#I have never admitted this but occasionally I engage in self destructive behaviors when I get overly upset

[redhotarsenic]

“Well I’m anxious and stressed and sick all the time and I go to work every day so I don’t have any sympathy for you how dare you use that as an excuse but we care about your wellbeing though :) but shame on you also”

[schreichters]

okay @norwaydumpsterfireremakes​ inspired me with her amira/mohammed regency au (go read it!!!) so i’m going to share all my druck regency au headcanons....they r going to be totally different but that doesn’t matter dslkfjdkslf what matter is REGENCY ROMANCE NOVELS FUN

so bearing in mind i hate jonas (fantastic way to start) my vision for hanna is actually pretty sad....like leonie and jonas r engaged but jonas and hanna are In Love and get caught cheating and obvs leonie is mad and vengeful as hell and won’t keep it to herself and wants to destroy hanna’s life so hanna and jonas have to get married to Save Her Reputation only like in s1, their relationship after that isn’t exactly Functional, only they’re married so they can’t break up and be happier that way like they can in canon they’re just...stuck. so hanna has a Thing with sam or is suspected to have a thing with sam and jonas is super pissed like canon but now he can’t dump her so he just fucks off and gets self destructive and bitter like s2 jonas and yeah their relationship just disintegrates and they don’t live together or really talk, hanna does her own thing and stays with friends a lot or at her family home with matteo (who’s her brother because this is my au and i want them to be related). and there are occasional periods where it seems like jonas is going to get his shit together but it never lasts. i hate that little man. also wouldn’t be surprised if at some point politically-minded jonas gets a reputation for supporting women’s rights, he just treats his own wife like shit. he seems like the type yk!

okay moving on.....OBVIOUSLY alex is a duke like The Duke who is cold and a rake and the worst and mia is a plucky young miss and they have a story that’s one of those novels with a CAPER where mia is trying to expose some wrong-doing and alex gets mixed up in it and is a good guy and in the course of Delivering Justice they fall in love. very little of it happens in ballrooms or involves courting and stuff, it’s all about ~adventures in the underbelly of london~. i personally hate those kids of novels slkdjfklsd i love the ballroom etiquette stuff but it fits mia i must admit! anyway now she’s an Unconventional Duchess who continues to shock everyone by DOING THINGS and being really casual and affectionate with her husband (ie, calling him his first name in front of people and stuff). because alex was so cold and mean before no one UNDERSTAAAAAAAANDS why he tolerates this impertinent behavior from his wife. you fools! he is a changed man.

he probably fucked around with kiki in this au too but like A Dalliance and then didn’t offer marriage. god he sucks. anyway.

kiki was heard in public swearing to not marry below a duke--the only eligible duke at the time was uhh....alex so yikes that was crass and obvious cap-setting. she gets up getting wooed HARD by a baron’’s second son and marries him (carlos) which everyone sees as a fitting come-down for such a rude person but actually she seems to really like him and they appear very happy together. matteo still thinks carlos’s older brother should watch his back though. just in case.

MATTEO is a baronet (!!!!!!!!!!!!! i have a HUGE soft spot for a hero being a baronet bc my fav hero in my fav novel is one). he likes to hang out in the country and never comes to london if he can help it--too loud, too crowded, too dirty. his father was The Worst because i love to make matteo’s father comically evil (it’s so convenient) and put in his will (oh yeah, i also like to kill matteo’s father off, again, so convenient!) that matteo wouldn’t get his inheritance unless he was married by 26. which matteo found out....ten days before his 26th birthday. luckily somehow he ends up in touch with mr. david schreibner who ALSO needs to get married fast because, uh, plot reasons--out-running a dark past or him and laura are in debt and matteo will pay it off, whatever. anyway he is VERY up front that he’s never going to fall in love, this is Strictly Business. oh david, you fool! there’s a lot of delightful strangers-to-friends-to-lovers action that occurs at matteo’s home in the country, and of COURSE david falls head over heels for matteo despite trying to keep him at arm’s length. it’s marriage of convenience turned True Love trope, very sweet, and once they admit everything they’re super happy together! they Still usually avoid london though, like why bother with the season when they can be at home just the two of them and david can paint matteo lounging by the creek that goes through the woods on their land instead?

i’m waiting for the season to start/keep reading this fic to get more ideas for amira and mohammed ;))) also idk what leonie is doing which kinda makes me sad....but i’m sure it is gay, involves sara, and she’s probably being snobby and rich about it so that helps me sleep at night.

[bukstins]

"Personal Renewal"

John Gardner

Delivered to McKinsey & Company, Phoenix, AZ

November 10, 1990

I'm going to talk about "Self-Renewal." One of your most fundamental tasks is the renewal of the organizations you serve, and that usually includes persuading the top officers to accomplish a certain amount of self-renewal. But to help you think about others is not my primary mission this morning. I want to help you think about yourselves.

I take that mission very seriously, and I've written out what I have to say because I want every sentence to hit its target. I know a good deal about the kind of work you do and know how demanding it is. But I'm not going to talk about the special problems of your kind of career; I'm going to talk about some basic problems of the life cycle that will surely hit you if you're not ready for them.

I once wrote a book called "Self-Renewal" that deals with the decay and renewal of societies, organizations and individuals. I explored the question of why civilizations die and how they sometimes renew themselves, and the puzzle of why some men and women go to seed while others remain vital all of their lives. It's the latter question that I shall deal with at this time. I know that you as an individual are not going to seed. But the person seated on your right may be in fairly serious danger.

Not long ago, I read a splendid article on barnacles. I don't want to give the wrong impression of the focus of my reading interests. Sometimes days go by without my reading about barnacles, much less remembering what I read. But this article had an unforgettable opening paragraph. "The barnacle" the author explained "is confronted with an existential decision about where it's going to live. Once it decides.. . it spends the rest of its life with its head cemented to a rock.." End of quote. For a good many of us, it comes to that.

We've all seen men and women, even ones in fortunate circumstances with responsible positions who seem to run out of steam in mid career.

One must be compassionate in assessing the reasons. Perhaps life just presented them with tougher problems than they could solve. It happens. Perhaps something inflicted a major wound on their confidence or their self-esteem. Perhaps they were pulled down by the hidden resentments and grievances that grow in adult life, sometimes so luxuriantly that, like tangled vines, they immobilize the victim. You've known such people -- feeling secretly defeated, maybe somewhat sour and cynical, or perhaps just vaguely dispirited. Or maybe they just ran so hard for so long that somewhere along the line they forgot what it was they were running for.

I'm not talking about people who fail to get to the top in achievement. We can't all get to the top, and that isn't the point of life anyway. I'm talking about people who -- no matter how busy they seem to be -- have stopped learning or growing. Many of them are just going through the motions. I don't deride that. Life is hard. Just to keep on keeping on is sometimes an act of courage. But I do worry about men and women functioning far below the level of their potential.

We have to face the fact that most men and women out there in the world of work are more stale than they know, more bored than they would care to admit. Boredom is the secret ailment of large-scale organizations. Someone said to me the other day "How can I be so bored when I'm so busy?" And I said "Let me count the ways." Logan Pearsall Smith said that boredom can rise to the level of a mystical experience, and if that's true I know some very busy middle level executives who are among the great mystics of all time.

We can't write off the danger of complacency, growing rigidity, imprisonment by our own comfortable habits and opinions. Look around you. How many people whom you know well -- people even younger than yourselves --are already trapped in fixed attitudes and habits. A famous French writer said "There are people whose clocks stop at a certain point in their lives." I could without any trouble name a half of a dozen national figures resident in Washington, D.C., whom you would recognize, and could tell you roughly the year their clock stopped. I won't do it because I still have to deal with them periodically.

I've watched a lot of mid-career people, and Yogi Berra says you can observe a lot just by watching. I've concluded that most people enjoy learning and growing. And many are dearly troubled by the self-assessments of mid-career.

