know my weaknesses and strengths (and everything in between) in order to know which aspects of my personality are beneficial, and which are destructive not only to others but to myself as well

I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.
—James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son

I’ve always felt that my greatest flaw is my inability to truly hate.

Nobody believes how much strength it takes.

I realize I have avoidant tendencies. This is good, in the sense that I am non-confrontational and non-aggressive.

However, I can’t keep on running away. It has nothing to do with geographical boundaries: no matter where I go, I’ll always end up running into myself. In the backalleys, in the library, in the island, on the street where you live.

I need courage to look at my true self (imperfections as well as perfections) without flinching away, without falling to rationalizations, without embarrassment.

This is autotopography, realities I have to face, as solid as my footing on the land.

Joan Didion, A Book of Common Prayer:

I knew about airports.

People who go to the airport first invent some business to conduct there, a ticket to be adjusted, a query about cargo rates, a newspaper unavailable elsewhere. Then they convince themselves that the airport is cooler than the hotel, or has superior chicken salad. Then one day they see a plane, “their” plane, one plane of many but somehow marked, a mirage on the tarmac.

They pay their lunch check.

They buy the ticket, they glance at the clock above the counter.

Quite as if they were ordinary travelers.

Quite as if they traveled on ordinary timetables.

[...]

She could take care of somebody or somebody could take care of her and it was the same thing in the end.

[...]

How could I leave you.

The same way you left everybody.

He wants you to walk away from here the same way you walked away from everything else in your life.

Margaret Atwood, Bodily Harm:

She discovers that she’s truly no longer at home. She is away, she is out, which is what she wanted. The difference between this and home isn’t much that she knows nobody as that nobody knows her. In a way she’s invisible. In a way she’s safe.

She realizes she doesn’t care. She doesn’t care what he thinks of her, she never has to see this man again if she doesn’t want to. She never has to see anyone again if she doesn’t want to. [...]already she feels light, insubstantial, as if she’s died and gone to heaven and come back minus a body. There’s nothing to worry about, nothing can touch her. She’s a tourist. She’s exempt.

“The man is all that is civilized- learned, kindly, idealistic, decent. The shadow is all that gets suppressed in the process of becoming a decent, civilized adult. The shadow is the man’s thwarted selfishness, his unadmitted desires, the swearwords he never spoke, the murders he didn’t commit. The shadow is the dark side of his soul, the unadmitted, the inadmissible.”

“The shadow is the other side of our psyche, the dark brother of the conscious mind. It is Cain, Caliban, Frankenstein’s monster, Mr. Hyde. It is Vergil who guided Dante through hell, Gilgamesh’s friend Enkidu, Frodo’s enemy Gollum. It is the Doppelganger. It is Mowgli’s Grey Brother; the werewolf; the wolf, the bear, the tiger of a thousand folktales; it is the serpent, Lucifer. The shadow stands on the threshold between the conscious and the unconscious mind, and we meet it in our dreams, as sister, brother, friend, beast, monster, enemy, guide. It is all we don’t want to, can’t, admit into our conscious self, all the qualities and tendencies within us which have been repressed, denied, or not used… Jung himself said, “Everyone carries a shadow, and the less it is embodied in the individual’s conscious life, the blacker and denser it is.” The less you look at it, in other words, the stronger it grows, until it can become a menace, an intolerable load, a threat within the soul.”

“If the individual wants to live in the real world, he must withdraw his projections he must admit that the hateful, the evil, exists within himself. This isn’t easy.It is very hard not to be able to blame anybody else.”

“For the shadow stands on the threshold. We can let it bar the way to the creative depths of the unconscious, or we can let it lead us to them. For the shadow is not simply evil. It is inferior, primitive, awkward, animal-like, childlike, powerful, vital, spontaneous. it is not weak and decent, like the learned young man from the North; it’s dark and hairy and unseemly; but, without it, the person is nothing. What is a body that casts no shadow? Nothing, a formlessness, two-dimensional, a comic-strip character. The person who denies his own profound relationship with evil denies his own reality. He cannot undo, or make; he can only undo, unmake.”

-Ursula Le Guin, “The Child and the Shadow”, The Language of the Night