Exertion and recognizing limits, in context

In case you haven’t notice I can’t leave well enough alone.  I decided after yesterday’s events that I needed to stop letting my ego get in the way of my common sense.  Of course I immediately began questioning that conclusion.

Is it really common sense to stop, or do I need to push myself more?  Then it occurred to me that I’ve been through this before.

I have a motto: I have to try.

If I don’t try I won’t know if I can do it or not.  I need to test my limits and I used to do that to the extreme, doing something and then collapsing and realizing that I had gone too far.  I would exceed my limits; the point where I should have stopped was always way before I finally did.  Eventually, through trial and error – mostly error – I learned enough to know when I was about to or had just gone too far.  Even knowing when I had just passed the limit was enough to keep me from hurting myself.  So I managed to do things and stretch myself and not do too much damage.

So why am I still hurting myself by doing things I shouldn’t be doing?  If I learned so much why am I still making mistakes and why am I questioning reasonable conclusions?

Well, I’m questioning reasonable conclusions because I’m human and I’m foolish and that’s just what I do.  That takes a lot more effort to stop, but I’m working on it and I’ll get better.

I do know why I was stupid yesterday.  It was something done in public.  I look fairly normal in public, I work really hard at it, and I want to keep it that way so the impulse towards stupid is great.  Someone asked me how long it had taken me to recover because I look – more or less – like I have.  Since I haven’t recovered my act must be good, but that’s my problem.

When I pushed myself before it was done in private or at least anonymously.  Also, when people don’t know me I’m smart enough to ask for help with the hard stuff.  Yesterday people knew who I was so this was the public persona that hides the disability.  That me hasn’t learned how to avoid dangerously breaking through the limits.  That part of me is a monumental idiot.

So you see, questioning conclusions – that I had listened to my ego and not my common sense – led me to ask the question ‘Why would I do that?’.  And the answer was that I haven’t learned to apply the lessons of my private life to my public life.  Now I know what to do.  I need to pay attention to how hard I’m pushing myself in all contexts – anonymous or not the same rules have to apply.  The next time that sort of thing comes up I can and should try, but if I can’t I need to just admit it.

As in most things, this is easier said than done, but in time and with practice I think that I can do it.