u/0tectus

I recently managed to drop nearly all negative influences in my life (especially the physical, mainly drugs of all varieties) and returned to church. I decided to read the Bible again for the first time since childhood and had a massive awakening.

So needless to say as I've spent the past week meeting myself again for the first time in a long time, I've come to realize many things I wouldn't have understood fully before or perhaps even rejected outright altogether.

The one thing on my mind today is how much labels prevented me from digging deep enough to achieve true understanding of anything I was actually speaking on. I think labels may even be detrimental to our sense of self at times.

As an example, in the beginning you might decide "I'm X because Y" but overtime, it becomes "Y is true because I'm X". We don't recognize that this is what's occurring in our mind because it happens gradually. What began as finding ourselves devolves into convincing ourselves we already have.

But that's simply not how life works. Though I'd be happy to hear anyone else's thoughts on this.

I was a seriously unhinged jerk up until I'd sufficiently matured around the age of 17 and had a bit of an awakening. What's strange though is the way I had genuinely countless friends when all I ever thought of was myself.

Now, over a decade later, all I seem to think about is others. I'm consistently the kindest I've ever been and I'm happy with that, but I've never been more alone and I've never felt the loneliness more.

I've noticed every time I post a comment, there's this extremely odd period ranging from when I've submitted it and can look at it and it reaching the stage where anyone else even knows it's there.

It appears to affect practically every comment I've surveyed the metrics of. What's weirder is that it does accumulate 2-8 views in that span of time before it finally resets to 0 and behaves normally from there with engagement now occurring.

Does anyone have any potential insight on this?