will you feel better, will you feel anything at all?

In the days before Facebook, when dinosaurs roamed the Earth, I made a livejournal account.  I can't remember exactly when and have long since deleted the thing, so I'm assuming sometime during freshman year of high school.  I don't remember what its name was, either (probably something along the lines of "Walter Explains it All" after my preteen idol, Melissa Joan Hart), but I definitely remember the picture I used for it, the cover to King Crimson's In the Court of the Crimson King.  I haven't changed much in that respect, and I think we're lucky that I never got into Mars Volta, because that could have just as easily been a Goldfinger'd Telly Savalas.

The livejournal, from what I can remember, was a very accurate reflection of me at the time: imbued with faux wordliness, given to occasional and grandiose mood swings, and self-assured to the point of arrogance.  Should I have found myself in a Greek tragedy, my exaggerated estimation of my self-worth could have been a real problem.  In high school it won me friends and a small following.  The notion that you're perpetually right is equal parts narcotic and panacea, and at the time I didn't realize the irony of pretending to be an intellectual in order to keep myself from thinking.

Not that I was appreciably happier at the time.  I was very attached to this poisonous idea that I was, to paraphrase Sam Beam, brave but all alone.  It wasn't enough for people to see how right I was; they had to appreciate the depths of my rightness, and I had a fatalistic understanding that they - whoever "they" happened to be - never could know those depths.  I was cursed with the dual burdens of excessive knowledge and the duty of enlightening my fellow man, no matter how hard it might be for them to accept it. 

I certainly wasn't right about many things.  In most cases, I was hilariously wrong.  This version of Walter, brimming with confidence, was the same Walter who defended to no end the Bush administration's policies at home and abroad, who dared not question the intellectual honesty of Fox News, who smugly took pleasure in seeing the great den of iniquity that was New Orleans drown in its own filth.  In retrospect, I can thank this experience for letting me understand the rampant dishonesty of the Keith Olbermanns and Bill O'Reillys of the world.  Because for all my pretensions to the contrary, for all my hatred of the white lies of social nicety, I was a liar, one of the very worst stripe:  a liar who's convinced that he's spreading the truth.

My ability to persuade people rested, for a very long time, in what amounted to bluffs in which I was very emotionally invested.  I could convince people largely because I had convinced myself, and I still on occasion lie casually without realizing I'm lying at all.  Fortunately, the seemingly impenetrable wall of self-satisfaction I had erected around myself was shattered by my making of a Beatrice out of one girl, my father's illness forcing me to grow up, my taking to heart Socrates' admonition to examine life, and my eventual love - the truth of which I believe in to this day - for a different girl.

What followed were a few years in the relative wilderness, as I lost a good portion of my following at school while reconciling myself with a latent distrust of the philosophical and political foundations of my old self.  I learned to appreciate a number of things I never had time for in the past, not the least of which was the beauty, complexity, and perfect honesty of sports, particularly football.  Throw in my budding appreciation of Faulkner, Eliot and other members of the canon, and I began to match my pretensions to intellectualism with a little substance.

More importantly, I grew as a writer.  I exchanged vitriol for thoughtfulness, emotion for discipline.  A more open attitude towards the world around me led to a thought process that was both more orderly and more creative than before.  And, as I learned when I recently looked over some old writing, it led to a writing process that was far more accomplished stylistically.

The end result is that I've sacrificed unwavering confidence in my writing for thoughtfulness and intellectual honesty.  I've been accused of lacking some backbone in some of my writing, but as someone who is no stranger to overweening confidence, I can say that I'm not the least bit tempted to go back to my old style of writing and thought.  And frankly, when you find someone who is completely and utterly self-assured in his writing, you ought to go into each essay with the assumption that at least half of what you're reading is bullshit of the rankest sort.  The chance that you're being taken for a ride is simply too great not to.