…Well, Temperance. And, also, not me. Winged water-bearer, creature of earth and sky and sea, dynamic balance of head and heart, moderation of the spirit. Freaking bane of my existence.
I’ve gotten better at finding the middle ground, I really have. But “getting better” in this context really just means that I acknowledge, more often than not, that there could be a middle ground, and that I consider it a viable option about 30% of the time. Believe me, this is progress.
Extremes are just so much more apparent, more… I don’t know. Real. Passionate and intense and discernable, and so often they have these clear delineations of moral right and wrong, making angsty issues like responsibility and regret so much easier to deal with. I simply must do one thing, or not do another, to be good and right. The rest, all the doubts or losses or hurt feelings, are simply the price of moral behavior. A noble sacrifice, even. I’ve boiled my life down to these sorts of decisions for as long as I can remember, and I’m only starting to realize that it’s no more than another way to dodge responsibility and assuage my guilt, the sort of cheap morality and willful ignorance that I hate so much when I see it in others.
One of the oddest quirks to humanity, in my opinion, is our need to feel justified and morally right. Some people need external validation of this, a divine measuring stick or a group of people to assure them that they are, indeed, good; others are simply self-assured of their own morality. You can dress it up as religion or politics or personal creed, but at its root it’s all the same thing. People want, desperately need, to feel that they are good and right. In fact, the absence of this drive is thought to be a sign of mental illness. So then why does it bug me so much? I know this drive is much more conscious for me than is the norm, a constant consideration in daily life. It haunts me, this feeling that I’m bad, bad, bad, that if I believe anything else, even for just a moment, that I’m lying to myself. And it’s so easy to lie to yourself in matters of morality and self-image. I know everyone does it, that it’s the inevitable result of that inborn desire to be good, but I want to be different. (Maybe that, more than morality, is the issue here.)
I can’t be perfect. I will mess up. I’ve accepted these things, and despite hating them with every fiber of my being, I know that they are, and will be, reality. However, I’m not willing to accept that I will constantly lie to myself about my own worth, about matters of moral justification and ethical behavior. I see so many people who are, in my estimation, terrible, selfish, and cruel, who believe themselves to be good. And so, there’s this constant paranoia that I’m bad and I just don’t see it, that if I let up for one second on my relentless need to analyze my own motives I’ll end up evil and cruel without ever knowing it.
The result? Chronic low self-esteem and a neurotic need for reassurance. I suspect that the solution to this (like so many other issues in my life) can be found in the elusive, murky realm of temperance.
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