There will be ways-of-life that are only possible during specific life phases. One should be careful rushing past these ways, especially when what awaits is a way that’s possible in many life phases.
So, refrain from living in an apartment far from campus when a dorm is the default option. You’ll always be able to live in apartments far from life; you’ll never again be able to live in a dorm.
Em-dash: use this for sentence interjections and sentence enders; can be used to replace colon. Wide as capital ‘M.’ Get there in Word with –. Can use or not use a space before and after. I like using the space. Or ctrl + alt + minus sign.
En-dash: half width of Em. Used to show range. Ctrl + minus in word. Often equivalent to to or versus. Width of “N.” Often represented with hyphen.
Hyphen: if two or more consecutive words make sense only when understood together as an adjective modifying a noun that follows, those words (excluding the noun) should be hyphenated. So special-interest money, but not special interest. Credit card vs. credit-card application.
How many people here witnessed xxxxxxxxx in a state where she was clearly struggling?
And how many here were then angry, sad, scared, confused, annoyed, frustrated?
I certainly was all of those things at some point during the past four years when she was my roommate. Over time I came to view her situation as akin to cancer: she wasn’t actively choosing in any meaningful sense to struggle. She had a disease and it was with her on both good days and bad.
While this realization didn’t erase the negative feelings, it did imbue the positive ones with more meaning because while it’s certainly nice when a man with a closet of shirts gives you the shirt off his back, it means something else entirely when he has no other shirt.
And xxxxxxxxx indeed provided me with much to be grateful for.
At the most basic level, yes, obviously, you need to care for yourself. But that’s not what “self-care” has come to mean. Similar to “good vibes only,” “self-care” is a selfish narrowing of the world, where your needs, wants, and desires are all the matter. If someone else happens to overlap with your vibes, cool, but if not, fuck that: my good vibes only.
And since when did it become hard to address your needs? Isn’t that the default position? Don’t you just unthinkingly do what your self, in this very moment, wants? And isn’t THAT the problem? That you are so focused on yourself, you’ve missed that perhaps the best way to care for yourself is to care for others? Instead of self-care, how about WWJD? How about civic duty, responsibility, honor? How about some real fucking values?
So I’ll start taking “self-care” seriously when someone says she is caring for herself by helping grandmas cross the street or by doing something she doesn’t want to do, like reading a book instead of binging another mindless show.
There is no comfort quite like the comfort offered by forward-focused excuses. “Forward-focused” means we aren’t explaining away past behavior – If only I had a good night of sleep I would have crushed that test– but rather dreaming and hoping that If I get this thing in the future, then my current issue will be resolved. The current issue is almost always some form of unhappiness. Hence the comfort: one is able to soothe himself with an explanation (read: excuse) for why the present unhappiness won’t persist forever. After all, suffering is easier to endure when it plausibly promises to be less than infinite.
But there’s also comfort via the meaning derived from chasing. What will you do with your time when eating, sleeping, and work are completed? Even the most motivated needs more than margaritas and some great show on Netflix. To have a forward-focused excuse provides a satisfactory answer that creates good feelings through both the pleasant thoughts of the-stuff-that-you-could-do and the tangible actions undertaken. Armed with an answer, you now have an additional reason to wake up, at least on some days.
shortly after “absorbing” new material to increase retention. More open-ended the better.
Also, think about material immediately after learning. Just a min. This can happen during. Take a sec to process before moving on to next section.
Testing as a form of studying.
Reminders of not having money are everywhere because prices are everywhere. Positive-thinking and paeans of You Are Enough fail miserably in preventing these reminders from extracting a psychological toll – even Tony Robbins’ mind would be helpless in surrendering to the objective, concrete reality of money. So, yea, this leads to stress that can only be escaped by multiplying one’s bank account to the point where a purchase of whatever represents an irrelevant dent in the account balance.
But there is another stressor associated with financial deprivation that will not vanish simply because you now make six figures. Quadrupling a salary is hard, positive-thinking is ineffective, but value-hunting can begin today and deliver today. Finding deals, collecting coupons, negotiating constantly, stretching the limits of return policies: spend less by spending smarter, by never getting ripped off, by always finding a deal. And so the must-find-value stressor develops. For a certain type of person, this stress may well become an energizing and adored personality trait. Let me tell you about the INSANE deal I just got!!! This positive affect is probably adaptive, but it still remains a stress response. And the deeper it’s ingrained, the harder to shed when it’s no longer adaptive. Like when you do, in fact, quadruple your salary and saving $1.25 on 2lbs of chicken breasts doesn’t matter. Yet it will matter if must-find-value is left unadjusted. You want to still find value because it’s fun? Do it. You want to still find value because you have to or because you feel dumb if you don’t or you really, really should? Well, then you’ve unfortunately managed to escape the conditions that created stress without dropping the stress.
And the excuse that immediately springs to my mind is that the provocation was so sudden and unexpected; I was caught off my guard, I had not time to collect myself. Now that may be an extenuating circumstance as regards those particular acts: they would obviously be worse if they had been deliberate and premeditated. On the other hand, surely what a man does when he is taken off his guard is the best evidence for what sort of a man he is? Surely what pops out before the man has time to put on a disguise is the truth? If there are rats in a cellar you are most likely to see them if you go in very suddenly. But the suddenness does not create the rats it only prevents them from hiding.
– C.S. Lewis
You are great. You are thoughtful, kind, cool, and fun. I will miss you. I feel I also possess some other insights about you given the time we’ve shared together. If you want to hear them, continue below. If not, that’s fine too.
—
—
What you have is not a moral failing. You might not believe this. In fact, I think, given your remarkable level of shame, you resist accepting what now seems so obvious to me. Take your parents’ recent visit as an illustrative example of why blame strikes me as so misplaced. If there ever was a time when you’d want to be in top form, xxxxxxxxx visiting would be the time, right? You hate to worry your parents, and if you could just hold it together for a few days, perhaps they would return home with a little less concern. You are a thoughtful person! Instead, you were helpless to stop that which you surely didn’t want to have happen. But of course: it’s a disease, not a matter of personal will, and so just as a cancer patient can’t be expected to stop negative cell growth and division, you can’t be expected to be in “top form” simply because you hope to please your parents – diseases of this sort aren’t a matter of positive intentions.
I get that I, your parents, and society have often failed to properly convey the idea that “it’s not your fault.” Especially when I was clueless as to what was happening, I know I sent both explicit and implicit messages that contradict what I’m saying now. That must not have been comfortable or helpful. I wish I had the wisdom then that I have now. What I wish more, though, is that you can see what I’m suggesting here as actual wisdom that actually applies to your situation.
Perhaps you want to fight and say it’s your fault that you got this disease – like a smoker being blameworthy for getting lung cancer. I’d protest while declaring such a disagreement largely irrelevant: what matters is how to get better. That’s where you still have agency. And that’s where I hope for an acceptance to seek serious, comprehensive help for a disease that will not bend to only your effort and goodness.
Whatever you do, you remain the same great person mentioned in the first sentence. That is constant and unchanging. Unfortunately, if you keep going as you are, I fear those who love you will only get to experience you for minimal years before this disease kills you.
offer a hug.