When I was young I took pride in my natural superiority over my peers due to being smarter and stronger than they were.

Later, I took pride in the fact that I had a family that actually had love for one another rather than seeming to be entirely apathetic or malevolent towards one another, and that I had such a facility with my studies that my potential seemed to be only limited by what would catch my interest and keep it.

Now, my intelligence is a liability, my family has been plagued with death and has dissolved into instability and neuroses, my potential and skill are thwarted by my lack of ambition and the distaste for the ambitious that was instilled in me from my youth, my romantic aspirations twisted from their prior purity in ways I still don't properly understand... My capacity for compassion and empathy damaged in some way that I still remember what is right and want to act on it because I still deem it to be right, but don't feel anything in my soul.

Being better than the common chaff is more of an albatross around your neck when it doesn't matter morally or socially and you're not phenomenally successful and accruing wealth and power.

My past self is disappointed in what little his death accomplished in bringing about my present self and my present self is endeavouring to ensure that the same does not happen when I die and my future self comes to be.

However, my past self had his share of flaws both of belief/thinking and deed, so I would not wish to fully have his approval.

Still, it irks me that perfection is not possible, of flesh or will, for that was my ambition as a child.

So, I am not especially happy, but I am able to look myself in the mirror when I am not bedridden. Nor am I going to scrub the mission and hope in reincarnation, as, since there is still life in me, there is still hope.