I have discovered that I cannot ask my friends who I am, because they don't know all of me. I didn't say they don't know me at all. They seem to know all the really annoying things that I don't like to talk about, and there seems to be a real shortage of fantasy in their lives, which prevents them from envisioning how I am when I'm perfect. The scariest thought is that my friends do know me very well, probably better than myself, but they are too nice to tell me the whole truth. The picture of me that I get from them looks like a Picasso in the cubist phase.

I don't expect them to know me; after all, my own life is based on a set of loose assumptions, such as "I think, therefore, I am", that have no basis in fact. This leads me to believe that I don't know them either and therefore, have to wonder who I've been hanging around. This is all nothing more than an illustration of the fact that observing the truth is one of the things we are always trying to get to in the visual arts, and so rarely succeed.

Therapy, as another option, is a bummer. Trying to describe the third person in the room, the "whole" you, to a stranger leaves me feeling like a split personality that would give Eve, and her small village, a run for their money. I've accepted that simply being aware of all of my shortcomings would put me in the top 1% of well-adjusted individuals, without any change required.