Self-Awareness

[blackburry]

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[717495]

Self-awareness is like an oxymoron.

[DirectorAbbie]

I haven't struggled with self-awareness for four years. How long does it take for you to understand someone you're in constant contact with? I figured by the time you're an adult you know who you are and should have an easy time knowing your type. No wonder so many people have trouble deciding on a type.

[silverchris9]

I haven't struggled with self-awareness for four years. How long does it take for you to understand someone you're in constant contact with? I figured by the time you're an adult you know who you are and should have an easy time knowing your type. No wonder so many people have trouble deciding on a type.

You can think you understand yourself when you see yourself in only one light.

Ni/Se .

Anyway, to the OP, self-awareness (to me) doesn't mean that you have yourself figured out. The only way to have yourself figured is to a) be Shakespeare, or b) "see yourself in only one (or two or three) light(s)," like aixelsyd said. Self-awareness is... this sense of watching yourself, observing yourself and noticing maybe why you're impelled do to certain things, noticing what makes you tick, not in a grand overarching sense, but in a more limited sense of "hmm... I didn't do that for healthy reasons, even though it was a good action" or "I know that was a bad thing to do, but I'm doing it for reasons that will ultimately make me a better person."

And of course it gets deeper than that and progresses on towards that grand Shakespearian revelation of the self, but the only way to get there is through the awful stumbling and uncertainty and lack of clarity and viewing yourself as a jumbled box of emotions and ideas and thoughts and impulses and confusions.

So to me, people who lack self-awareness are not those who cannot... notice themselves doing things. Like people talked about in the Ni-polr thread (and the Joy thread...). This inability to see your own motivations and your own drives. This inability to see yourself beyond the skin-deep level, inability to see beyond the externals of your life and start investigating "the effect upon me of my early life or the ward and city I live in."

And I don't know if this is an Ni-thing or not. I know it's a me thing. I'm horribly self-aware, almost to the point of pain. And self-awareness, or self-consciousness (a word that has a justly-deserved negative connotation for all the wrong reasons) is a big part of Romantic poetry. And it's detailed most clearly and explicitly by Walt Whitman (which is fitting for an Ni-ego that pretended to be an Se-ego):

Trippers and askers surround me,
People I meet, the effect upon me of my early life or the ward and city I live in, or the nation,
The latest dates, discoveries, inventions, societies, authors old and new,
My dinner, dress, associates, looks, compliments, dues,
The real or fancied indifference of some man or woman I love,
The sickness of one of my folks or of myself, or ill-doing or loss or lack of money, or depressions or exaltations,
Battles, the horrors of fratricidal war, the fever of doubtful news, the fitful events;
These come to me days and nights and go from me again,
But they are not the Me myself.
Apart from the pulling and hauling stands what I am,
Stands amused, complacent, compassionating, idle, unitary,
Looks down, is erect, or bends an arm on an impalpable certain rest,
Looking with side-curved head curious what will come next,
Both in and out of the game and watching and wondering at it.
Backward I see in my own days where I sweated through fog with linguists and contenders,
I have no mockings or arguments, I witness and wait.

That's self-awareness. That feeling of always having someone looking over your shoulder, and then you turn around and find out the person looking over your shoulder is you. (And to take a poetic detour, the crucial word of this entire section is "curious"---if you can bless your self-awareness as "curious," as fundamentally interested in the future and in discovery, then you have taken the first step towards being "As Adam, early in the morning." Not what you asked, but since I had an excuse to bring up Walt Whitman, I figured I'd run with it.)

[DirectorAbbie]

You can think you understand yourself when you see yourself in only one light.

Huh? How many lights does a person need?

[silverchris9]

Huh? How many lights does a person need?

An infinite number, one for every color on the spectrum between black and white. Of course, if you spread out signposts on each color, you can get a decent approximation, but it's kind of like going from a tangent line to a derivative. Sure, if you know the line tangent to the curve at several points/colors, you can guess what the curve is like, but it's far more helpful to just have a formula that tells you what the y value for the curve is at any given x value. Of course, people are also four dimensional rather than two, so...

EDIT: Oh, wait, that implies grayscale. Nevermind. I mean every color on the spectrum period, not just the grayscale spectrum running from black to white.

[DirectorAbbie]

Okay...so I need dim light as well as bright light?

Why?

If one is accustomed to a bright light, a dimmer light with not help one see more clearly.

[DirectorAbbie]

Yeah, I feel the same. Except I don't ever remember a time struggling with it.

Yeah, "struggled with" was the wrong phrase. I should have used a phrase like, "had any problem with."
Myst be a thing.

[CILi]

Myst be a thing.

[limNol]

Self-awareness, self-development, whatever you want to call it is such a contradictory process; it's not something you can ever reach. Because living life means constantly adding new layers to who we are while simultaneously struggling to remove layers of ourselves to get to the "core" of who we are. But we are a lot less constant than we'd like to think, and I think self awareness firstly means letting go of the need to pinpoint what exactly our "self" is, accepting that although we can keep peeling away layers, we won't ever reach the core. And then, knowing yourself becomes an exciting journey because once you accept that success is impossible, failure also becomes impossible -- and when you realize that so much of yourself is built on limitations, there's no longer any such thing as limitations.

