Quiet Confidence and Feelings of Superiority

There's no need for compensation, otherwise you will overshoot and end up in overcompensation. Just do what you have to do. Learn from your mistakes and those of others. Watch your temper. Mind your words. Choose them carefully because they linger and fester in people's minds. Be sweet and pleasant at all times. Don't try to be clever. Be real and true to yourself. Don't be like those you have contempt for. Be careful out there. Make friends, not enemies. Show people respect, not contempt, even to those who don't deserve it since humans all hunger for it. Disrespect is intolerable for most, if not all of them. Remember humans are irrational and emotional at heart.

Be at peace. Don't be agitated like others. It's not a pretty sight. You are more honest than most and prettier than all. Don't show off your superiority, even to scums and assholes. Some woman commented that you were into peace and healing. No, nostalgia was more like it when you sent her the photos of Saigon in 1961 , the time the war just got started and the capital didn't yet take on a look of a city of rampant sins and the people didn't have a look of harried anxiety.

You have desire and ambition. You know you can express yourself, but you have not made a breakthrough. But you are not worried or in a deep funk. You just keep on with your reading and taking care of your body and ignoring the assholes and motherfuckers who are rude to you while waiting for the right time to exact vengeance.

You have a high regard for yourself because your imagination is boundless and your understanding is singular of the urgency of physical passion as well as the barriers imposed by emotional pain. When you write, you want to explore love with all its incarnations, to look at all the assholes and motherfuckers whose damages, deceptions, and obsessions have driven you very close to the abyss of destruction and self-destruction, and to lay bare your own life with its points of light and ruinous truths. Run through your words, there is a thread of throbbing, disquieting memoir of an effort to stay sane in a world of cheap treachery and easy cowardice and little, too little, heroism.