Tenants of the Self

There are many tenants of my self, but today I want to tell about these three. Think of them as different parts of your character that interact with each other.

There’s the drill sergeant. He’s a skillful executor, he does what he’s told to and does it well and feels good about himself. He longs for his father’s approval and often projects that to the relationships with his clients. He does a good job at doing a good job. He thinks of himself as an “A” player, capable of sacrifice, a strong believer in “owning your work” and “delivering on your word”, a follower of a rigid self-discipline he expects the same military dedication from his peers and subordinates. People lied and broke there promises to him when he was a child and he’s made it an integral part of his character to never break his own promises, no matter what.

Sometimes when the drill sergeant is exceptionally satisfied or comfortable, he vacates the space for our next character to appear, albeit briefly, usually for no longer than a weekend. He’s the spiritual creative. He’s constantly searching for deep meaning, even in the most mundane things. He’s running in circles most of the time — because his thoughts are many, but there’s little action that follows them. He’s a juicy piece of meet for anyone who feeds on emotion, because this one generates a lot of it, so much so that by the end of that weekend, despite having made zero progress towards his dreams, he’s feeling exhausted, drained, in need of recovery.

The last one is friends with the drill-sergeant but has zero respect for the spiritual creative. Meet the arrogant judge. He’s a self-proclaimed judge more than anything. Inside he’s just as hurt as the other two. He’s never felt loved as a child. He likes criticizing others, he wants people around to look up to him and is full of envy and disgust towards others’ success. In fact, he is terrified of a thought that any one of the people close to him should become more successful and overcome him in his “greatness”. He’s constantly working on rationalizations as to why he is better, smarter, wiser than others. He simply cannot live with the fact that there should be others around him that surpass him in any of the areas of life in which he himself is regarded as an expert.

Now that you have an idea about all three of my characters, we can talk about how the three interact with each other, how the symbiosis operates inside me.

The creative is eager to begin working on an idea and get it out there for the rest of the world to see. The drill sergeant is on stand by, waiting for the timid fucker to wear out, so that he can take over and do “real” work, the kind of work that provides. The judge, having learned of the new idea, immediately begins to criticize and justify why he thinks it’s a bad idea. The timid fucker tends to agree with both and retreats, only to be replaced by the serge the next morning. The best critique that works every single time is “this is too low level / plebeian for you to be involved in, we’re worth a place much higher”. The spiritual creative is a vain motherfucker.

None of them are actually me.

The greatest gift a human being has is the capacity to observe that what he calls his own self.