My Character Defect "Short list"

Gluttony - binge eating watching thrillers , 'finishing what's on the plate', 'not stopping when I feel full."
Sloth - not exercising enough - just avoiding it by taking a vehicle to run an errand when walking would be more appropriate. Reading at home rather than at the library. Just all those 'lazy' options.
Lust - excessive masturbation at times (normally in the spring when people are undressing collectively in public) which goes to show the importance of the first 'year" or 12 months or 4 seasons of recovery. There are specific triggers to certain behaviours and these can be seasonal or at different times in a day. They can also be because of "slippery people, places and things". I don't 'have to" masturbate. I've gone without masturbation for years. (That was when I was single, I masturbated more in marriage. Now I probably would masturbate more sometimes but I roll over and fall asleep. Besides it takes energy to masturbate and I'm finding with age I prefer sloth.)
However what masturbation represents here is that 'demanding' self centered 'entitlement' which I have shown in sexual relationships. I can recall thinking, "If they loved me they'd meet my needs.....because they don't they don't love me." That's clearly not love but it ties into lust. It's that self centeredness and expectation and then the 'self pity" or "pout' (or depression) that follows the other not being telepathic or simply interested. Naturally I don't notice when I ignore others sexually either.
Overspending - I thought about this and my gold pen and earrings. "I'm entitled to this. Naturally I don't think when the tax man wants his money that the problem was my buying the pen as a reward but instead blame the person who stole from me. I focus on the unpredictable theft by staff and the tens of thousands of dollars of damage that an employee did rather than looking at my "overspending". I didn't 'prepare for a rainy day'. Instead I played "poor me." Thats not to say that the powers that be who mismanaged the country and are the lowest of dirty theives in history, hiding behind 'corporate" priviledge, right up there with Hitler, hiding behind his cultural imperatives, but maybe I could include 'my part' in the problem. While I can't change the psychopaths at the level of government and international finance and the war mongers and ammunition salesmen I can certainly think twice about spending money on a luxury item rather than paying off debts or saving.
I am most amused by my own vanity which has me buying Harley Davidson boots. I love them. They're excellent boots and I admit Harley Davidson did a great job of selecting and providing them. But they're made by Hush Puppy. And the fact remains that I would not go out and buy myself a pair of Hush Puppy Biker boots at half the price they're sold to me by Harley. That's a character flaw. Every time I choose "name brand" I have to question how much vanity is involved.
Anger - I work at this one. I figure that people should cut me a little slack. They're alive aren't they. They're complaining and they're still breathing. It's not like I was really angry. Because if I ever 'let go" they'd not be here, right. Still, it's in the tone and the eyes and quick temper and the disdain and the sneers. It's in the road rage. It's in the 'letting myself be angry" because "I'm right". The fact is that anger hurts me. It's a primitive drive that turned on was meant to protect me from physical attack by club weilding strangers or wild animals. I need to nip it in the bud and not tell stories about it to re awaken the already awakened monster. Of course I can transform it to humor and this is healthy. I'd like that.
Pride - that's the vanity. That's the ego. That's the concern about how people think about me. That's the over concern with wanting to be liked. This is especially ironic in my field of endeavour where being 'liked' probably means I'm not doing my job. No one "likes' the proctologist. If a therapist is "liked" it's probably because they're doing massage and not doing 'surgery'. Real therapy is 'painful' and you kind of don't like the guy who did it with you becuase it's a shameful memory and mostly you want to put it behind you. I've never felt particularly fond of the guy who fixed my hemorrhoids and yet I wax poetic about my masseuse.
Pride is wanting my cake and eat it.
Unforgiving - I'm an unforgiving son of a bitch. The joke about alcoholism is that Alcoholic Alzheimer's is where you forget everything but the resentments.
I know I've really forgiven a person when I really have to think about what it was that upset me about them. I used to pride myself in 'forgiving' people and being 'forgiving'but I could list any fault done to me in a blink of an eye. Now I 've better things to do with my mental hard drive. I've got that stuff mostly out of RAM and on floppy disks I can get if I need to. Resentments are said to be taking poison and hoping the other guy dies. Today I pray for my enemies and realize that they are most likely just sick and immature and that if I was smarter and wiser I'd have seen the assholes coming and avoided being around such shits. I can change the latter. I can have the courage to change me. I can't be prepared for every misogynous person in the world. It's always a way of teaching me what I have to learn. Enemies teach us our weaknesses. I'm forever learning that I trust too easily because it's frankly a lazy way of being. I know I like to think I'm being loving and spiritual but I've trusted people who have not deserved that trust. I give them a chance and they fail miserably but maybe I have to look at why I'd trust someone who is clearly untrustworthy in the end rather than 'testing' them incrementally. Of course there's the crunch of the moment and time factors and various pressures but it's a character flow of mine that I have to change rather than being "poor me" about. Or blaming the other or condemning god's creations.\
Self pity - I'm a sucker for this one. I really have to get over myself.
Fear - I'm full of fear and I don't like it. I fear failure. I fear humiliation. I fear being a lone. I fear being sick. I fear pain. I fear just about everything but I put on a good show. I've got a 'stiff upper lip' that keeps my body upright. I tell men that if they didn't put such energy into keeping their upper lip stiff their dink wouldn't be limp. It's a real effort to always be protecting women and children especially when women are so collectively incompetent and full of themselves when it comes to their ability to protect themselves and not needing men and not admitting that men protect women from bad men and rarely do women protect men from bad women. It's a bug bear of mine because I've listened to women over and over go on about not needing men but the minute a guy shows up with a gun or an axes or a knife I'm out front and they're hiding behind me playing little girls suddenly. I'd love to be around one of these television hero women for a change but then that's what my mom was and I'm not 5 anymore so I should get over it. But it's an issue. Men die , women weep. And we don't get credit for it. But then I'm afraid of being unappreciated to . I 'm afraid of being hurt. I'm afraid of an humiliating death. I'm afraid of growing old. I'm afraid of disease and hospitals and callous nurses and horrible doctors. I've known some of the finest but I had the worst nightmare being in a hospital cared for by the sickest doctor and the most incompetent nurse. It just takes 2 and the hundreds of others don't matter when your doctor is a nazi pervert. I hold on to hurts and with that in mind fear that I'll attract the same experience. It's not true though.

Fear and anger attract like love. It's better to focus on the love and live hopefully with faith and today I pray. Right now I'm praying I'll become more a 'person of character' and look more closely at the lesser character flaws that I've surely got. By working one , being a glutton for instance, I can focus on that and not do anythign about it, but give it alot of time and trouble and tease and nurse it while avoiding looking at my own judgementalness for instance. There's a 'motive within the motive' to consider.

I once gave a lavish gift so I could buy myself the lesser but still expensive item that I personally wanted. That way I could appear to be 'giving' when in fact I was being very self serving. That's the kind of stuff I have to look for and not necessarily get rid of but at first be aware of . My own emotional well being, my feeling of happiness, lightness of being, my joy and freedom is all about keeping the channel open. It's like not being able to see the Grace of God because the window is all covered in this dark soot of self.