Hmm, you can tell a lot about someone from their blog. For instance -- I obsess over what other people think of me, and try to control my image.

This is very true.

At some point in my life, I started giving a shit about what other people thought of me. I started desiring acceptance.I started spending money on clothes. I started obsessing over the way I look. I started crazing over the presentability of my environment, and making certain that it conformed to other people's standards of acceptability. I started trying to impress people. I became desirable, wanted, and "cool".

I've worked hard on a "status" that seems to have become my prison, and in a jihad of conforming and shaping all of my self into reflections of other people's desire, I've lost my core.

I think this makes me irritable sometimes.

And while I look at what I've gained, and seem pleased -- I can't help thinking about the parts of me that I have sacrificed in the process. I think back to the things which occupied my time in the past, and the things which occupy my time today, and I realize that I've become out of touch with who I used to be, and subscribed to the parts of society that I preach so loudly against in some half-desperate attempt to become one of the elite.

Did the desperation stem from a few broken relationships that proved to me how little I actually care about other people? Was I desperately trying to get close to people that I might feel them and understand what they feel, or was I only trying to further hone so-called chameleon-like abilities that I might fool the world, and myself, into thinking, "There goes a guy who gives a damn..."

Was I desperate? Realizing that I've watched friends fall around me, clinging to me in times of need, shouting at me and trying to elicit a feeling... Realizing that when they walked away, I had fooled them into thinking that what I said I felt I truly did feel, and that it was right (words words words) ---- knowing that at the back of their minds they knew, at the core, what I did I did for myself as much as for them. Always 50/50. Never more. Preferably less. Shit. There I go, obsessing again. I did help carry them, but it depended on the depth of their needs, and how much I felt I could truely help them.

Maybe that is how I moved into this phase, altho I don't think it can all be chopped up so easily. Well, not by me. Do I miss the man I used to be? Have things ever been any different?

Perhaps I simply obsess over my loneliness, rather than celebrate my individuality. I bring down people's walls by trying to be what they want in their lives. I could get lucky, but one can only play a game for so long before exhaustion leads to a mistake -- and I haven't felt very lucky lately.