Such self-assessments are no great problem at your age. You're young and moving up. The drama of your own rise is enough. But when you reach middle age, when your energies aren't what they used to be, then you'll begin to wonder what it all added up to; you'll begin to look for the figure in the carpet of your life. I have some simple advice for you when you begin that process. Don't be too hard on yourself. Look ahead. Someone said that "Life is the art of drawing without an eraser." And above all don't imagine that the story is over. Life has a lot of chapters.

If we are conscious of the danger of going to seed, we can resort to countervailing measures. At almost any age. You don't need to run down like an unwound clock. And if your clock is unwound, you can wind it up again. You can stay alive in every sense of the word until you fail physically. I know some pretty successful people who feel that that just isn't possible for them, that life has trapped them. But they don't really know that. Life takes unexpected turns.

I said in my book, "Self-Renewal," that we build our own prisons and serve as our own jail-keepers. I no longer completely agree with that. I still think we're our own jailkeepers, but I've concluded that our parents and the society at large have a hand in building our prisons. They create roles for us -- and self images -- that hold us captive for a long time. The individual intent on self-renewal will have to deal with ghosts of the past -- the memory of earlier failures, the remnants of childhood dramas and rebellions, accumulated grievances and resentments that have long outlived their cause. Sometimes people cling to the ghosts with something almost approaching pleasure -- but the hampering effect on growth is inescapable. As Jim Whitaker, who climbed Mount Everest, said "You never conquer the mountain, You only conquer yourself."

The more I see of human lives, the more I believe the business of growing up is much longer drawn out than we pretend. If we achieve it in our 30's, even our 40s, we're doing well. To those of you who are parents of teenagers, I can only say "Sorry about that."

There's a myth that learning is for young people. But as the proverb says, "It's what you learn after you know it all that counts." The middle years are great, great learning years. Even the years past the middle years. I took on a new job after my 77th birthday -- and I'm still learning.

Learn all your life. Learn from your failures. Learn from your successes, When you hit a spell of trouble, ask "What is it trying to teach me?" The lessons aren't always happy ones, but they keep coming. It isn't a bad idea to pause occasionally for an inward look. By midlife, most of us are accomplished fugitives from ourselves.

We learn from our jobs, from our friends and families. We learn by accepting the commitments of life, by playing the roles that life hands us (not necessarily the roles we would have chosen). We learn by growing older, by suffering, by loving, by bearing with the things we can't change, by taking risks.

The things you learn in maturity aren't simple things such as acquiring information and skills. You learn not to engage in self-destructive behavior. You leant not to burn up energy in anxiety. You discover how to manage your tensions, if you have any, which you do. You learn that self-pity and resentment are among the most toxic of drugs. You find that the world loves talent, but pays off on character.

You come to understand that most people are neither for you nor against you, they are thinking about themselves. You learn that no matter how hard you try to please, some people in this world are not going to love you, a lesson that is at first troubling and then really quite relaxing.

Those are things that are hard to learn early in life, As a rule you have to have picked up some mileage and some dents in your fenders before you understand. As Norman Douglas said "There are some things you can't learn from others. You have to pass through the fire.'

You come to terms with yourself. You finally grasp what S. N. Behrman meant when he said "At the end of every road you meet yourself." You may not get rid of all of your hang-ups, but you learn to control them to the point that you can function productively and not hurt others.

You learn the arts of mutual dependence, meeting the needs of loved ones and letting yourself need them. You can even be unaffected -- a quality that often takes years to acquire. You can achieve the simplicity that lies beyond sophistication.

You come to understand your impact on others. It's interesting that even in the first year of life you learn the impact that a variety of others have on you, but as late as middle age many people have a very imperfect understanding of the impact they themselves have on others. The hostile person keeps asking 'Why are people so hard to get along with?" In some measure we create our own environment. You may not yet grasp the power of that truth to change your life.

Of course failures are a part of the story too. Everyone fails, Joe Louis said "Everyone has to figure to get beat some time." The question isn't did you fail but did you pick yourself up and move ahead? And there is one other little question: 'Did you collaborate in your own defeat?" A lot of people do. Learn not to.

One of the enemies of sound, lifelong motivation is a rather childish conception we have of the kind of concrete, describable goal toward which all of our efforts drive us. We want to believe that there is a point at which we can feel that we have arrived. We want a scoring system that tells us when we've piled up enough points to count ourselves successful.

So you scramble and sweat and climb to reach what you thought was the goal. When you get to the top you stand up and look around and chances are you feel a little empty. Maybe more than a little empty.

You wonder whether you climbed the wrong mountain.

But life isn't a mountain that has a summit, Nor is it -- as some suppose -- a riddle that has an answer. Nor a game that has a final score.

Life is an endless unfolding, and if we wish it to be, an endless process of self-discovery, an endless and unpredictable dialogue between our own potentialities and the life situations in which we find ourselves. By potentialities I mean not just intellectual gifts but the full range of one's capacities for learning, sensing, wondering, understanding, loving and aspiring.

Perhaps you imagine that by age 35 or 45 or even 33 you have explored those potentialities pretty fully. Don't kid yourself!

The thing you have to understand is that the capacities you actually develop to the full come out as the result of an interplay between you and life's challenges --and the challenges keep changing. Life pulls things out of you.

There's something I know about you that you may or may not know about yourself. You have within you more resources of energy than have ever been tapped, more talent than has ever been exploited, more strength than has ever been tested, more to give than you have ever given.

You know about some of the gifts that you have left undeveloped. Would you believe that you have gifts and possibilities you don't even know about? It's true. We are just beginning to recognize how even those who have had every advantage and opportunity unconsciously put a ceiling on their own growth, underestimate their potentialities or hide from the risk that growth involves.

Now I've discussed renewal at some length, but it isn't possible to talk about renewal without touching on the subject of motivation. Someone defined horse sense as the good judgment horses have that prevents them from betting on people. But we have to bet on people -- and I place my bets more often on high motivation than on any other quality except judgment. There is no perfection of techniques that will substitute for the lift of spirit and heightened performance that comes from strong motivation, The world is moved by highly motivated people, by enthusiasts, by men and women who want something very much or believe very much.

I'm not talking about anything as narrow as ambition. After all, ambition eventually wears out and probably should. But you can keep your zest until the day you die. If I may offer you a simple maxim, "Be interesting," Everyone wants to be interesting -- but the vitalizing thing is to be interested. Keep a sense of curiosity. Discover new things. Care. Risk failure. Reach out.

The nature of one's personal commitments is a powerful element in renewal, so let me say a word on that subject.

I once lived in a house where I could look out a window as I worked at my desk and observe a small herd of cattle browsing in a neighboring field. And I was struck with a thought that must have occurred to the earliest herdsmen tens of thousands of years ago. You never get the impression that a cow is about to have a nervous breakdown. Or is puzzling about the meaning of life.

Humans have never mastered that kind of complacency. We are worriers and puzzlers, and we want meaning in our lives. I'm not speaking idealistically; I'm stating a plainly observable fact about men and women. It's a rare person who can go through life like a homeless alley cat, living from day to day, taking its pleasures where it can and dying unnoticed.

That isn't to say that we haven't all known a few alley cats. But it isn't the norm. It just isn't the way we're built.

As Robert Louis Stevenson said, "Old or young, we're on our last cruise." We want it to mean something.

For many this life is a vale of tears; for no one is it free of pain. But we are so designed that we can cope with it if we can live in some context of meaning. Given that powerful help, we can draw on the deep springs of the human spirit, to see our suffering in the framework of all human suffering, to accept the gifts of life with thanks and endure life's indignities with dignity.

In the stable periods of history, meaning was supplied in the context of a coherent communities and traditionally prescribed patterns of culture. Today you can't count on any such heritage. You have to build meaning into your life, and you build it through your commitments -- whether to your religion, to an ethical order as you conceive it, to your life's work, to loved ones, to your fellow humans. Young people run around searching for identity, but it isn't handed out free any more -- not in this transient, rootless, pluralistic society. Your identity is what you've committed yourself to.

