The dichotomy of publicity and privacy is the tension between pride and shame. These toxic elements, in their resentment of each other, denigrate the individual psyche. Be it through inflation or devaluation, the ego is unbalanced. This state becomes stasis which the self greedily maintains. Whether sourcing flattery and adulation in others to promote an exaggeration of one's identity or absorbing the negation of self intrinsic in shame, one invariably seeks the familiar image in the mirror, regardless of its distortions. I would suggest that it is the mirror itself that makes the villain. Self-consciousness, while an honest virus of modernity, is an inflammation of the mind that obscures the reality of being. Our talents and our flaws are accidents, and as such they do not own us any more than we own them. And to identify with either is to limit oneself, to cut one's stippled tongue and silence whole multitudes of who we are or can be.
"This journal is not a mere literary diversion. The further I progress, reducing to order what my past life suggests, and the more I persist in the rigor of composition--of the chapters, of the sentences, of the book itself--the more do I feel myself hardening in my will to utilize, for virtuous ends, my former hardships. I feel their power." --Jean Genet
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