Obsidian Sync 2024-11-19 18:02:51

content/daily-notes/2024-11-19.md

@@ -31,7 +31,7 @@ Started following Celine Nguyen on Substack only recently. Her essays contain de
 
 > What disturbs me, what keeps me up at night, is how I lie to myself. “Self-deception,” Joan Didion [wrote](https://www.vogue.com/article/joan-didion-self-respect-essay-1961) in 1961, “remains the most difficult deception”:
 > 
-> The charms that work on others count for nothing in that devastatingly well-lit back alley where one keeps assignations with oneself: no winning smiles will do here, no prettily drawn lists of good intentions. With the desperate agility of a crooked faro dealer…one shuffles flashily but in vain through one’s marked cards—**the kindness done for the wrong reason, the apparent triumph which had involved no real effort, the seemingly heroic act into which one had been shamed.** The dismal fact is that self-respect has nothing to do with the approval of others—who are, after all, deceived easily enough.
+> > The charms that work on others count for nothing in that devastatingly well-lit back alley where one keeps assignations with oneself: no winning smiles will do here, no prettily drawn lists of good intentions. With the desperate agility of a crooked faro dealer…one shuffles flashily but in vain through one’s marked cards—**the kindness done for the wrong reason, the apparent triumph which had involved no real effort, the seemingly heroic act into which one had been shamed.** The dismal fact is that self-respect has nothing to do with the approval of others—who are, after all, deceived easily enough.
 > 
 > But how do you resist this kind of danger, when—by definition—the deceived self can’t even identify the lie? I’m trying to teach myself how to see what I don’t know about myself; to find the failures that my ego tries to ignore.