a challenge

I love one.

I am trying to understand myself, why I do the things that I do and it is very difficult.

In fact, it seems like everything I lay my hands to is difficult.  It is tempting to think that this is because the universe or the world has something against me but really, I think, it is because I seek out difficult situations to challenge myself.  Things could be easy for me if I wanted them to be.

There are a lot of different jobs that I could do or ways I could occupy myself in lieu of a "job".  I have chosen to work with mentally ill, abused, delinquent teenage boys.  Once a week I have to stay at work for 27 hours.  I can say that the job is in line with what I have studied and that it is interesting (both true) but I don't think these are good answers for why I do it.  It's certainly not for the money. *laughs*  

I have a lot of ambiguous "guilt" that doesn't seem to have a discrete source and I want to punish myself as a result.  I'm trying to figure out where it all comes from in the hope that I can address these sources directly and attempt to remove it instead of jumping through all kinds of fiery hoops to punish myself or in the hope of proving to myself that I am a good/worthwhile person.  First, I think, I need to be able to believe that I am a good person apart from my actions.  I hold myself to the belief that a person is only as good or bad as their actions demonstrate.  But I don't hold anyone else to that.  I think people are good regardless of whether they have done bad things - even lots of bad things.  But if I do the littlest bad thing it serves as a proof to me that -I- am bad.

I am not bad.  I am a good person.  I wish only good things for other people and I always intend to do the right thing.  Sometimes I fail to do the right thing but a lot of the time I am successful.  I can type that but I can't believe it.

A goal of Buddhists is to achieve equanimity, a feeling that all living things are equally valuable and equally worthy of respect and love.  With regards to OTHER living things this is not too hard for me.  But I don't like, and sometimes, hate myself.  I can't even imagine what it would be like to feel about someone else the way I feel about myself.  I want very much to be loved and respected but I don't feel like I deserve it.  Nor do I feel that I deserve the gifts that I have been given in my life.  I wish I really knew why.  Probably a lot of other people wish they knew why, too.

I need to have faith because I need to find this answer.  I need to believe that there is a higher consciousness that loves me because if It does then I should too.  It is disturbing to me that the one person I can't love is the one I know the best.  Maybe that is not so.  Maybe I think I know myself really well but in fact I am oblivious to things about me that are completely obvious to other people.  This is getting too heavy for a blog.  While writing stuff down helps me work through it logically, I don't think I should write any more on this subject.  It's quite possible that I shouldn't have written any of this at all.  But this blog is about me.  And this is very important to understanding me.

I promise my next blog will be about something other than my psychology.