And then my conscience goes like this, "So slandering people on the web isn't bad huh." But it isn't slander. I just say what I feel and what I perceive at the time. This journal helps to keep my perspective in line. I re-read some of my entries and I realise that I was wrong at that time. And while I don't come out and retract the earlier comments in a later entry all the time, I do learn something and try to improve myself in life.

Which brings me to the next step in such a line of questioning. Is it desirable to be so introvert and nitpick your flaws in your personality repeatedly, or is it better to go through life with a superficial understanding of your own psychology that allows you to move on in life rather than dwell on the intricacies behind those flaws? Because if you are secure in pursuing your goals, it implies that you have already form a concrete opinion of your personality and your self. It implies the unswerving confidence of the self. You already know what your flaws are and see no reason to change to accomodate other people.

After all, to know thyself, is to know one's goals, and how to achieve them. If we paralyse ourselves with our dittering over the right and wrong or the possibility that you are not being true to oneself, then are you not abiding by this rule of "knowing yourself"? By constantly focusing on the search for the "true self", we might have missed the forest for the single tree.

What is hoped for, is a person who knows himself well, and is firmly grounded in his own self, so much so that he need not analyse any of his previous actions because he already knows what his motivations are. There is no time for hindsight or the regret that is a common companion to such thoughts. What is done, is done. One can just square his shoulders and move on. There is nothing one can do to change the past.

Perhaps, a person with that much confidence and little self doubt is merely a fanciful wish of mine, an ideal to aim for. After all, looking around me, there are thousands of blogs and diaries out there with similar people, who constantly need to reassure themselves of their own existence, by inscribing on the bare pages of their journal or pixels, their emotions and thoughts and ineluctably their doubts and pain. It allows them an outlet for these setbacks and allows some of them to succeed in gaining that inner strength to project that aura of confidence I so desire to achieve.

However, we all know that most journal keepers tend to be the sort that lingers on the margins of introvertness and therefore more likely to be pessimistic folk. So feeding upon themselves, like sharks, they tear themselves apart in an effort to understand themselves, not knowing that they are only perpertuating their own pain. Research has shown that people who write things down tend to dwell on them, simply because they have concrete evidence of their pain. And so it is a never-ending cycle. Yet, if we do not keep these journals, we will never let the pain out.

A paradox.

What diary-keeping is a form of self love, narcissism. We love ourselves enough, (perhaps too much) to pour all our hurt and various emotions onto a piece of paper we can hold and touch and reassure ourselves is real and concrete, unlike all those pesky "right and wrongs", "flaws and virtues", "anger or happiness" that always seem so nebulous simply because we can't categorise them. So an online blog is the same, as it reassures the writer that someone out there is reading about him and that attention is concrete, is solid, is wholly tangible.

Maybe it is just me.