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RE: [Dream Report] Plague of the Twisted Flesh
Damn. I was hoping you were batman. ;-)
Maybe the connection in your brain between bodily well being and fear isn't broken. Maybe it works just like it's supposed to. Without people who get excited and explore scary things while everyone else is huddling in fear, we probably would have died out a long time ago.
Well, Batman and I have never been seen together in the same room. Just saying.
I'm sure there are upsides, but I have no compunctions about frank self-analysis. I am brutal with myself because in the opposite direction lies dunning krugeritis and various other forms of narcissistic self-delusion. If I cannot accurately gauge my own strengths and weaknesses, I will really be in trouble.
The result is that I make wildly varying first impressions on new people depending on whether they first hear me talking about areas I think I am strong in ("Oh, he's arrogant") or areas I'm weak in ("he's a depressive sadsack").
It seems a totally alien concept for some people that I would, for example, have no reservations describing autism as a mental disorder or myself as mentally defective to a degree. My own life experience bears that out. There are good reasons evolution has decided that human brains, by and large, should not work this way. Trust me when I tell you it has hindered more than it has helped.
So it goes with everything else about me. Where I am deficient, I acknowledge it, because otherwise I cannot know where to focus my efforts at self improvement. Where I am strong, I allow myself to say so, because that should be one of the rewards for developing a talent.
I am 33 now and by this point perfectly comfortable being a strange, flawed, mixed bag of a person. Not in the sense that I am done trying to improve, but I don't need to hold an artificially elevated view of myself in order to get out of bed in the morning.
Sweet of you to say, though. I certainly appreciate the sentiment.
I have some well meaning friends who insist my deficiencies are inseparable from my strengths and having them is just an alternative way of being. This makes me want to kick them. They may be right, but it minimizes the difficulties those weaknesses cause. I'm not sure why I did the same thing to you, but you're welcome to give me a good cyber kick if you'd like. ;-)
Also, I don't know how I got by all these years without knowing the term dunning krugeritis. Thank you for rectifying that. I suppose it's useless to point it out to someone who has it, but I'm happy to know it anyway.
You're a really interesting person. If you hit me up on FB (https://www.facebook.com/AlexBeyman/) I think we'd have a lot to discuss.