The Terrible Paradox of Self-Awareness | Fernando Pessoa

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Perhaps the most comforting thing about delving into this level of the human experience is knowing there are a few other humans who dared to think as far as you did, and they feel the terror, beauty, and absurdity of it all just as much as you do.

Being self aware is weird. I both know who I am and have no clue who I am. I’m both the narrator and main character of my own life, and I spend a great deal of my time analyzing myself from the 3rd person. Every word I say, every movement I make, and even every thought I think has been carefully curated to create a ‘character’ of me. I know everything about myself, so it feels like I know nothing about myself. I have no idea whether my feelings are real or whether I fabricated them in order to fit my artificial identity. Even the most ‘raw’ parts of my emotion are intentionally raw, and it’s caused me to feel absolutely horrible, knowing that even my truest self might not actually be my truest self, and is just what I create my truest self to look like. I don’t feel human.

Seems that if you ask yourself a question for long enough, the answer no longer matters.

The hardest part is the isolation that comes with this level of self awareness.

"Every deep thinker is more afraid of being understood than of being misunderstood." - Friedrich Nietzsche

I'm from Portugal, and in school it was mandatory to study Fernando Pessoa. I hated it so much. I think he'd hate it as well. Fernando Pessoa, just like most great writers, you find them in the time of your life you need them the most.

I get so caught up in self-awareness that I haven’t done anything at all in life. I’ve been hyper focused on my every move and breath for half my life only to realize I never looked at the bigger picture. I’m so isolated and constantly overwhelmed and it’s all my own doing. I understood every word of this video, I can’t imagine living a life not thinking this way.

being a deep thinker is being terrified you’re going to think too much and realize something you weren’t supposed to and you’re never going to see anything the same again

These kind of stories makes you wonder, how many of such incredible works of so many people are or might be out there waiting to be found, and still so many lost forever.

"The truly wise man is the man who lets external events trouble him as little as possible. To do this, he needs to armor himself by surrounding himself with realities that are closer to him than those events, and through which the events reach him, changed so as to accord with those realities." - Fernando Pessoa

“Life is so short” not for the self-aware person…every moment is filled with heavy introspection, it’s liberating but my gosh is it exhausting

You know a video is beyond exceptional when the comment section isn’t filled with compliments and praise but people philosophising about life. Bravo!

I feel like an observer. A perpetual student. An examiner of information of sorts. A feeler of feelings, an analyst of reality. It’s all I ever do and think, it’s all I really know.

Self awareness almost feels like you know more then should, it allows you to be so connected with yourself you realize your lack of importance and purpose, you are but a grain of sand on the eternal beach

Being self aware is agony. especially when u are stuck with mental illness, bad habits, addictions, etc that u can't control. sometimes, you confuse who is actually "aware", is it your body, or perhaps the voices in your head arguing over justifications of every actions u made. even without emotional intelligence, you are aware of how your actions affect others physically and emotionally. it feels like the best persona of yourself is trapped inside your head and act as the "voices" and the worst version of you act as the vessel that move by your command yet it feels wrong. to become self aware is to lead yourself to understand the nonexisting and pointless thoughts that haunts you when your vessel don't listen.

I truly think he had borderline personality disorder but not the one media tells you about, but the real one: emptiness, doubt of self, feeling nothing but also feeling everything, periods of emotional unstability, the rabbit hole while trying to understand his existence... it was probably triggered because of losing his family. With no antidepressants, that disorder is truly destructive of one-self.

Fernando Pessoa was not an obscure figure in his time in Lisbon. He was a very active member of the modernist movement in Portugal, being one of the creators of Orpheu magazine, and friend of great poets and writers such as Mário de Sá Carneiro and others. His poetry is widely studied in Brazil and Portugal.

I thought like this for about a year and had to step away from it. It was effecting my sanity and my health. And the worst part of it is; you can’t talk about it with other people very much bc most people can’t comprehend thinking that far. It’s just scary.

This was honestly one of the toughest things I put myself through. I remember being outside and it was as if I “woke up” I questioned everything and dove into trying to find the answer to everything. I felt mad, I felt like nothing was real. It got to a point where every second of my life I was aware of what I was doing. It wasn’t fun because i couldn’t allow myself to dive into whatever was happening. Whenever I try to explain this to anyone else I try to make them feel, and understand my experience but 1. I wouldn’t want them to go through that and 2. It’s such a strong experience that words can’t properly explain what I went through / go through