I might add that the person I know of myself is real. It's more to do with that I see my innermost thoughts and feelings which are not apparent to others but spend so much time with that part of who I am that I totally ignore what people see of me. People tell me I am this or that and I am like "what?" Or people say I am courageous and I dismiss it because I know very well my fear and know how much I wrestle with fear. Or I know my weakness and see myself as weak but actually can perform well and work past it more than I even am aware of.

I think when we see courage in other people, we assume that they're courageous, and that's the whole story. But when people see only a small cross section of our "selves" and call us courageous, we're like "oh, if only you knew, man." But really, this self depreciating thing is an unrealistic perfectionism because there's always weakness behind courage. What's more courageous than just accepting fear?

[Slacker]

Okay...so I need dim light as well as bright light?

Why?

If one is accustomed to a bright light, a dimmer light with not help one see more clearly.

"Dim" and "bright" are words that rely on comparison. If you've only ever used one light, you don't know how dim or bright it is.

[Hot Scalding Gayser]

I'd watch the six feet under episode 'Someone else's eyes.' We all need other people's perceptives on what we're doing. I didn't even realize I was doing certain things wrong until other people pointed them out to me. Then I could realize it and say 'Oh yeah you're right, I do do that.'

Sometimes people have wrong insight into me though. But these were people that I trusted, that didn't disrespect me like most people in life. You really need the right people. Which I think, sometimes only happens by accident. But you can listen to other people's input over you, without feeling like you have to be a victim about it. Ya know?

[Hot Scalding Gayser]

I would get off of the 'self-improvement kick' because deep down it makes you feel like there's always something wrong with you that needs fixing. Although it's true the more you want to change the world, the more you have to change yourself.

All I know is that, we usually feel bad if we focus on ourselves, and we usually end up feeling a lot better once we learn how to focus on others.

'Self-improvement' is a viscous cycle because it makes you focus on yourself, to change yourself- but it also makes you too hard on yourself, where you probably won't do much of anything. It's not like bullies have this level of introspection. Beat them at their own game, and just keep trying things physically until you get it right. Just try your best at whatever you want to do, regardless of what the haters say. Don't let them bring you down. =)

[MysticSonic]

I would get off of the 'self-improvement kick' because deep down it makes you feel like there's always something wrong with you that needs fixing. Although it's true the more you want to change the world, the more you have to change yourself.

All I know is that, we usually feel bad if we focus on ourselves, and we usually end up feeling a lot better once we learn how to focus on others.

'Self-improvement' is a viscous cycle because it makes you focus on yourself, to change yourself- but it also makes you too hard on yourself, where you probably won't do much of anything. It's not like bullies have this level of introspection. Beat them at their own game, and just keep trying things physically until you get it right. Just try your best at whatever you want to do, regardless of what the haters say. Don't let them bring you down. =)

What's wrong with accepting there's always something wrong with you? I think it's important to accept you have imperfections and attempt to burden the feelings of inferiority--eventually accepting your weaknesses--and attempting to improve upon them, then to shrug it off because you're not emotionally strong enough to accept that there's some important areas in your life that need to be improved. Feeling bad isn't a bad thing. Fearing feeling bad is.

[krieger]

i love this post

[Sir Knight]

thanks for the replies..
just trying to figure out what career I want to go into...and stay in...and for me it feels like a huge crisis. ugh.
I need to figure it out asap..and I've given so many things a go, and now I'm 22...and work at a hospital and I'm burnt out...and am stressed way too much, cry way too much.


what to do...seriously.

Heh. I'm in your same boat now. College starts tomorrow, for me, and I don't have a single course registered yet. I completely failed out last semester, which was any huge disappointment on top of a heap of such disappointments, and it was only taking to my older brother on New Years and learning how truly shitty it is to be poor and working paycheck to paycheck that gave me the drive to get back in. But I'm looking at the registration screen and I have no idea what the hell to take, which path to go into... any of it.

So, I guess the advice I would give you, since its the advice I wish I could follow, would be: do what you love to do. Find something you enjoy more than anything in the world and figure out a way to make money at it.

[Sir Knight]

I would get off of the 'self-improvement kick' because deep down it makes you feel like there's always something wrong with you that needs fixing. Although it's true the more you want to change the world, the more you have to change yourself.

All I know is that, we usually feel bad if we focus on ourselves, and we usually end up feeling a lot better once we learn how to focus on others.

'Self-improvement' is a viscous cycle because it makes you focus on yourself, to change yourself- but it also makes you too hard on yourself, where you probably won't do much of anything. It's not like bullies have this level of introspection. Beat them at their own game, and just keep trying things physically until you get it right. Just try your best at whatever you want to do, regardless of what the haters say. Don't let them bring you down. =)

I would look at it from another perspective: "I'm a big squishy fleshbag full of potential that, if squeezed, all kinds of awesome might pour out of."

I mean, Self-improvement is just looking at one's potential and saying, "Let's realize some of this."