I don’t know what I’m doing.
That’s the most reinforced narrative in my mind, the story I repeat to myself to the point of belief. So when they turned to me with their joy, I felt—complexity. My immediate response was to judge, why do you need my validation? (Me, this human, who has no idea what they are doing) then it was to become jealous, the envy grew over me like spins, sharp and prickled. I read, and I read—and I stared. Confronted with my own displacement within myself, feeling as though, the same person we admire, who was so kind to them on their emotional unveiling and upheaval, would never compliment my work in that same way, as I do not accurately represent myself, because I do not know what I’m doing, let alone who I am—as I stewed around in my own disapproval, feeling the tension of it locking every tendon in my body, I ruminated how it was my own fault, and that I had no one else to blame. And then a new, hard fought but quiet voice came to shed the scales and spins, to stroke them down and say—you are not accurately portraying yourself, and you are trying your best to know yourself. The first wave of feeling the beautiful contradiction allowed me to breathe. The next wave came, you can be happy for your friend and uncomfortable with the fact that you do not know yourself as well as you’d like to. This second one allowed the return to myself, with a seemingly clearer picture, even if I still don’t know what I am looking at or what I’m doing.
My friend is at times a light to me, and perhaps some lights don’t just shine and lead the way; they burn—burn away the fragments of me that have hardened up around calloused ideas of self—to allow that sometimes painful expansion into a furtherance of self that can only come through a hard and painful carving away, theirs is by light, an intense fire that sheds my ego to cinders in seconds—while I do not endure physical pain well nor do I seek to inflict it upon myself as self harm to feel an emotional wound physically heal or a painful tattoo to remember a passing event or person by for the duration of my existence going forward, the emotional pain of reinvention and rediscovery are my preferred methods of masochism.
Which is perhaps why I surround myself with people who are in every way better than myself—and probably could stand to learn a thing or two from me in return. But that might just be the narcissist talking who definitely has no idea what they are doing.