My faults

This isn't a complete list. These are just the ones that reoccur most frequently, and with a vengeance.

I can't trust anyone.

If it came down to the choice between truly putting my trust in a person, and being left alone, I'd choose being alone every time. And it's not that I believe everyone is evil and out to get me with malicious intent. It's just my belief that anybody who truly knows me, who has had a glimpse into the core of who I am as a person, would simply choose not to be around me. I use pre-emptive rejection as a weapon against the possibility that I will be rejected. I would rather lose the connection with another person on my own terms than lose it because someone of their own free will decided it wasn't worth the effort. I list this first because it is at the root of almost everything else that's wrong with me. It's why I'm dishonest, it's why I can't make or keep friends, it's the reason I suspect everybody else's motives, it's what makes me afraid of losing the love of everyone who loves me, and on and on and on.

I have a bad temper.

When I was a child, my two older brothers used to try to get me mad. Then they would laugh at my anger and call me "temper boy, temper boy". That boy never fully went away. I just got better at suppressing him. I used to have these weird explosions of anger, usually resulting in self-directed (or property-directed) violence. I used to punch myself in the head as hard as I could, several times at a go. I've banged my head against more things than I can recall. My parents had a stairway at their old house that I used to throw myself down. One time I ran down my street and tackled a garbage can, linebacker-style. Another time my car ran out of gas and I punched the steering wheel so hard the horn got stuck and went "ERRRRRRRRRRRRRRHHHHHHHNNNNN" for several minutes until a nice guy (and total stranger) living on the block came out and cut it off for me, before driving me to the gas station and filling my tank up for me. I've gotten better over the years at not taking my anger out on things, but sometimes the boy comes back and whenever it does, it's still as powerful as ever. I feel totally out of control, even if I manage not to destroy or injure anything. I'm starting to realize it'll never go away, it's just this beast I carry inside me forever. Maybe this explains why the Hulk was my favorite superhero when I was a little kid.

I focus on the negative side of everything.

Which is obvious to everybody who knows me (see fault #1). On the one hand, this can be a useful analytical skill. But when applied to one's own life, it's nothing but a bludgeon.

This isn't all, but I don't really care about the others. These seem to be the most significant, the ones I can see causing serious problems down the line. I have to figure out a way to keep these tendencies in check, or they will mess with my life. Anyway I'm working on it. I know awareness isn't the same thing as improvement, but it's a start, right?

Goodbye ain't

From this day forward, effectively immediately (or whenever I start feeling like it), I am hereby removing the word "ain't" from my vocabulary. It's going to be difficult to let go of, since I love saying it so much, but my wife asked me nicely to stop saying it and so I had to acquiesce, mainly because I couldn't come up with a compelling reason why I should keep saying it. I don't know whether she's opposed to the word on principle or if she just doesn't like it when I say it. She said to me "You're not Huckleberry Finn", and I just can't argue with that point.

So goodbye, ain't. You were fun and ungrammatical. It's going to be hard singing along to every pop song that I love and having to correct the lyrics, but it is a necessary commitment.