It may just mean doing a better job at whatever you're doing. There are men and women who make the world better just by being the kind of people they are --and that too is a kind of commitment. They have the gift of kindness or courage or loyalty or integrity. It matters very little whether they're behind the wheel of a truck or running a country store or bringing up a family.

I must pause to say a word about my statement "There are men and women who make the world better just by being the kind of people they are." I first wrote the sentence some years ago and it has been widely quoted. One day I was looking through a mail order gift catalogue and it included some small ornamental bronze plaques with brief sayings on them, and one of the sayings was the one I just read to you, with my name as author. Well I was so overcome by the idea of a sentence of mine being cast in bronze that I ordered it, but then couldn't figure out what in the world to do with it. I finally sent it to a friend.

We tend to think of youth and the active middle years as the years of commitment. As you get a little older, you're told you've earned the right to think about yourself. But that's a deadly prescription! People of every age need commitments beyond the self, need the meaning that commitments provide. Self-preoccupation is a prison, as every self-absorbed person finally knows. Commitments to larger purposes can get you out of prison.

Another significant ingredient in motivation is one's attitude toward the future. Optimism is unfashionable today, particularly among intellectuals. Everyone makes fun of it. Someone said "Pessimists got that way by financing optimists." But I am not pessimistic and I advise you not to be. As the fellow said, "I'd be a pessimist but it would never work."

I can tell you that for renewal, a tough-minded optimism is best. The future is not shaped by people who don't really believe in the future. Men and women of vitality have always been prepared to bet their futures, even their lives, on ventures of unknown outcome. If they had all looked before they leaped, we would still be crouched in caves sketching animal pictures on the wall,

But I did say tough-minded optimism. High hopes that are dashed by the first failure are precisely what we don't need. We have to believe in ourselves, but we mustn't suppose that the path will be easy, it's tough. Life is painful, and rain falls on the just, and Mr. Churchill was not being a pessimist when he said "I have nothing to offer, but blood, toil, tears and sweat." He had a great deal more to offer, but as a good leader he was saying it wasn't going to be easy, and he was also saying something that all great leaders say constantly -- that failure is simply a reason to strengthen resolve.

We cannot dream of a Utopia in which all arrangements are ideal and everyone is flawless. Life is tumultuous -- an endless losing and regaining of balance, a continuous struggle, never an assured victory.

Nothing is ever finally safe. Every important battle is fought and re-fought. We need to develop a resilient, indomitable morale that enables us to face those realities and still strive with every ounce of energy to prevail. You may wonder if such a struggle -- endless and of uncertain outcome -- isn't more than humans can bear. But all of history suggests that the human spirit is well fitted to cope with just that kind of world.

Remember I mentioned earlier the myth that learning is for young people. I want to give you some examples, In a piece I wrote for Reader's Digest not long ago, I gave what seemed to me a particularly interesting true example of renewal. The man in question was 53 years old. Most of his adult life had been a losing struggle against debt and misfortune. In military service he received a battlefield injury that denied him the use of his left arm. And he was seized and held in captivity for five years. Later he held two government jobs, succeeding at neither. At 53 he was in prison -- and not for the first time. There in prison, he decided to write a book, driven by Heaven knows what motive -- boredom, the hope of gain, emotional release, creative impulse, who can say? And the book turned out to be one of the greatest ever written, a book that has enthralled the world for ever 350 years. The prisoner was Cervantes; the book: Don Quixote.

Another example was Pope John XXIII, a serious man who found a lot to laugh about. The son of peasant farmers, he once said "In Italy there are three roads to poverty -- drinking, gambling and fanning. My family chose the slowest of the three." When someone asked him how many people worked in the Vatican he said "Oh, about half." He was 76 years old when he was elected Pope. Through a lifetime in the bureaucracy, the spark of spirit and imagination had remained undimmed, and when he reached the top he launched the most vigorous renewal that the Church has known in this century.

Still another example is Winston Churchill. At age 25, as a correspondent in the Boer War he became a prisoner of war and his dramatic escape made him a national hero. Elected to Parliament at 26, he performed brilliantly, held high cabinet posts with distinction and at 37 became First Lord of the Admiralty. Then he was discredited, unjustly, I believe, by the Dardanelles expedition -- the defeat at Gallipoli-- and lost his admiralty post. There followed 24 years of ups and downs. All too often the verdict on him was "Brilliant but erratic...not steady, not dependable." He had only himself to blame. A friend described him as a man who jaywalked through life. He was 66 before his moment of flowering came. Someone said "It's all right to be a late bloomer if you don't miss the flower show." Churchill didn't miss it.

Well, I won't give you any more examples. From those I've given I hope it's clear to you that the door of opportunity doesn't really close as long as you're reasonably healthy. And I don't just mean opportunity for high status, but opportunity to grow and enrich your life in every dimension. You just don't know what's ahead for you. And remember the words on the bronze plaque "Some men and women make the world better just by being the kind of people they are." To be that kind of person would be worth all the years of living and learning.

Many years ago I concluded a speech with a paragraph on the meaning in life. The speech was reprinted over the years, and 15 years later that final paragraph came back to me in a rather dramatic way, really a heartbreaking way.

A man wrote to me from Colorado saying that his 20 year-old daughter had been killed in an auto accident some weeks before and that she was carrying in her billfold a paragraph from a speech of mine. He said he was grateful because the paragraph -- and the fact that she kept it close to her -- told him something he might not otherwise have known about her values and concerns. I can't imagine where or how she came across the paragraph, but here it is:

"Meaning is not something you stumble across, like the answer to a riddle or the prize in a treasure hunt. Meaning is something you build into your life. You build it out of your own past, out of your affections and loyalties, out of the experience of humankind as it is passed on to you, out of your own talent and understanding, out of the things you believe in, out of the things and people you love, out of the values for which you are willing to sacrifice something. The ingredients are there. You are the only one who can put them together into that unique pattern that will be your life. Let it be a life that has dignity and meaning for you. If it does, then the particular balance of success or failure is of less account."

[omg-ben-blog]

Personal Renewal, by John Gardner

Delivered to McKinsey & Company, Phoenix, AZ

November 10, 1990

Transcript

I’m going to talk about “Self-Renewal.” One of your most fundamental tasks is the renewal of the organizations you serve, and that usually includes persuading the top officers to accomplish a certain amount of self-renewal. But to help you think about others is not my primary mission this morning. I want to help you think about yourselves.

I take that mission very seriously, and I’ve written out what I have to say because I want every sentence to hit its target. I know a good deal about the kind of work you do and know how demanding it is. But I’m not going to talk about the special problems of your kind of career; I’m going to talk about some basic problems of the life cycle that will surely hit you if you’re not ready for them.

I once wrote a book called “Self-Renewal” that deals with the decay and renewal of societies, organizations and individuals. I explored the question of why civilizations die and how they sometimes renew themselves, and the puzzle of why some men and women go to seed while others remain vital all of their lives. It’s the latter question that I shall deal with at this time. I know that you as an individual are not going to seed. But the person seated on your right may be in fairly serious danger.

Not long ago, I read a splendid article on barnacles. I don’t want to give the wrong impression of the focus of my reading interests. Sometimes days go by without my reading about barnacles, much less remembering what I read. But this article had an unforgettable opening paragraph. “The barnacle” the author explained “is confronted with an existential decision about where it’s going to live. Once it decides… it spends the rest of its life with its head cemented to a rock..” End of quote. For a good many of us, it comes to that.

We’ve all seen men and women, even ones in fortunate circumstances with responsible positions who seem to run out of steam in midcareer.

One must be compassionate in assessing the reasons. Perhaps life just presented them with tougher problems than they could solve. It happens. Perhaps something inflicted a major wound on their confidence or their self-esteem. Perhaps they were pulled down by the hidden resentments and grievances that grow in adult life, sometimes so luxuriantly that, like tangled vines, they immobilize the victim. You’ve known such people — feeling secretly defeated, maybe somewhat sour and cynical, or perhaps just vaguely dispirited. Or maybe they just ran so hard for so long that somewhere along the line they forgot what it was they were running for.

