limited time alive. As a 'funny' side note, my fear of becoming lazy occasionally makes me incredibly neurotic which also leads to very little productivity. I suppose that the best way to really find out who you are as a person is to ask the people close to you how they see you, because how you present yourself to them is who you are in the eyes of the world.