Please don't confuse honesty with malice

I have about 15-20 files open in Photoshop but I need to address this for my own sake.

Please don't confuse honesty with malice... you can just as easily convey what you want to say without hurting the person's feelings.

Especially when that person is yourself.

Which is to say I owe myself a big apology for being so goddamn harsh in my criticisms of myself over all these years. Years of beating myself under the pretense of honesty.

I thought I was warding off self-delusion. Instead I was just harboring self-loathing which has festered and grown into doubt, fear, greed, and a myriad of other demons.

And for years the people around me told me "Charles, you're too hard on yourself"

"Bullshit", I thought. "I'm not hard enough on myself, otherwise I wouldn't have failed at [fill in the blank]"

And like the coach who pushes his son harder than any of the other kids on the team, I figured I could take it. Because I had to hold myself to a higher standard. And that higher standard meant no bullshit and no excuses and no pulled punches and no sugar-coating the goddamn truth.

I'm the guy who thinks T-ball is the cause for the everyone-deserves-a-medal delusional mentality of our society. So I sure as hell wasn't about to go soft in my self-critism.

Hell, I believe no one deserves a medal and especially not myself.

And I did this in the name of self-defense of all delusional reasons! That if I beat myself up, that if I were my own biggest critic, I could protect myself from the pain that I would endure in the hands of others.

Boy was I wrong.

This self-inflicted mental torture makes waterboarding look like a bar mitzvah.

So stop.

And I'm talking to you too.

There's something about you guys out there that still somehow find your way onto this blog. You share in many of the same pains I've experienced. Sometimes greater. Perhaps you find solace in my stories because you've walked similar paths. And I believe that a good number of you feel the same way I do and can treat yourselves poorly.

So stop.

There's no reason we can't be gentle in the deliverance of the same message. You can be honest without being malicious.

That's all.