Going over it again... Internet Regrets

started 28th Dec. 2015, finished 29th Dec. 2015

So... I found something interesting.
A few days ago, I started writing a post about "Regrets and the Internet". My self-esteem and sense of self-worth has been in a much worse and deeper pit than usual, so I'd been ripping myself apart inside almost every day about it. (Usually at night while lying in bed with nothing better to think about - yay chronic insomnia.) 'Breaking my own rules of conduct' on the internet and in social interactions in general. I know I can't always live up to those rules, but I try my best.

My particular instrument of self-torture (over the last year or two) were some posts I made at Crunchyroll. I was going to actually go back and analyse them, take them apart and show (myself) what I did wrong, and see if this could lead to my changing anything. So I got up the courage or mustered my stupidity to look up my own posts on the site. All of them. But when I read them again, I found I didn't really regret them at all. I'd been prepared for the worst, and instead I saw, almost entirely, only things that I liked. If anything, I felt, confusingly, significantly bolstered about my own self-worth. (When I'd meant to dive into the worst of what I feel about my own actions and look at them head on.) Even if it means I'm a horribly selfish, arrogant bastard, I'm apparently a selfish, arrogant bastard that I like. Even if in some cases I broke some rules of 'internet etiquette'... I still liked what I saw.

Some of my stupider posts had apparently been in topics that got deleted... from age. Saving me the trouble. So while I don't know just how bad what I wrote there was... seeing all the rest of them filled me with such a sense of "not-worthlessness" that it probably would've helped me through it even if they'd still been there.

In the end, "we're all idiots". That old thing of "imagine the audience, naked (or seated on toilets)"... it really works. So often we (everyone I've ever seen or met) get so caught up in all of these illusions, and the masks people wear, that we forget that these other people are people and we're holding ourselves, our real selves, up to an imaginary mask, a product, that these other people are holding up. An illusion that society demands and that society ('everyone', like a single animal) holds up all together.

So I ended up coming right back around in a circle again:
"It's better to try to live, as myself, than not."
Better to just go ahead and be myself, as bad as that might be for some people (and it will always be bad for some people) ...and live with the risks and consequences of that, than to waste any more of my life. Waste it for who? I don't want to feed those people's egos or their cocoon of illusions... by being... what? What would I even be being for them? More than half the time these sorts of people don't even have their minds made up inside about what they really want from others. They don't even know.
 
I'm not so bad a person, and I've even done some little things I can be proud of.

It's better to live and make my own mistakes, as myself. At least they're my own mistakes.

We're all mortal, all human, but we're apparently damned to live in a world where we're all told that, to succeed, we need to be the best liar... ha ha.
I refuse.
...and I keep finding that, even despite myself, I stay steadfast on that point.

Has this ever happened to you?

Have you ever been eating a salad and have some little stem or long leaf flip up when you bite it, and go right into your nostril?

What are you supposed to do with it then, eat it?
...Or just pretend nothing ever happened. Mmm... Salty.