April Blog

This goes with number 13 from the Tell Tale Heart questions.

Many times I have heard people say something like, "Eww, you're gay." Then in turn the other person says, "No your gay, why would you say something like that..." None the less you see people project themselves regularly upon others. It's something that I am even guilty of. I know this kid, I'll just say that he's from the South. I would always ask him why he hated me. His response would always be "I don't hate you." It always suprised me that he didn't hate me because Lord knows that I hated him. I had thought that the feeling was mutual, but now that I look back at it, I suppose that I was really projecting my hate, so I only thought that he hated me in my mind. Of course he could have been lying to me and really did hate me, I'll never know.

My life experience is strikingly similar to that in the "Tell Tale Heart". Except the narrator says that he loves the old man. Was there ever anything evil with the old man's eye? Of course not, I mean it doesn't work properly so for that reason it could be considered evil, but not in a true sense. Instead of saying that there was something wrong with himself, the narrator finds something ugly, the eye, to project his ugliness on.

So why would me and the narrator do something like this? After a little thinking, the only answer that I can really think of is that I would not like to think of myself as an ugly person. So when I found out that something ugly was inside of me, hate in this case, I did everything to convince myself that I am not ugly (I've been using ugly for lack of a better word.) So, because it was not possible that I could have been the ugly one, I said that he was and therefore projected my feelings of resentment. The same thing must have happened to the narrator, he thought that there was no way that he could have been evil, so he said that the eye was.

Anyway, I feel really stupid that I could be so immature as to project my feelings on someone else. I just need to stop and realize that I can be an ugly person and that it's okay because everyone has some amount of ugliness in them.