My Strange Relationship With Myself: Self Recognition

     One of the most important relationships in your life is with yourself. We find this growing up through the adolescent years that we are the most intelligent, interesting, scary, reliable person that there is. We are our number one fan and enemy.
     This discovery of yourself usually begins around the age of two or so when we develop the ability of self recognition. Scientists and psychologists have tested this by putting a mark on the forehead of a baby and then having the child look at itself in the mirror. This is why we don't have dreams about ourselves as infants. Existence is a strange thing, probably too much for a newly developing brain anyways. The point I am making here is that this idea of self recognition isn't gender based. However, we do tend to hear that little boys become aware of their bodies at a young age, but this is besides the point.
     Adolescence is where I will start. Hormones are raging, attitudes are sharp and the need to become an autonomous individual is a constant struggle. I have learned a lot about myself in these years. Things like, what you meant to say and how it sounded are two different things. Simply put, experiences are strictly at the mercy of being subjective. This is the time where your body is changing and you like the opposite sex. You explore your body in a new and exciting way and for some reason you develop quite an adversary; yourself.
     I tend to have conversations with myself when I'm alone. Being unemployed, this is often times most of how I spend my day. When I was younger however, and even now, I would sit in the bathroom and think. I wasn't waiting for anything to happen. Technically I was "done" doing my business, but I would just sit. A lot of the time I would talk to myself, have little hypothetical stand up comedy shows or just simply a great new and inventive idea. Of course all my good ideas were in places I had no access to a piece of paper or anything to write with. Needless to say they must have been strictly for self amusement purposes. But I found myself asking questions; strange ones at that.
     First they would be about random things. Things I would have thought about as they came to mind. Other times, I would think about something that was bothering me. I have a hard time letting certain things go, I often times over analyzed situations and had a habit of replaying life's events in my head. It got to the point where it was annoying and I thought that this part of me had settled down over the years. Only recently have I realized that it really hasn't. Now these thoughts go from fears and anxieties about future events, to my opinionated beliefs, but almost always turn up becoming taken into a sexual context. Which only turns out to make me panic more. I tend to over hypothesize how an event will occur, usually the worst things weigh heavier in my probable scenarios. The good thing, most times than not, the situation goes better than expected. So when you expect the worst and it turns out completely fine, you can breathe that huge sigh of relief after you catch your breath from the way Anxiety sought fit to constrict your airways the past few weeks.