I real­ized a lit­tle while ago that I respect self-under­stand­ing much more than self-con­fi­dence. It’s such a pity, because many peo­ple I know have much more of the lat­ter than the for­mer. I use the words self-under­stand­ing in an almost con­tra­dic­to­ry man­ner, though one can be both. I see it as an under­stand­ing of one’s faults and one’s lim­its. I use these words in this man­ner because I find that one whom is blind to one’s faults is some­one who has lit­tle or no self-under­stand­ing.

When some­one has lit­tle self-under­stand­ing, it almost angers me. The igno­rance involved is a very dif­fi­cult thing for me to com­pre­hend. If some­one refus­es to admit to his or her faults, or per­haps is aware of them but refus­es to change them, then I see them as being very child­ish. And child­ish­ness, of course, is some­thing that both­ers me great­ly.

I usu­al­ly find that an open-mind­ed per­son is very aware of his or her faults. Perhaps I sim­ply asso­ciate a lack of open-mind­ed­ness with self-igno­rance, though I haven’t seen much evi­dence to the con­trary.

My expe­ri­ence with this idi­ot­ic char­ac­ter­is­tic has made me bit­ter. I seem to have lost much faith in the human race, some­thing that I real­ized even longer before this. It has left me alone, with few peo­ple I can tru­ly feel com­fort­able with, or respect.

Maybe it’s bet­ter this way.