It came to me, like so many things do, in the shower (I need to buy soap).
I was out of soap so I grabbed the only bar in there. That's the thing with having to share a shower with two other roommates; someone's always got some soap in there, and right now it certainly wasn't mine, not the green bar of Irish Spring that I'd grown so accustomed to. It was a white bar. Dove, I think. There was that moment's pause that comes when you do something you don't agree with, but only a moment's before I just reached down because fuck it, I needed some soap. All the while someone in my head kept saying, "Are you really that guy? The soap snatcher? You hate that guy. Well, you don't hate-hate him. He's a nuance. He's unprepared. He's absent-minded. Don't be that guy. Don't be the soap snatcher, be the snatch soaper." Well I'll try, I guess.
Then it dawned like a quick sunrise come upon me. It doesn't matter who I want to be now. It only matters who I am, and more likely than not that being is different in my eyes than it is in others. And maybe how I see myself matter to me, but how I come across to others matters to everyone else. The world out there don't give a damn how I see myself. For the most part, they only notice my actions. Maybe what I say too, but actions always speak louder. They always have. Words can be manipulated, pretenses can be faked, feelings forged and so on. But the way a man treats those around him tells the most. That's because it's habit by now. Instinctual in a sense, and instincts are very hard to break away from. See, it's not what we believe, but what we do that defines us. Someone said that, and I remembered.
None of us are as good as we think we are. I may not think I'm a soap snatcher or an asshole, but I'm beginning to see that the facts state otherwise. For now anyways. What's that all the scholars say? The only constant is change.
