Take an Antagonist to Lunch

A system of based on the logic, experience, and idiosyncracy of your taste makes such sense to you that you seldom question it.  More often than not, instead of questioning it, you apply what you like to think of as tweaks.

When you do question your personal system to the point where you find the need to make changes, you do so with an amalgamation of exhilaration and relief.  All this is by way of saying you try to keep some tabs on your equivalent of an operating system, alert for revisions and enhancements that will make your subsequent experiences as a sentinent being as pleasant as possible.

In a manner similar to the operating systems that supervise function of your computer, its features, your cell phone, its features, and a few other electronic devices such as readers and musical storage systems, your own personal operating system has occasional crashes and bugs, to use IT language tropes.  Once aware of these, you take what seems to you at the time the most effective cure.

All this by way of saying you are in large measure sane, if idiosyncratic, happy, if wary of the detours happiness can lead you toward, and comfortable, to the extent where you do not become lolled into a false sense of security.

Thus accoutered, you set out to compose:  to write story or to speculate about story, or to attempt to draw things of apparent or potential dissimilarity to some kind of logical or emotional detente.

No big deal, right?  A person should be able to accomplish a measure of self-maintenance without making it a primary cause.  But here's where the matter contributes to your health and awareness more than you consciously realize.

Characters.

Characters and, when not dealing with the inventions of fiction, other points of view.  Opposing points of view.

In a real sense, you've at last come to accept that you have to do the same things you do for yourself to every individual who sets foot on the stage of your composition.  You have to take in the equivalent of your direct opposite, feed, clothe, and give comfort to that individual in order to give that individual a fair chance at life in story.  

The greater the likelihood of such polar opposites being accorded respect and civility in your stories or simulacra or history, the greater their chance of achieving in your work what you hope to achieve in Reality.  That goal is the end of being listened to, considered, engaged in some manner.

For the longest time, your goal was to produce a record of your time with some degree of accuracy, but try as you did to work out that mission statement and then work toward it, you always stumbled at the word "accuracy."

There is no accuracy in the abstract, only in the range of beliefs and opinions about a particular point or concept.  You are an advocate for a particular vision, but to make that vision emerge with as much stature as you wish, you need to give your vision worthy opponents.

In the service of yourself and your opponent visions, you must look for the places of sanity and insanity in both, of the delusional and the visionary in both, of the pompous and the humble in both.

You've come some distance in looking for balance and tolerance in yourself, but there is more ground to cover, and perhaps in that coverage, you'll be able to find ways to add dimension to those you recognize as having differing visions than your own.

In basic terms, this means you're in effect sending yourself to casting calls for characters you might not like, were you to meet them in Reality.  You think you can handle that condition in Reality right now, but can you handle it with the characters you wish to portray, right now?