log ten

I am on the road to a realization about my own state and I am not sure if I want it to set in enough for me to use it as a crux of real change.

I am almost of age to decide a path for myself. I am scared. My skill in writing is the antonym of prevalent and I’m so terribly washed up in my own mind that I can’t think of anything else to do with myself. The buzzing longing for financial stability is the only motivating factor that pushes me to find a proper path, to get a good job, to be somewhat respectable and whatever other subconscious drives that are working inside the recesses of my thoughts. In other words, my drive is selfishness.

I’ve yapped about selfishness so much in this log that at this point I have become tired of the mere mention of the word, but it is the only thing that is taking me anywhere. I’ve become insensitive to a regrettable degree. I think to myself I’ve retained some bit of sensitivity but I know in reality that I have lost it all, which I’m really not happy about. The protection that arrives once someone locks themselves into their enclosure, is it worth the sacrifice of real, good-willed sentiment that is directed to someone other than yourself?

Self-sufficiency has served me well, to a degree that I am too comfortable. I don’t know if comfort is the best thing to drown yourself in. In fact, I don’t know if if it’s good to drown myself in anything at all, but it seems that sticking my fingers into any body of water causes some invisible force to grab them and pull me down into the blue until I can no longer breathe.

This is enough talk about the exaggerated egocentrism I’ve plunged my head into. As I mentioned, I, Loretta, came to the halfway point of a realization that could either completely destroy the entirety of my psyche or turn me into a fairy.

A thought popped into my head. What motivates selflessness? Selflessness is simply a winding switchback road, a little longer than you can see, to excessive wounds. I can’t comprehend why anyone would choose to hurt themselves in the most smarting method humanly possible. It’s something I want to understand, but I don’t.

Altruism itself is a disgustingly foreign concept to me, and, frankly, I want to be nowhere near it, but the only way to better myself even slightly in terms of becoming someone that isn’t an absolute mental horror to be near is through adopting such an idea. I don’t want to, but I have to. I feel like I’m trying, and I tell myself so, but the truth is that my subconscious apprehension towards prioritizing anyone other than myself is holding me back very noticeably, and as such my progress in this goal to bask in selflessness has not even begun upon the road it is set to depart on.

A few days ago, my mother was baking bread. She was busy, hosting who knows how many randoms in our unnecessarily spacious basement. They were having a discussion. As for me, I spent the day irritable, due to reasons that will remain unidentified, and I very enthusiastically pulled my poor family into this pit of general dissatisfaction. My mother asked me to take out the bread out of the oven so that she could serve it hot and well to our unknown guests, and as a result of my unhappiness I refused, making sure to dump what was left of the task perfectly onto her shoulders.

By the time the bread was taken out of the oven, it was a charred black. Not one guest that day came to see the promised bread, much less taste it, but the smell was certainly happy to float across the entirety of the house and grace the noses of everyone it could find with its pungent scent.

Mum was greatly, and rightly, upset with me for my heightened self-regard, which seemed to be so very high that I could not spare a moment for my mother. The bread burned because I chose not to take it out of the oven. As I laid in bed to retire hours later, still prickly from earlier events in the day, she approached me and motioned for me to make space for her. Begrudgingly, and only begrudgingly, I scooted to the left to empty the minimal amount of space that she’d need, and she uncomfortably nestled herself next to me. She said to me, in a voice composed of gentleness and disappointment, many things, the great majority of which caused me an inclination to physically bristle, and one stuck out to me horribly enough for me to write a log so self-centered as this one. She told me I was selfish.

I know I’m selfish, but someone saying it to my face seemed to solidify the idea as a fact. No less from a someone that sees only the worst parts of me. I wasn’t exactly hurt. Maybe, the sentence simply invoked tension that I won’t be able to shake off until I shed this hard, crusted skin of ‘self-love.’