Tell me about yourself.
Well, my good friend, I have never really known how to answer that query—though I have used it on many occasions myself in trying to get a damsel to be softer towards me. Never really worked though. Now that I am on the receiving end of that statement, I feel like I’m in front of a panel of interviewers, and I don’t know where to start.
It is always my intention, when I coin that phrase to a damsel, to leave it as open as possible so that the other person is free to talk about any aspect of themselves that they like—because there are some parts of ourselves that we would prefer remain buried and unknown. I’ll take it that way in this case as well: just blabber on and on about everything about myself that you might like to hear.
Let’s start then, shall we?
I am a man. A young man, though I’m not sure how long I can use that label. Minutes to me feel like days, staggering by slowly, and years go by like hours. Yes, that is a line from Skyscraper Stan’s song I Fell Over.
You see, my friend, I’ve reached an age where I’ve started losing people: friends, family. Everyone convinces themselves that death is normal, but when it knocks, we all stampede towards the other entrance—only to find it there—and we are forced to retreat to our knees and beg for mercy.
I have strayed off topic, haven’t I?
My good friend, I am a man approaching his mid-morning days, and my life has been far from interesting. Yes, I’ve tried to be on the offensive—but in retrospect, I was being defensive. Defensive in the sense that I was trying to compete with time.
How many people have competed with time and lost?
Time goes by slowly, climbing that mountain from 7 o’clock to 6 o’clock, and then it’s free fall from the other 7 o’clock to 6 o’clock—and it beats each and every opponent.
You don’t understand that? Well, it’s because I always imagine a clock on the wall every time I look at the time. If you haven’t got it yet, I don’t think you ever will. It’s just an analogy flaw on my part—sorry.
I think time wins because it is not trying to compete with anyone. It has no final destination it is sprinting toward. But we do.
So, my good friend, I was telling you I haven’t led an interesting life.
I haven’t been to any war at all. I haven’t worked beside a captain of the sea. I haven’t worked at a dock. I haven’t made friends from tragedy. I don’t have any trauma for killing the enemy. I have never killed for a cause.
I haven’t even worked at a desk from nine to five yet, slaving away for the ‘system.’ I have no desire to do that—although it would never hurt to share such experiences with strangers like you, if I had them.
I believe that any experience, whether good or bad, has some value in it—if we are willing to change our perspectives, scan it, and milk it of the value it has. Working for the system is one of those experiences.
What value, you ask?
Well, for starters, you will know for a fact that you wasted your life. That everything you had been told ever since you were little was a lie. It’s not every day that we get to confirm that the adults in our lives were liars and clueless—well, until you become the adult and you are hit with reality.
You want me to talk about something else? I think you’ve been triggered by the ‘slaving away for the system’ bullshit, huh?
Well, in that case, I think you’ve led a way more interesting life than myself.
So, I was reading an essay the other day and it condemned the way parents punish their children. Most parents punish with such tenacity, I don’t think even leopards attack antelopes with such anger and bitterness. You see, there is punishment and there is vengeance. Most parents confuse the two.
I remember how my mother used to punish us—firmly, yet we could see that she didn’t want to. It was like we forced her hand. She loved us too much and wanted to stop, and she knew that stopping wasn’t an option.
“I’m beating the sin out of you, not you!” she would say.
Children can hate their parents—but not parents. Who comes first between parents and children?
A child doesn’t choose her parents, but parents choose their children. You don’t think so? Yes, they do. They choose who to fall in love with. They choose when to have a baby, how to have that baby, and they have total control of whether to terminate the pregnancy before the baby is born. Even after that, they can still put up the child for adoption.
It may seem simple, but all those are choices—hard ones—and they navigated all of them.
Imagine going through all that just to end up beating your own child to death.
I guess I talked about that because I’ve seen the extent to which anger can control us and manipulate us. Of the most embarrassing moments of my life, the ones that were controlled by anger are at the top of the list.
It is an unimaginable force—its energy can defy gravity. It blurs your vision, causing anthills to appear like mountains.
If the devil really exists, I think anger is his deadliest weapon.
But with all poison, there is an antidote: retreat to your own company and wait for a full day before making any action.
I’ve tried that myself and it works like a charm.
The measure of wisdom is silence,
but the measure of a great man is his restraint—whether in words or action.
Only then can we sit down and accord the appropriate punishment for the sin.
Beware of getting too angry—so much that there's no visible difference between the punishment accorded to a thief and to a murderer.
You have anger issues? Well, hopefully you can use my tip.
