=on becoming a better person=

It's not easy. The worst part is that you might succeed. Then you inevitably end up looking back on your previous life with horror and regret. How could you have said and done the things you've said and done? How could you have been so inconsiderate, so smug, so self-righteous and so selfish? What were you thinking? Were you thinking at all? In most cases, the damage done is done for good. There's no way to correct it. Many of the people you've hurt are no longer in your life. You don't even know where they've gone and even if you did, what is crooked can never truly be made straight, what was said cannot be unsaid. Some debts just can never be repaid. Now all the pain is yours and often it is more pain than  you think you can bear. 

Maybe it's preferable to remain an asshole your entire life, to be a bastard right to the grave, without a moment of self-reflection or a second thought. It would be so much easier, so much less uncomfortable. I've known people like that. They've assholed their way from start to finish, never doubting they were 100% right. Of course, I wasn't always at their side when they woke up at 3am wondering what they'd done with their lives. I wasn't present at their private Gethsemanes, if they had any. But from every indication, if they did have such moments of doubt and pain, it never altered their public persona or behavior one iota. 

How does one get to be so strong and self-assured? It's beyond me. I've walked across my life as if on thin ice, ready to drown in the freezing water of regret and self-loathing with every step. If only I could have been a real asshole, confident and brazen, never looking back. I might have really made something of myself! Instead I was a timid, half-hearted asshole, a fake asshole, a phony, a pretender. How much more bearable, how much more enjoyable, how much better my life might have been if I'd never become a better person!