I’m not talking about people who fail to get to the top in achievement. We can’t all get to the top, and that isn’t the point of life anyway. I’m talking about people who — no matter how busy they seem to be — have stopped learning or growing. Many of them are just going through the motions. I don’t deride that. Life is hard. Just to keep on keeping on is sometimes an act of courage. But I do worry about men and women functioning far below the level of their potential.

We have to face the fact that most men and women out there in the world of work are more stale than they know, more bored than they would care to admit. Boredom is the secret ailment of large-scale organizations. Someone said to me the other day “How can I be so bored when I’m so busy?” And I said, “Let me count the ways.” Logan Pearsall Smith said that boredom can rise to the level of a mystical experience, and if that’s true I know some very busy middle-level executives who are among the great mystics of all time.

We can’t write off the danger of complacency, growing rigidity, imprisonment by our own comfortable habits and opinions. Look around you. How many people whom you know well — people even younger than yourselves –are already trapped in fixed attitudes and habits. A famous French writer said “There are people whose clocks stop at a certain point in their lives.” I could without any trouble name a half of a dozen national figures resident in Washington, D.C., whom you would recognize, and could tell you roughly the year their clock stopped. I won’t do it because I still have to deal with them periodically.

I’ve watched a lot of mid-career people, and Yogi Berra says you can observe a lot just by watching. I’ve concluded that most people enjoy learning and growing. And many are dearly troubled by the self-assessments of mid-career.

Such self-assessments are no great problem at your age. You’re young and moving up. The drama of your own rise is enough. But when you reach middle age, when your energies aren’t what they used to be, then you’ll begin to wonder what it all added up to; you’ll begin to look for the figure in the carpet of your life. I have some simple advice for you when you begin that process. Don’t be too hard on yourself. Look ahead. Someone said that “Life is the art of drawing without an eraser.” And above all don’t imagine that the story is over. Life has a lot of chapters.

If we are conscious of the danger of going to seed, we can resort to countervailing measures. At almost any age. You don’t need to run down like an unwound clock. And if your clock is unwound, you can wind it up again. You can stay alive in every sense of the word until you fail physically. I know some pretty successful people who feel that that just isn’t possible for them, that life has trapped them. But they don’t really know that. Life takes unexpected turns.

I said in my book, “Self-Renewal,” that we build our own prisons and serve as our own jail-keepers. I no longer completely agree with that. I still think we’re our own jailkeepers, but I’ve concluded that our parents and the society at large have a hand in building our prisons. They create roles for us — and self-images — that hold us captive for a long time. The individual intent on self-renewal will have to deal with ghosts of the past — the memory of earlier failures, the remnants of childhood dramas and rebellions, accumulated grievances and resentments that have long outlived their cause. Sometimes people cling to the ghosts with something almost approaching pleasure — but the hampering effect on growth is inescapable. As Jim Whitaker, who climbed Mount Everest, said “You never conquer the mountain, You only conquer yourself.”

The more I see of human lives, the more I believe the business of growing up is much longer drawn out than we pretend. If we achieve it in our 30’s, even our 40s, we’re doing well. To those of you who are parents of teenagers, I can only say “Sorry about that.”

There’s a myth that learning is for young people. But as the proverb says, “It’s what you learn after you know it all that counts.” The middle years are great, great learning years. Even the years past the middle years. I took on a new job after my 77th birthday — and I’m still learning.

Learn all your life. Learn from your failures. Learn from your successes, When you hit a spell of trouble, ask “What is it trying to teach me?” The lessons aren’t always happy ones, but they keep coming. It isn’t a bad idea to pause occasionally for an inward look. By midlife, most of us are accomplished fugitives from ourselves.

We learn from our jobs, from our friends and families. We learn by accepting the commitments of life, by playing the roles that life hands us (not necessarily the roles we would have chosen). We learn by growing older, by suffering, by loving, by bearing with the things we can’t change, by taking risks.

The things you learn in maturity aren’t simple things such as acquiring information and skills. You learn not to engage in self-destructive behavior. You learn not to burn up energy in anxiety. You discover how to manage your tensions, if you have any, which you do. You learn that self-pity and resentment are among the most toxic of drugs. You find that the world loves talent, but pays off on character.

You come to understand that most people are neither for you nor against you, they are thinking about themselves. You learn that no matter how hard you try to please, some people in this world are not going to love you, a lesson that is at first troubling and then really quite relaxing.

Those are things that are hard to learn early in life, As a rule, you have to have picked up some mileage and some dents in your fenders before you understand. As Norman Douglas said “There are some things you can’t learn from others. You have to pass through the fire.’

You come to terms with yourself. You finally grasp what S. N. Behrman meant when he said: “At the end of every road you meet yourself.” You may not get rid of all of your hang-ups, but you learn to control them to the point that you can function productively and not hurt others.

You learn the arts of mutual dependence, meeting the needs of loved ones and letting yourself need them. You can even be unaffected — a quality that often takes years to acquire. You can achieve the simplicity that lies beyond sophistication.

You come to understand your impact on others. It’s interesting that even in the first year of life you learn the impact that a variety of others have on you, but as late as middle age many people have a very imperfect understanding of the impact they themselves have on others. The hostile person keeps asking ‘Why are people so hard to get along with?” In some measure, we create our own environment. You may not yet grasp the power of that truth to change your life.

Of course, failures are a part of the story too. Everyone fails, Joe Louis said, “Everyone has to figure to get beat some time.” The question isn’t did you fail but did you pick yourself up and move ahead? And there is one other little question: ‘Did you collaborate in your own defeat?” A lot of people do. Learn not to.

One of the enemies of sound, lifelong motivation is a rather childish conception we have of the kind of concrete, describable goal toward which all of our efforts drive us. We want to believe that there is a point at which we can feel that we have arrived. We want a scoring system that tells us when we’ve piled up enough points to count ourselves successful.

So you scramble and sweat and climb to reach what you thought was the goal. When you get to the top you stand up and look around and chances are you feel a little empty. Maybe more than a little empty.

You wonder whether you climbed the wrong mountain.

But life isn’t a mountain that has a summit, Nor is it — as some suppose — a riddle that has an answer. Nor a game that has a final score.

Life is an endless unfolding, and if we wish it to be, an endless process of self-discovery, an endless and unpredictable dialogue between our own potentialities and the life situations in which we find ourselves. By potentialities I mean not just intellectual gifts but the full range of one’s capacities for learning, sensing, wondering, understanding, loving and aspiring.

Perhaps you imagine that by age 35 or 45 or even 33 you have explored those potentialities pretty fully. Don’t kid yourself!

The thing you have to understand is that the capacities you actually develop to the full come out as the result of an interplay between you and life’s challenges –and the challenges keep changing. Life pulls things out of you.

There’s something I know about you that you may or may not know about yourself. You have within you more resources of energy than have ever been tapped, more talent than has ever been exploited, more strength than has ever been tested, more to give than you have ever given.

You know about some of the gifts that you have left undeveloped. Would you believe that you have gifts and possibilities you don’t even know about? It’s true. We are just beginning to recognize how even those who have had every advantage and opportunity unconsciously put a ceiling on their own growth, underestimate their potentialities or hide from the risk that growth involves.

Now I’ve discussed renewal at some length, but it isn’t possible to talk about renewal without touching on the subject of motivation. Someone defined horse sense as the good judgment horses have that prevents them from betting on people. But we have to bet on people — and I place my bets more often on high motivation than on any other quality except judgment. There is no perfection of techniques that will substitute for the lift of spirit and heightened performance that comes from strong motivation, The world is moved by highly motivated people, by enthusiasts, by men and women who want something very much or believe very much.

I’m not talking about anything as narrow as ambition. After all, ambition eventually wears out and probably should. But you can keep your zest until the day you die. If I may offer you a simple maxim, “Be interesting,” Everyone wants to be interesting — but the vitalizing thing is to be interested. Keep a sense of curiosity. Discover new things. Care. Risk failure. Reach out.