The other day, a friend of mine went to one of those meetings that addicts go to—you know, where they sit in a circle and share aspects of their recovery journey. She told me how they introduced themselves, as you’ve seen in films: “Hey, I am so and so, and I am an addict.”
I’ve always found that absurd. But experts claim that the first stage of recovery is acceptance, and I hate that logic.
The same experts want me to look in the mirror every morning and convince myself with affirmations: “I am smart. I am the greatest. I am beautiful.” Why the double standards?
Yes, it is good to be honest with yourself—which is also why those words of affirmation never really work.
If I have to look in the mirror and say a bunch of words in order to believe that I’m smart, then I’m not really smart, am I?
If I ever find myself in such a meeting where they shove a label down my throat, I will leave.
The same goes for all other labels—Christian, fundamentalist, feminist, sadist, and so on.
You know, the moment you’ve allowed yourself to belong to a certain label, then after a while, you won’t be able to think beyond the confines of that label. Maybe it’s because you spend too much time with people who subscribe to that label, and they affect your thinking.
Note that this only applies to social labels—labels we give ourselves as a way of catapulting ourselves up the social ladder, or isolating ourselves from it.
The other labels, like sexuality and the like, those are different. We are born either male or female. We are born straight.
That’s as far as I am concerned.
I have no issue with the sexuality agenda. It doesn’t really bother me. To each his own.
I’ve experimented with some drugs myself—mostly alcohol.
I’ve always been fascinated by how delicate our minds are. I like to think that sanity is a spectrum: on one end, extremely sane; on the other, extremely insane.
Well, I don’t know if one can be extremely sane or extremely insane, because that would lead to more questions.
What I do know is that whenever we use drugs, our sanity shifts toward insanity—albeit slightly. The more we use them, the further along the spectrum we move.
For those already extremely insane, though, consuming drugs shifts their insanity toward sanity.
That explains why it’s possible to have a normal conversation with a mad person—though the window is usually very small before they come back to their senses.
What I’ve never really understood is why most lethal drug addicts prefer the drugs that make them dormant. You’ll find someone completely zoned out, but the ecstasy they are feeling is beyond human understanding.
I guess when the mind is silenced, we are capable of great joy—even if it is both temporary and deceiving.
The best way to avoid such low levels of human ugliness, the corrosion of our souls, is to never start in the first place.
Each drug is addictive for a reason.
Once you’ve started—and through hanging out with other users—all the bias and hatred you had toward the drug dissipates.
And before long, you’ll have subscribed to that level: a smoker, a crackhead—and what’s funny, you’ll feel good about it.
And then you will unleash a great storm over paradise.
Talking to you about addiction has led me to the issue of desire. The guilty pleasures.
If there is something that leaves humans completely without control, it is our desire.
I remember when I was little, my Sunday school teacher used to tell us that in heaven, there is a big screen that has a file on each one of us, and all our vices will be broadcasted for all to see. It scared the hell out of me—even though at the time, what I didn’t want people to see were the occasional scoop of sugar here and there and other minor issues.
Now that I’m grown, though, I understand the appeal.
As humans, we are afraid of being judged—that is why we do most things in darkness. The moment you have opened that red door, that door labeled as guilty pleasures, the door that people will hate you and be disgusted by you if they found you entering (even though they have their own red doors), then you are doomed.
The easiest way of making sure that people don’t suspect you of being an opener of a certain red door is to publicly condemn those who open that door.
If you are a closeted homosexual, publicly condemn homosexuals.
If you indulge in pedophilia, publicly condemn pedophiles.
That is why you should never trust extremists—why would someone hate something that much? Is it passion?
Remember this: the intense hatred or the intense love of something are both passions—and when the two exist together? That’s an explosive combination. Beware of that.
The reason we have low self-esteems is because we know what we’ve done.
We can hide it from everyone, but we can’t hide it from our subconscious—it saw us do it.
And it also understands that the reason we suppress those thoughts is because we know that the action was wrong.
Our subconscious, being responsible for the nourishment of our self-esteem, will eat at us slowly by slowly.
And when the guilt and self-loathing are at the brim, we will explode into nothingness—through suicide, or any other available means.
You want me to tell you about my family?
Well, I suppose I owe you that one, my friend. I haven’t really told you about myself and yet your query was, “Tell me about yourself.” Allow me to divert and talk about families in general—I am good at that.
Leo Tolstoy in his famous book Anna Karenina said, “All happy families are alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
But are there really happy families in the first place?
It’s the same way we can’t straight-up dissect a person as a happy person or an unhappy person. Even the lowest of the low have their happy moments. Families are just like that.
