Of Virtue, Vice, and Fear

Of my fears and of the self-avoidant overcautiousness of my heart, I have often crafted virtues from what are, in reality, vices.  I believe that many of us do this from time to time.  We self justify our secret fears and private vices until they become, in our eyes, virtues.  We couch our failings in lauditory tones until they seem to be the very dew drops of heaven and we defend them fierociously.  And that, this prickly defensiveness, is what demarcates a virtue so-called, born of fear and that certain fretful, fearful looking for the wrath we know in secret but deny in public that we deserve from the true virtue that neither needs nor demands any such jusification.

I have found myself doing this often; often because of my innate and sometimes paralyzing shyness.  Through force of will, I have been able to suppress my isolating tendencies and move beyond my selfish self.  However, I have my limits even still and this has destroyed many potentials friendships and relationships because I quite honestly am terrified of becoming emotionally close to someone else.  I have acually sabotaged relationships and avoided people simply because I felt myself becoming emotionally vulnerable.  I won't psychoanalize that any further partly out of a list ditch effort to save face and partly because I don't value psychanalysis very much.    Somehow out of my fear of others, I have crafted some sense of noble, self-destructive stoicism.   

I have seen other people carefully crafting their own damnation out of their fears, brick by brick damming their self improvement because they are too afraid to look honestly at their own reflections in the clear light of day.  It is unnerving to look and assess oneself honestly and that includes honestly acknowledging the good as well as the bad.  The sticking point is ego.  

I have contemplated ego quite a bit, not mine in particular, but just egos in general.  I have often wondered what exactly the "self" is and its relationship to attributes and qualities.  It is difficult for me to extrapolate my self from the qualities I ascribe to myself.   How to disentangle the easy going, shy bookworm from me, if indeed that is possible.  Pride remains the stumbling block, for pride is the root of fear.  Fear reenforces pride and from it extrapolates the devlish rationales that create the silken cords which bind us down to destruction by lulling our senses to our failings.