It's Still Validation - unfinished

I don't know who I am without insecurity. Not a new phenomenon. Everyone knows old habits die hard. Lately when I write, I imagine every pair of eyes that might read it. I assume their opinion. It's automatic. I hardly even notice. But it's noticeable in how difficult it becomes to write. How each word feels too easy or forced. Avoiding cliché to push creativity, feeling unable to be creative. Again, not a new phenomenon. Every thought meets the same judgment. Every word, every movement, every moment of silence. It's still... all... for validation. Your admiration makes me feel complete. I assume you admire about me what I might admire of myself. Until I realize that I don't know what you think. I can't trust your admiration. I have to admire myself. But what is there to admire? If every attempt at self-expression is ultimately intended to impress, then how can I reflect on myself and feel innate pride? If I chase accomplishment and achievement, if I chase friendship and romantics, philosophy and poetry. How can I separate pure intention from vanity? I think I know how, again. The trick is to be the admirer. The trap is that in being someone who admires others, there's a desire for reciprocity. When that desire grows, admiring becomes another way to impress, and vanity takes control. Or, alternatively, it's overbearing. It creates a divide between you and the person of admiration. What may be easy for many people, to learn to repress, hide, redirect admiration, becomes complicated for me. It's always been this way. My behavior, intentions, and emotions fall out of sync, and my awareness of one, two, or all three starts to blend and confuse. I'm not sure if that's a learned or innate quality. 

Focus, for me, is a sensitive ability. When I focus on somebody, I must maintain it completely if I intend to understand them. For some reason, the level of focus it takes is emotionally exhausting. I think it's because I'm using empathy as a tool for intellectual understanding. Trying to see what they're seeing from their perspective. I'm not sure if that was necessarily learned to compensate for intellectual deficits, or if it was simply a learned trait, perhaps a form of anxiety. I have my suspicion, but I admit that I don't truly know. However, it would make sense that that quality would then follow me around, and, in merging the intellectual and emotional, I find myself putting judgmental guardrails around potential trains of thought, conclusions, and actions. This would explain why it's so difficult for me to do pretty much any and everything. However, if this was a learned skill to compensate for legitimate deficits, then it wouldn't explain anything at all. 

What I find interesting is that I think my best writing comes from deep passion. Even intellectual. If I can emotionally embody sophistication, it becomes a sort of truth that I feel justified in expressing. However, without that passion, I feel intellectually hindered creatively and bolstered practically. The pride that I feel in attempted creative expression far outweighs pride in attempted intellectual expression. Unless that intellectual expression has a means of emotional satisfaction, perhaps. But I can hardly relate to the feeling intellectual pride for the sake of intellectual pride. Unless in introspection, which often goes hand-in-hand with emotion, and it may not be possible to distinguish the two, in my case.