Remind Yourself of Yourself.

I am, on the whole, a person confident in her array of capacities. Not much ever happens to shake my certainty that I dwell in the proper place, surrounded by those I am meant to flourish amongst, and in whom I am meant to encourage a flourishing of their own.

But even an imperceptive individual would be hard-pressed to overlook the frequency with which a great many people find themselves in positions of doubt. My girlfriend Ariel doubts her intelligence. Our mutual girlfriend Elle doubts (more and more occasionally, these last few years) whether the expression of softness befits her -- whether vulnerability is within her capability to show and still remain safe.

Our boyfriend doubts and doubts and doubts. It's charming, in its own way, owing to the earnest depths of sincerity with which he dismays of ever being truly sufficient.

With my own confidence, and my absolute fervor for the nourishment of souls in whom I have invested my affections, I'm forever stepping up to salve these worries and neuroses that dog the heels of my beloveds. I'm good at it, and have learned the mystique of the right look, or touch, or word parceled out with optimal timing. Yet my ability to give succor to those suffering anxieties can never rise to a level genuinely curative -- I am a talented balm, not a persistent, perpetuating solution.

And so the help I most try to give is to be for them a mirror: to hold up before them a perception of themselves that is real and unalloyed with self-censure. Then, once with this glass I get them to see what I see within them, I deliver the most important morsel of aid that I can.

"Remember to see this in yourself," I tell them -- as I tell you now. "Take note of your perfections, not merely your flaws. And daily, before you find yourself at sea in a sargasso of uncertainty, take the time to recall these things that make you worth my while, and worth the world's while."

(I use rather a bit more casual language about the house when doing this, obviously. But indulging in flights of fluency here is one of the manners in which I practice this advice for myself.)

Mortification

I delight in words, as you obviously must know if you've read with any depth the spill of language that is this blog. And so I've acquired the sporadic habit of snatching from some convolution of my grey matter a fanciful example of my vocabulary, musing upon it from a number of angles, and then lofting it into place as a post title to inspire me to write.

It's worked decently enough, a number of times. I'm particularly happy with "Atavism," a few entries past.

But oh, tonight, how I have stained the clean page of my anticipation with embarrassment.

A word, I thought. A word, a word, a word. But which?

And there bubbled into my sensorium this: causistry.

And I typed it. And the stinging red lash of the automated spell-checker denied me. What? Can this be? But ...

A right-click confirmed it. The word is casuistry. I have held it in my brain with the amorphous hints of a definition attached for years upon years, but all this time, I have mentally mis-spelled it.

Why am I so humiliated by this failure, yet shameless to admit I didn't have more than a vaporous phantasm of its meaning? Honestly, I can't quite say.

And given the output of my Google search to grasp its full and formal denotative identity, I plainly cannot stoop to rationalizing these emotions.

Thus, my new title above.