Become self-actualized

The biggest roadblock I find myself at here is the non-hostile humor. I’ve always been quite sarcastic, which doesn’t always come off well. I’m still occasionally crass, still sometimes say things that cross lines. I do still talk shit.

What I’m finding more and more though, is that I find situational eccentricities the most humorous. Strange people with strange habits—not things that I look down on, more like noticing the ridiculous hilarity of life as is.

I feel like camp set me back—it was way too easy to be catty and just adapt to the back-stabbing mentale.

Next year I need to bring Tao Te Ching, because there were quite a few times over the summer that I specifically needed it and wished I had brought it.

Something else that hit it on the head for me:

My wonderful psych teacher gave an example that a self-actualized person, if angry with someone over something relatively small, might react with an “I’m angry at you now. Give me some time to myself to be angry and get over it, and in a few days, it won’t bother me anymore.”

The bells went off in my head, because this was, almost word-for-word how I liked to deal with things. Most people though, thought it was strange and were a bit puzzled and put-off by it.

God, I love Maslow. When we got to this portion of my psych class, I was really surprised, because I spent a lot of time with people that I didn’t think understood my reasons for acting or reacting in the ways that I do. And going through the list, I felt like a lot of it was much like me, but I’m not all there yet.

From my PSYC 380 notebook:

Maslow’s concept of self actualization came from two teachers he admired: they had an intellectual devtion to work, liked to exceed expectations and had senses of humor that never belitted anyone.
-he wanted to study these people and why they were that way; modern psych didn’t explain them.

Traits
-clear, efficient perception of reality and comfortable relations with it
-spontaneity, simplicity & naturalness
-problem-centered (having a mission)
-detachment and need for privacy
-resistance to enculturation (independence)
-continued freshness of appreciation
-mystical and peak experiences (moments of profound insight in which everything in the world makes sense)
-feelings of kinship and identification with human race
-strong friendships but limited in number
-democratic character structure
-ethical discrimination among good and evil
-philosophical, unhostile sense of humor
-balance between polarities in personality