The nature of one’s personal commitments is a powerful element in renewal, so let me say a word on that subject.

I once lived in a house where I could look out a window as I worked at my desk and observe a small herd of cattle browsing in a neighboring field. And I was struck with a thought that must have occurred to the earliest herdsmen tens of thousands of years ago. You never get the impression that a cow is about to have a nervous breakdown. Or is puzzling about the meaning of life.

Humans have never mastered that kind of complacency. We are worriers and puzzlers, and we want meaning in our lives. I’m not speaking idealistically; I’m stating a plainly observable fact about men and women. It’s a rare person who can go through life like a homeless alley cat, living from day to day, taking its pleasures where it can and dying unnoticed.

That isn’t to say that we haven’t all known a few alley cats. But it isn’t the norm. It just isn’t the way we’re built.

As Robert Louis Stevenson said, “Old or young, we’re on our last cruise.” We want it to mean something.

For many this life is a vale of tears; for no one is it free of pain. But we are so designed that we can cope with it if we can live in some context of meaning. Given that powerful help, we can draw on the deep springs of the human spirit, to see our suffering in the framework of all human suffering, to accept the gifts of life with thanks and endure life’s indignities with dignity.

In the stable periods of history, meaning was supplied in the context of a coherent communities and traditionally prescribed patterns of culture. Today you can’t count on any such heritage. You have to build meaning into your life, and you build it through your commitments — whether to your religion, to an ethical order as you conceive it, to your life’s work, to loved ones, to your fellow humans. Young people run around searching for identity, but it isn’t handed out free any more — not in this transient, rootless, pluralistic society. Your identity is what you’ve committed yourself to.

It may just mean doing a better job at whatever you’re doing. There are men and women who make the world better just by being the kind of people they are –and that too is a kind of commitment. They have the gift of kindness or courage or loyalty or integrity. It matters very little whether they’re behind the wheel of a truck or running a country store or bringing up a family.

I must pause to say a word about my statement “There are men and women who make the world better just by being the kind of people they are.” I first wrote the sentence some years ago and it has been widely quoted. One day I was looking through a mail order gift catalogue and it included some small ornamental bronze plaques with brief sayings on them, and one of the sayings was the one I just read to you, with my name as author. Well I was so overcome by the idea of a sentence of mine being cast in bronze that I ordered it, but then couldn’t figure out what in the world to do with it. I finally sent it to a friend.

We tend to think of youth and the active middle years as the years of commitment. As you get a little older, you’re told you’ve earned the right to think about yourself. But that’s a deadly prescription! People of every age need commitments beyond the self, need the meaning that commitments provide. Self-preoccupation is a prison, as every self-absorbed person finally knows. Commitments to larger purposes can get you out of prison.

Another significant ingredient in motivation is one’s attitude toward the future. Optimism is unfashionable today, particularly among intellectuals. Everyone makes fun of it. Someone said “Pessimists got that way by financing optimists.” But I am not pessimistic and I advise you not to be. As the fellow said, “I’d be a pessimist but it would never work.”

I can tell you that for renewal, a tough-minded optimism is best. The future is not shaped by people who don’t really believe in the future. Men and women of vitality have always been prepared to bet their futures, even their lives, on ventures of unknown outcome. If they had all looked before they leaped, we would still be crouched in caves sketching animal pictures on the wall,

But I did say tough-minded optimism. High hopes that are dashed by the first failure are precisely what we don’t need. We have to believe in ourselves, but we mustn’t suppose that the path will be easy, it’s tough. Life is painful, and rain falls on the just, and Mr. Churchill was not being a pessimist when he said “I have nothing to offer, but blood, toil, tears and sweat.” He had a great deal more to offer, but as a good leader he was saying it wasn’t going to be easy, and he was also saying something that all great leaders say constantly — that failure is simply a reason to strengthen resolve.

We cannot dream of a Utopia in which all arrangements are ideal and everyone is flawless. Life is tumultuous — an endless losing and regaining of balance, a continuous struggle, never an assured victory.

Nothing is ever finally safe. Every important battle is fought and re-fought. We need to develop a resilient, indomitable morale that enables us to face those realities and still strive with every ounce of energy to prevail. You may wonder if such a struggle — endless and of uncertain outcome — isn’t more than humans can bear. But all of history suggests that the human spirit is well fitted to cope with just that kind of world.

Remember I mentioned earlier the myth that learning is for young people. I want to give you some examples, In a piece I wrote for Reader’s Digest not long ago, I gave what seemed to me a particularly interesting true example of renewal. The man in question was 53 years old. Most of his adult life had been a losing struggle against debt and misfortune. In military service, he received a battlefield injury that denied him the use of his left arm. And he was seized and held in captivity for five years. Later he held two government jobs, succeeding at neither. At 53 he was in prison — and not for the first time. There in prison, he decided to write a book, driven by Heaven knows what motive — boredom, the hope of gain, emotional release, creative impulse, who can say? And the book turned out to be one of the greatest ever written, a book that has enthralled the world for over 350 years. The prisoner was Cervantes; the book: Don Quixote.

Another example was Pope John XXIII, a serious man who found a lot to laugh about. The son of peasant farmers, he once said “In Italy there are three roads to poverty — drinking, gambling and farming. My family chose the slowest of the three.” When someone asked him how many people worked in the Vatican he said “Oh, about half.” He was 76 years old when he was elected Pope. Through a lifetime in the bureaucracy, the spark of spirit and imagination had remained undimmed, and when he reached the top he launched the most vigorous renewal that the Church has known in this century.

Still another example is Winston Churchill. At age 25, as a correspondent in the Boer War he became a prisoner of war and his dramatic escape made him a national hero. Elected to Parliament at 26, he performed brilliantly, held high cabinet posts with distinction and at 37 became First Lord of the Admiralty. Then he was discredited, unjustly, I believe, by the Dardanelles expedition — the defeat at Gallipoli– and lost his admiralty post. There followed 24 years of ups and downs. All too often the verdict on him was “Brilliant but erratic…not steady, not dependable.” He had only himself to blame. A friend described him as a man who jaywalked through life. He was 66 before his moment of flowering came. Someone said “It’s all right to be a late bloomer if you don’t miss the flower show.” Churchill didn’t miss it.

Well, I won’t give you any more examples. From those I’ve given I hope it’s clear to you that the door of opportunity doesn’t really close as long as you’re reasonably healthy. And I don’t just mean opportunity for high status, but opportunity to grow and enrich your life in every dimension. You just don’t know what’s ahead for you. And remember the words on the bronze plaque “Some men and women make the world better just by being the kind of people they are.” To be that kind of person would be worth all the years of living and learning.

Many years ago I concluded a speech with a paragraph on the meaning in life. The speech was reprinted over the years, and 15 years later that final paragraph came back to me in a rather dramatic way, really a heartbreaking way.

A man wrote to me from Colorado saying that his 20 year-old daughter had been killed in an auto accident some weeks before and that she was carrying in her billfold a paragraph from a speech of mine. He said he was grateful because the paragraph — and the fact that she kept it close to her — told him something he might not otherwise have known about her values and concerns. I can’t imagine where or how she came across the paragraph, but here it is:

“Meaning is not something you stumble across, like the answer to a riddle or the prize in a treasure hunt. Meaning is something you build into your life. You build it out of your own past, out of your affections and loyalties, out of the experience of humankind as it is passed on to you, out of your own talent and understanding, out of the things you believe in, out of the things and people you love, out of the values for which you are willing to sacrifice something. The ingredients are there. You are the only one who can put them together into that unique pattern that will be your life. Let it be a life that has dignity and meaning for you. If it does, then the particular balance of success or failure is of less account.”

Original source: PBS

[mothmancrossing]

BPD and Actually Having It

Let’s talk about 🌸BPD🌸

Borderline Personality Disorder is probably the worst diagnosis I ever received, and one of the best diagnosis too. Now that I’m diagnosed, I can fight the dragon that was always hiding below the surface under incorrect or incomplete diagnosed disorders.