Most families do a good job of portraying themselves as happy, but behind the scenes, the ugliness and the weirdness they are going through are quite blinding.
The reason why a person can’t be considered to be fully happy is because we all have our demons, and they haunt our waking days and plant uncertainty and chaos when we are asleep.
Imagine a family of ten people who interact on a regular basis—all those demons striving to be louder than the next one. Complete chaos.
I don’t know if a family can be truly happy, but I guess I am still young. Perhaps there is still time to understand better.
While in the same institution, let me talk about marriage, because you are probably going to ask me about it next.
Do I believe in the institution of marriage?
Not really.
I am not married yet, and I don’t know if I ever will.
From the societal machinery that I hail from, marriage is a must, but for me, rules are not things that I respect that much.
I don’t want the exclusivity of marriage—having to spend one’s life with someone, or for the polygamous instance, with several people. If I bump into someone who is worth my time, sure—but the chances of that happening are very bare.
Yes, if I choose to spend my life by myself, people will raise eyebrows, what with homosexuality on the rise.
People’s opinions are not things I hold in high regard anyway. If you care about praises, then you have to care about the criticisms—I don’t care about either.
And no, I don’t want to spend my life without commitment so that I can be promiscuous or anything. I want to be free.
Have the time to travel the world, think, and focus on the things that interest me, while occasionally, swim and drown in the embrace of a great woman.
For me, marriage is not that important. Feel free to disagree with me on that.
Oh—about love?
I’m sorry, are you asking me if I have ever been in love?
Well, I don’t know what the definition of love is, but for the sake of this argument, let’s go with the mainstream definition.
Yes, I have loved.
And lost too.
I prefer the fleeting kind of love—the ones where we are inseparable for a few weeks or months, drinking from each other’s springs, where we forget the existence of the world outside of ourselves.
And then, just like it started—it should end.
You see how after the honeymoon phase, love reaches a plateau, and you have to stick around and build the foundations again, pacing for time, gaining the energy to climb that hill again?
I don’t want that.
I prefer to end things before the plateau phase begins—right at the end of the honeymoon phase.
I love that.
People experience love in different ways, and just like everything else, we make judgments based on what we have experienced.
Have you ever lit a match?
The instant you light it, the flame can burn you, it can put forests or even massive buildings on fire.
But after a few seconds, its intensity dies down, and it doesn’t scare even a toddler.
That’s the love I want.
Feel free to disagree with me as well.
What else do you want me to talk about, stranger?
Perhaps you should order another drink before I conclude my boring monologue, then I can shut up as you answer the same question that you have asked me.
Let me talk about knowledge, because I have come to love it.
I read a lot of books.
I don’t know if you could tell by the way I answered your question, but I do.
I don’t read books in order to be smarter or even to be more eloquent—I just read books because I enjoy them.
My aim is to be entertained and, if possible, to become wiser than I was before I started.
Sure, some books are purely for entertainment—I would probably get a laugh out of them.
And some will attempt to give you some life secrets.
Whenever I find such books, I skim through them fast.
Why?
Well, because there is no manual to life.
I’m sure you have been to school.
Imagine studying for a test that is tailored for each student, and no questions are repeated, ever.
Will you listen to me if I told you I can give you a study guide?
Probably not, because even if I went through the same process that you are going through now, you wouldn’t get much from me.
That is how life is.
Life is customized for you and you only—what is the need for me to listen to you, then?
I can get behind a book that attempts to take me through life in retrospect, explaining how a person would have handled a situation better than he did—that way preventing me from making the same mistakes.
That is why I love history books.
You get to see through people’s actions with their ending in mind, and you have all the facts and contexts.
But that is history.
And we all have different contexts, different situations, different challenges, and different starting points.
I am ranting again, aren’t I?
I also love reading books in which the author is trying to challenge other people’s actions.
He should have done this.
He shouldn’t have reacted that way.
With those books, I get to understand how the author judges others, and with that, I understand how he is as a person—the values he holds dear, whether he is a decent human being or a shitty one.
Wasn’t it Montaigne who said that we judge people based on the estimates of ourselves?
Allow me to pause so that you can answer, good sir.
When I start talking, I just can’t stop—probably a sign of lack of wisdom.
After saying all that, I hope we both come to an understanding that the query, “Tell me about yourself,” is not a sufficient way of trying to know more about a person. You can't summarize a person, and even if you can, I don't think they themselves can in a way that does their depth any justice
Please speak now, sir. Tell me about yourself.
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