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__)))___.::e is for egocentricity::.__ _ ___ *************************************************************************‘ I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead. I lift my eyes and all is born again.’
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Despite my apparent intellectual maturity, I am still waiting for the day when I will lose my egocentricity. I always found it difficult to understand that the world carried on, regardless of me. I had to constantly remind myself that the world did not revolve around me and my invented difficulties. My world did, but not the whole wide world. I always tried to empathise, to understand how other people felt, but I was never very good at it. It was strange to imagine that other people have feelings, and lives and memories. That thought would excite me, that everyone holds inside them so much detail, so much that I could learn about them. I wanted to open up everyone’s minds so that I could read them like a book, enter their intimate worlds. I could hardly imagine; here was me, 17 years old and yet a life so complicated and specific to me. Just think what I could find in the heads of other people. I think that this is what led me into wanting to be a psychologist; I wanted to see what they could see, to know what it was like to live from their perspectives. But perhaps most people do not have minds as private and personal as mine, for they think of other people and world issues whereas I was totally self-obsessed. My career aspirations also may have sprung from the way I was always an observer, I always sat silently and watched, and listened. I would listen to the casual conversations going on around me and in my head I would often join in. Come to think of it, I know that I would find it very disconcerting having someone in the corner watching and listening, staring, so I hope no-one was scared of me (Yeah right! I wish!!!). More likely that they forgot I was even there, less frightening for me that way. I would sit on my windowsill look at the stars at night and think about all the other people looking at the same stars, and what they were doing. I would imagine hungry artists looking out of a skylight, or an old widow dancing in the night air. But I’m sure that the truth would have been somewhat more mundane. Would have more likely been people like me, rocking their hunched body from their seat on the windowsill. I’m not sure why I liked my windowsill so much. I’d sit looking at the stars for hours and I liked looking out on the street, although people rarely walked down it. It would always fascinate me to wonder, while sitting lazily, about the rest of the world, all the other people totally unknown to me. It was hard to comprehend that, while I lay sunbathing, people all over the world were dying, or giving birth, or receiving life changing news. And there was me, with nothing meaningful happening and little chance of helping those people around the world who’s lives were not carefree like mine, with real problems rather than just teenage messing about. But yet i still can't believe that other people feel, that they are real and live and act and think and love and feel. |