To be diagnosed with BPD, you need to present an active 5 out of 9 symptoms from the DSM. These symptoms are:

🌸 Frantic efforts to avoid real or imagined abandonment.

🌸 A pattern of unstable and intense interpersonal relationships characterised by alternating between extremes of idealization and devaluation.

🌸 Identity disturbance: markedly and persistently unstable self-image or sense of self.

🌸 Impulsivity in at least two areas that are potentially self-damaging (e.g. spending, sex, substance abuse, reckless driving, binge eating). This does not include suicidal or self-harming behaviour.

🌸 Recurrent suicidal behaviour, gestures, or threats, or self-mutilating behaviour.

🌸 Affective instability due to a marked reactivity of mood - intense feelings that can last from a few hours to a few days.

🌸 Chronic feelings of emptiness.

🌸 Inappropriate intense anger or difficulty controlling anger.

🌸 Transient, stress-related paranoid ideas or severe dissociative symptoms.

How many do I present out of the DSM? I present all nine. All nine. Let’s break some of these down.

I constantly feel as though I’m about to be abandoned. I was once, legitimately, due to my self destructive behavior. No matter who it is, friends, partners, my own parents- I’m constantly afraid, “They hate me, they’re going to leave me.” “I shouldn’t have made that joke, they hate me now.” And of course the all too common BPD cry, “I can’t let you leave- I’ll hurt/kill myself if you leave!!!” Luckily I’ve learned to manage this. I know that my parents and partners, if they wanted me gone, would tell it to my face. I know they love me, and I love them.

The second symptom can be described as “Splitting,” where one moment you think someone is great, and the next you hate them. This can happen at the drop of a hat. I’ve seen people with BPD start to abuse their partners out of nowhere, screaming at them, sending horrible angry texts, crying and yelling that they’re terrible and they don’t really love them, angrily typing away about how they prefer their friend or their other partner or their pet over the one they’re splitting on, only to beg for forgiveness later. Splitting isn’t fun. Splitting is probably my least favorite symptom of this hellish disease. I’d like to think I’ve never lashed out quite as extremely, but I’ve definitely lashed out. It’s better now, so much better now. Between meds that help stabilize my moods and the DBT therapy, I can recognize when my dragon wants to make me think I hate someone that I know for damn sure I don’t hate. It’s an incredibly difficult symptom to reign in, and I’ve even seen some people -to my horror- embrace the instability.

Self destruction! My favorite! A while ago I admitted to my mom that I was a smoker. I used to smoke cigarillos because I’m a snob and cigarettes taste terrible, but I still wanted the nicotine. I would spend a lot of money on smoking. Now I occasionally will hit my vape, and the nicotine level is very low thankfully. I also used to drink. My partner would come home to me crying, a mess on the floor clutching a vodka bottle that had been full this morning and was now half empty. I don’t drink anymore, period. It affects my meds, and overall I don’t need it. I’m depressed as it is, and taking a depressant when I’m working as hard as I am to not be depressed is a waste. I often think about killing my self, usually in a passive way where I have no motivation to act on it, but there are times when something -usually something small and stupid- strikes a cord and I want to throw myself from the overpass into I-5 traffic. DBT has helped a lot with those thoughts. It’s helped me learn to love myself and smack that dragon in the snout whenever it starts whispering in my ear about suicide.

I experience what’s called “mania” or “manic episodes.” They’re not that fun. My ego swells up, my impulsivity sky rockets, I engage in a bunch of stupid shit, push everyone away from me laughing the whole time, and then I crash into the largest pit of depression afterwords. I got my most recent piercing in a manic episode where I NEEDED to get hurt ASAP. I needed to spend money ASAP. I shaved my head and did a bunch of other stupid shit once and that too blew up in my face. After the mania is over, I collapse into a heap going “good god what have I done kill me now.” Mania also manifests in anger. Usually the kind where it goes, “I’m SO GREAT!! So great! Better than all of you, actually!!! God shut up! When did you all become so fucking annoying?! SHUT UP! I LOVE HATING YOU SO SHUT UP!!!” The mania is treated through a combination of meds, DBT, and meditation. I haven’t had an extreme episode in some time. I aim to keep it that way.

🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸

BPD has a terrible stigma of being the “abuser disorder” or “manipulator disorder.” Honestly I believed that for a long time, avoiding anyone with the disorder like a plague. Then I was consequently diagnosed with it. My world shattered. I was half convinced one of my partners would leave me due to the diagnosis. I wouldn’t wish this disease on anyone. There are no black and white emotions. There’s no inbetween, no mediums, no grey areas on how you feel. Emotions are extreme all the time, the paranoia, the fear, it’s all so overwhelming and it never stops being overwhelming. There’s no real excuse to not get treatment for this disorder because it will destroy your life if you let it. With my help it nearly destroyed my life more than once. I can never shut up, I share too much personal information and then scare people off cuz oversharings a bitch. I can’t handle the idea of people not liking me or wanting to leave me, I need constant reassurance and validation that they don’t in fact hate me and it’s all in my head. I need my accomplishments or creations to be met with enthusiasm, or else I think you hate me and want me to go away. I need my pain to be met with loud, boisterous displays of sympathy, or else I think you don’t care. Silence is the worst. Silence means you don’t care. Not even that you hate me, you just don’t care. Etc etc etc etc. [word vomit]

🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸

BPD is a hellish disease and I refuse to call it anything but a hellish disease. I wanted to share my perspective on the disorder because I know too many sufferers who are reluctant to get help, and I know too many people who are reluctant to learn or accept BPD. BPD sufferers aren’t crazy. We feel so much more intensely than neurotypicals do. We can hurt more intensely sure, but we also love more intensely! We’re amazing with babies, we can be incredible lovers and artists, we can be amazing friends and partners too. We just need a little extra patience, and a little extra push to get the help we need sometimes. We ourselves need to be better about learning and managing our disorder too. So many of us are still in the dark about our own symptoms and available treatments because of the stigma. As black and white as the world looks to us, it’s truly a two way street.

I’ve gotten really good at dragon taming, and I’ve got this beast by the horns.

[littledragonlily]

