I borrowed a game from a friend of mine, or rather, he put it in my hands and said: PLAY!
This game is called Persona 4, which is awesome, by the way. The game is about a bunch of teenagers who becomes capable of entering TV's and end up in a different world, where so called "shadows" are on the ready to attack them. Fortunately, our heroes are capable of summoning an avatar of their so called "dark side" (Which is the truth about themselves) called a "Persona."
But there is a catch. before they are able to use their personas, they need to accept their "shadow selves." That is all there is required. But this is easier said than done, 'cause their shadow parts are mean and cruel. They still speak the truth though. They have the virtue of honesty. They are open about the weakness of their counter-part and what annoys them. From a freudian point of view, one might call them the subconsciousness.
The point is that they can't accept their shadow selves to begin with and that is exactly what happens in real life. There is a part that we don't wish to acknowledge, deep inside us. It might be an opinion, an interest or some physical. Personally, this isn't such a big problem for me, I'd gladly admit that I am weak, or lazy or unattractive, if people point it out with some reasonable arguments. It's not a problem for me, since I am completely satisfied with who I am and accept that I am not perfect. This is partly because that whilst I realize that I am very "cruel" when it comes to some points, I simply don't care. It have been a problem for me, though. When I found out that I was going to be bald in a couple of years from now, I felt really bad about it, and I hated when people commented on my thin hair. That part of me is however gone. Which is why it pisses me off that I am still not able to summon an avatar capable of firing off lightning bolts!
So Persona got me thinking and I could actually recognize this kind of dilemma. After my en devours in bizzaro-TV-land, I was in a real-life sports competition, where we were in teams of 4-6. My group came in the 5th place, which means that we lost and so did the group of a guy I knew who were also participating. Th judges had a reward for everyone though, which consisted of a small candy-bars. Of course the winners received more. Both I and the guy I know who was also there, insisted on not receiving anything because of the fact that we lost. Still, later I see him gnawing on one anyway. At that point I ask him, why he might have changed his mind? He said, that since one of the winners offered him one, he couldn't say no. So he couldn't say no because a different person than the judge offered him one. I believe that he shrugged it off as being rude to say no, which, according to my observations, it wouldn't be, especially not if he told him about his principle of "loser gets no reward". Therefore I asked him: "So you said yes because you really wanted the chocolate." This made him very angry and needless to say, he gave me a childish reply, that made no sense whatsoever.
I believe that he became angry, because he was faced with the truth. He gave in. Craved. Having the tasty chocolate dangled in front of him twice was more than enough, and thus he decided to just dumb his principle and eat it. That is most definitely a sign of weakness, which I believe is why he didn't wanna face it. His "darker self" was smearing the fact in his face and he chose to neglect it. But I believe that we can learn a lesson from Persona 4. If we can't accept ourselves, we will grow weak and our we will in fact be defeated time and time again by ourselves (Which kinda seems humiliating.) But if we can accept ourselves, we will grow stronger (evidently without a cool avatar, though.)
It all boils down to whether we want to be weak, or acknowledge that we have a "darker side" and know that we are so much more than that. If we want to evolve and grow to acceptable levels, we need to be able to accept ourselves. Our "Full" selves.
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