Doing, Thinking, Being

You are—you say—more at home in “doing” than in “intelligent conversation”, and you ask whether you ought to be “aiming at improving [your] speech”.

I don’t think this is something you should worry about at all. Obviously you and your husband have different gifts, and as “there are many organs in the body”, this is just as it should be. Of course there’s no reason not to take steps to become a more orderly thinker and speaker if and when those steps become evident to you, as perhaps they will when you have studied, and rightly admired, his considerable abilities for a long enough time. But you shouldn’t fret about this; if your deficiencies in this domain “gnaw at your self-esteem”, good! You have no self, after all—no true self—outside of God, and He is perfectly capable of providing all the esteem you need; anything else, or more, is superfluous, if not an obstacle, to genuine growth in holiness.

To answer your other question, yes: it is certainly possible to “sort out” the difference between a mere “delusion of happiness” and the real thing, provided one applies the proper criteria, which in part at least have to do with continuity in the midst of changing circumstance. And yes, I would agree it also has something to do with taking “pleasure in being oneself”—which, you write, A. is not able to do but which (for the most part) you are. If this is really so, then congratulations! It is certainly better to be “coherent on the inside and muddled on the outside”, to use your expression, than the other way round!