TMI: Oversharing

((Trigger warning: mentions of self harm, r@pe, abuse, drugs, alcohol, suicide, body dysmorphia, mental illness, ...um, a lot, actually, so please please think about this before reading ahead. My life's a mess tbh. Will put an * (or many, if bad bad) by the numbers of anything with potentially bad triggers just in case..)) Credit to one of my mutuals, after reading their oversharing post, I felt like writing my own might actually be cathartic for me, so thank you mutual (no name callout because they may not be comfortable with that). 1. I actually have zero idea about who I am when I'm on my own. I've felt this way for years and only recently has it been recognized/taken seriously. 2. My father and three siblings are all on the autism spectrum in varying degrees. The question hangs if I am too, I show similar signs, but I don't care enough to find out. 3. I cycle through obsessive behaviors. Collecting things, couponing, certain games; luckily it has never landed on an unhealthy addiction so far, but it scares me that it might. 4*. I have been self destructive for 7+ years. (For clarification, I'm 21 going on 22 currently.) My arm is white lines and long story short, I cannot wear shorts above my knees anytime soon, or anything less than a one-piece bathing suit to cover my torso. 5*. My arms are healed because I was relentlessly picked on by an abusive ex and my own father when I wore it on my sleeves, so to speak.. I hide it now. My dad still doesn't know I started doing it again and I plan on keeping it that way. 6****. Callout to my ex I mentioned above. Because of him, I get ptsd episodes if I'm under the water even a second too long, forbid I'm being held down even playfully. He took whatever he wanted, including my current peace of mind in relationships. I've been trying to escape the damage he caused for 5 years. 7****. Callout to friends/another ex I trusted that would not take no for an answer, especially the one that took me as I cried for him to stop. 8*. By all normative standards, I'm wickedly smart. I had the military branches beating down my door from my perfect aptitude test scores (no studying, mind you, I wing tests), and if not for mental issues stealing my motivation to try, I could've been in my top ten graduating from high school easily. However..no one wants to take a damaged "genius" so..yeah. 9. I have so so so many ideas of what I want to do with my life, but I'm viciously afraid of stepping foot outside of my not-so-comfy-but-good-enough bubble. 10*. I am professionally diagnosed with major depressive disorder, general anxiety disorder, and dependent personality disorder. That list may grow when I actually trust the psychiatrist enough to tell them Everything™. 11. If I don't push myself to hang out with my friends/favorite people, and it has to be because THEY want ME, I will quite literally spend all day in my bed during my time off. Even finding the motivation to clean my room and pay my bills (spoiler, I usually don't) is just..improbable. 12*. I have two, count them one-two, people that are even close to knowing Everything™ about me. (Unfortunate spoiler: they've both done things that they sometimes use against each other to make me question my faith in them.) I love them both, which causes me immense guilt because they both want to keep me Forever™ (also know to me as until they get tired of my..Me-ness.) and right now I'm just wondering how long of Forever™ I'll actually be alive for. 13. Speaking of immense guilt, hi, it's because I've hurt mentioned people both more than they admit to. I didn't mean to I'm sorry I really didn't just I just how do you not depend on someone that you were engaged to but also how do you not depend on someone that actually gets you and is your carer and you actually get along with everyone in their system and ahhhh fjdjfhdjrbd I'm sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry.. 14. Sorry, sorry.. I'm back. Kinda? Anyway.. I feel like a split person, kinda. I have different aspects of myself that handle different things and I have names for them, but I would NOT call myself a system at this point, I would just say I am compartmentalizing and personifying certain aspects of my personality. It just feels easier, yeah? I try to stick to the ones people love best (Mama(carer)-me, Lily(regressed)-me, and Belle(work)-me). My carer is the only person "acquainted" with all of Me™ by name. 15. I only always get along with one person in my house, which is my little sister, Hannah. She has a degenerative disorder and has her own special way of communicating. But as far as I can tell, I'm one of her favorite people, and that makes me super happy actually. 16. So I got derailed on number 13 because that's such a touchy subject. Mostly because I'm forced to choose between the two of them because of societal norms/their feelings/some other reasons here, and in my head and heart I'm so dependent on them both it hurts. (Lately, however, I've been more dependent on my carer.) 17****. Possible reasons I shouldn't be dependent on ex-fiancé person: Has hit me in a "black-out rage" previously (isolated, non-recurring, however I have my days of questioning would I trigger that again..), can be incredibly argumentative if my word choice is incorrect expressing my issues (bad to the point it has triggered me to self-harm), and has forced my indecisive self into making a decision in the midst of a six-hour crying/panicked episode. Also can be neglectful as a person to depend on at times, a little more self-centered than he realizes most of the time, etc. 18****. Possible reasons I shouldn't be dependent on my carer person: Lack of respect towards a previous relationship with ex-fiancé ((as in..well.. some unloyal behavior happened while I was drunk/high/sometimes sober and it actually makes me sick that I let that happen.. I disrespected my own relationship oh god I'm horrible I never wanted to be that person I didn't mean to I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry..)(okay, okay, calmed down..)), one of his alters is notoriously angry/violent however has recently been more gentle with me after some talks about the fact that anger/arguments/violence/yelling trigger my anxiety badly (I'm a sensitive marshmallow puff y'all, sorry..), I WILL NOT HOLD HIS PAST AGAINST HIM but it sometimes gets in my head a little so I try to talk it out when it does, he does have a bit of dependence on Mary Jane (think green, not a lady) but I don't mind this so much because it's better than alcohol (I helped with that! I helped! Yay!), and there are some times when he doesn't word things well and it'll get to me but I don't see this being intentional honestly. 19*. My past trauma makes me hypersexual, and sometimes I'm incredibly disgusted with myself for being that way. Thankfully though, my regressed self is "too small" for those things and my carer does not fetishize my regressed self, so thankful for that. It is that that caused my initial confusion because I didn't understand that some communities were fetish.. ugh.. 20****. In the past year I have cycled through drinking, smoking, and pills as a short-term "dependence" (I put that in quotes because I feel as if it had been serious I would not have been able to step away so easily). Each one I have quit (drinking is social, and never anywhere near as heavy as it used to be). I occasionally smoke Mary Jane now as it is more effective than my Prozac I'm currently prescribed (will get changed soon, I hope). 21. Physically I have some liver/kidney damage (my fault), scalp psoriasis, chronic acid reflux, chronic pain (fibromyalgia), anemia, cold and hot sensitivity, spleen damage (I'm Epstein-Barr sensitive, aka unfortunately susceptible to mono), and something I don't have a name for that makes me get incredibly weak if I don't have a steady intake of sugar during the day.. (any ideas?) 22. I have a SEVERE phobia of vomit. I can handle the word, stories are iffy, but seeing/smelling/hearing it will trigger a panic attack and when i do it (which is thankfully only once every few years so far) it is incredibly painful and I will NOT eat for days. I will be absolutely food repulsed. I doubt anyone would post anything visual, but if you do and you're reading this, PLEASE I'm begging you, post a warning for me. I'll be eternally thankful. 23. Something lighthearted for once: I will not see a superhero/comic book/Nerdy™ movie that I can't go see without my dad. It's just super important to me. 24****. I hate my appearance while simultaneously being incredibly vain about it (do I make sense? No? Ok). I have dysmorphia, because I swear by a few things (I'm always too big, my skin is always bad, etc etc.) If it were not for my conditions (phobia of vomit, not being able to function without sugar), I'd most likely have an eating disorder. Instead I am in a state of limbo where I hate my body but I won't do anything negative to impact my body image. (Yay?) 25. You now know more about me than most people I know in real life, including my parents and family. Sorry it's so much, thanks for sticking around.

[ossyuche]

My Fiance May Be an Alcoholic. Should I Stay with Him?

I have followed your much-revered advice in dating and have since found and established a wonderful relationship for what I hope my fiance and I will thrive in for the rest of our lives. We just have one snag we can’t seem to get past despite even our best efforts exercising patience, generosity and kind but frank communication to one another. One evening, about a year and a half into our relationship, I discovered my boyfriend at the time, Bill, at his home, by himself, on his couch, surrounded by lots of empty beer cans. I asked Bill what was going on and he broke down in tears, saying that he thinks he has a problem with alcohol. He told me that it seems to run in his family as his father and both grandfathers were heavy problem drinkers with DUIs, as well as perpetrators of vicious, alcohol-related domestic violence. He got private counselling sessions after the incident and afterwards established new boundaries he created between himself and alcohol. No more getting drunk and no more drinking by himself outside of social situations. He asked if these boundaries made me comfortable enough to progress the relationship (which I was verging to break off) and I said yes.

Fast forward two and a half years later: as our relationship thrived, we enthusiastically got engaged and moved in together. Bill (now 32) had no slip ups drinking or getting drunk that whole duration and we could easily keep beer/wine in the fridge without worry for future social events. Life is good…but just recently he mentioned how he wanted to have a beer here and there by himself again and, I admit, I (now 27) just froze in terror. I told him I wouldn’t be comfortable given his own admittance to a past problem as well as his family history and I would prefer if he just stood by the original boundaries he made for himself 2.5 years before.

Since then he’s been calling those boundaries “My rules” and has a bitter if not resentful and embarrassed relationship with them, claiming it’s me trying to “control him.” I’m absolutely devastated and to an extent feel tricked into this place. I don’t know what to do. He says he will follow “my rules” because he would rather do that then potentially lose me, but the bitterness behind it doesn’t feel right and every time I bring it up he says something resentful and shuts the conversation down. The rest of our relationship is truly life-giving and wonderful, but I don’t know what to do. How heavily should one weigh genetics and family history when making a lifelong relationship choice. How do you know the difference between a glaring red flag and normal bumps in a relationship. Should I stay?

Longtime reader and first-time writer, Emma

That’s a rough one, my friend.

First of all, if I were you, I’d seek professional help from Al-Anon, an organization that specializes in helping friends of alcoholics. I’m just a guy with an opinion.

Looking at it from your side, it’s easy to see why you’re alarmed. You certainly don’t want to go down the road that Bill’s mother and grandmothers went down. You’re afraid for your future. You don’t like the tone Bill’s taken since his admission. You don’t want him to feel controlled but, at the same time, you don’t want to build a relationship on a risky foundation. Once an alcoholic, always an alcoholic, they say.

He may have a family history of it and may have abused it a few times in his 20’s, but that doesn’t mean he is like his father and grandfathers.

But here’s the thing: I’m not positive he’s an alcoholic. He may have a family history of it and may have abused it a few times in his 20’s, but that doesn’t mean he is like his father and grandfathers. If anything, his self-awareness allowed him to prevent a potential problem from blossoming. For this reason, I hold him in a different category than other alcoholics, like my wife’s uncle, who go to meetings twice a week and never touch a drop of alcohol, so careful they have to be to avoid falling into their old patterns.

The way you make it sound, Emma, Bill drinks somewhat like the rest of us drink – socially.

And since he seems to be in a good place with you and his relationship to booze, he’s wondering if he has to adhere to the rules he put in place a few years ago, which are pretty rigid. I, too, am a social drinker – 95% is out at parties or restaurants – but I’d be lying if I said I never had a beer or a scotch my myself. On the other hand, I’m not considered at-risk for self-destructive behavior, so perhaps the rules are not universal for all people.

Ultimately, I think there are two things to consider here:

First is how much you trust him as a man, a human being, and your future husband. If you believe in him because he did the right thing three years ago, I don’t think it’s a terrible idea to loosen the rules a little bit. If it becomes a problem, you always have the right to walk away from the relationship, but we don’t know it’s going to become a problem.

The other issue – the one I’m personally more concerned about – is the potential gaslighting that’s going on when he turns things around and says he’s living under YOUR rules. That’s revisionist history and his ability to press his case as if that’s true is not a good harbinger of a sound marriage with healthy communication. It sounds like a child, a narcissist, or, if you may, an alcoholic, who is willing to say anything to get what he wants.

I think you should have a heart-to-heart conversation with him – not as his opponent, but as his caring fiancé. Acknowledge his bravery for changing his habits a few years ago. Acknowledge that it’s probably not a big deal to have an occasional drink outside the original rules. Get him to acknowledge the reason you’re afraid of the worst-case scenario. And then bring it back to the communication piece – let him know that it feels bad when he’s giving you a guilt trip over a rule that HE imposed when he was vulnerable – a rule that was designed to preserve both his health and your relationship. Let him know that you don’t want to be the bad guy but you have to have an honest conversation about how you got here and where you go from here. His reaction to this conversation will be far more telling than whether he has a beer after work one day.

Good luck and please let us know how it goes.

The post My Fiance May Be an Alcoholic. Should I Stay with Him? appeared first on Dating Coach – Evan Marc Katz | Understand Men. Find Love..

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Original source: https://www.evanmarckatz.com/blog/understanding-men/my-fiance-may-be-an-alcoholic-should-i-stay-with-him

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The Value of a Relapse

Utter the seven-letter word relapse in recovery circles and the room grows silent. Why did it happen? How did it happen? How much sobriety did she have? How long did she stay out? If a person had years of sobriety accrued, it is expected that the clock be reset – as if they had never stopped drinking. Call me a rebel, but this is too black and white for my taste. While I realize the need to recognize and commemorate consecutive days of sobriety, recovery from addiction is rarely straightforward or neat. More often than not, it’s a messy, ongoing journey of learning and coping and healing that includes its share of falls. Relapses are a sometimes-necessary part of the adventure. In fact, I’m glad mine happened. Here’s why.

My five-day experiment

The summer before last I experimented with alcohol after 28 years of sobriety. Having quit drinking before I was legal, I always questioned whether or not I was truly an alcoholic. Maybe, I thought, my binge drinking between the ages of 15 and 18 were merely a form of high school rebellion. It seemed a valid question. I couldn’t relate to many of the testimonies in twelve-step group meetings because I hadn’t really lost anything as a result of my drinking, except for some pride after initiating a stupid cat fight under the influence.

One July evening after everyone had gone to bed, I stared at the Heinekens in the fridge. Maybe I am normal, I thought to myself. Maybe I can have the occasional cocktail and join the fun. So with shaking hands, I pulled one out of the fridge, opened the bottle, and reacquainted with my long lost friend.

Nothing terrible happened. I stopped at one. So the next night I tried it again. For the first 48 hours of my experiment it seemed as if I had joined the ranks of the social drinkers. Hallelujah! However, by day three, I began to obsess about my next drink. On day four, I smuggled a six-pack of Coors Light into a park to drink alone. On day five, I considered stopping by the liquor store to buy a bottle of vodka to keep in the trunk … you know, in case I needed a fix.

The next day, by coincidence or divine intervention, a friend who is a recovery alcoholic stopped by the house during his run. He has never done this before or since. I confessed to him the details of what I was up to and he told that he was picking me up for a meeting the next day.

A bathroom break, not a start over

“Is there anyone here with 24 hours of sobriety?” the meeting chair asked at the end. I wasn’t sure whether or not to raise my hand. As the folks in the room saw it, I had about 26 hours of sobriety. However, by my standards, I had been sober 28 years and one day. I went with their math and waltzed sheepishly to the front of the room to claim my chip.

That day was an important milestone for me. I haven’t drank since. However, I wasn’t celebrating a day of sobriety. I was commemorating all the wisdom and perseverance and courage that had kept me sober for over a quarter of a century. All the sweat and hard work of the 28 years of sobriety that preceded my 24-hour chip were on display in that moment. Nothing was lost. I don’t believe a person starts over if they pick up a drink. I view it more like a bathroom break, where you look at yourself in the mirror and ask, “What the hell am I doing?” and then resume your place in line to get a table.

Progress is uneven

Perhaps some people have linear recoveries. They drink. They stop. They find happiness and peace. But I have yet to meet such a person. The recovery patterns for most of us entail a dance of up-and-down movements, right-to-left adjustments, a pirouette and a plié – with the hope that we are moving forward. Much like a walking labyrinth that guides you out before in, recovery is typically more spiral or circular than it is square. Just when we think we’ve encroaching on home base, we are thrown out to left field.

“Progress, not perfection” rings true with all of my addictive behavior. I don’t have to get it down the first time, the second time, or even the 52nd time. Gradual baby steps towards the goal of serenity and peace are enough. On those days when I engage in codependent behavior or reach for something to relieve my pain, I remind myself that it’s not the fall but the rebound that counts. Healing consists of catching myself and trying over and over and over again, sometimes as many as 50 times a day. It’s the journey and effort that matter in recovery, not a perfect score card.

Lessons of a relapse

Relapses teach us invaluable lessons if we are open to learning. For example, before my experiment, I regarded my decision to stop drinking much like I did eliminating gluten and sugar from my diet. My relapse demonstrated the seriousness of addiction, that sobriety is a life-saving action, not a healthy choice. Abstaining from a cocktail isn’t in the same category as foregoing a brownie or piece of bread. For addicts, alcohol hijacks your brain, whispering false promises in your ears. If you’re not careful, the self-destruction can erode all aspects of your life.

My relapse also taught me that abstinence isn’t about willpower and discipline. It has nothing to do with personal character or emotional resilience. Recovery is about humility, about admitting powerlessness and relying on other people and a higher power for strength and guidance. The healing power is found in the shared experience of others, in tapping into a community of support.

The pain underneath the addiction

I dare say that my relapse was life-transforming in that it forced me to discover what was driving the addiction. I began intensive psychotherapy and probed more deeply into every aspect of my life, asking the question, What’s going on here? My soul-searching efforts resulted in a stronger sense of self. As a result I can better identify the pain that makes me susceptible to addictive behavior.

I’m certainly not saying relapse is all good. Some people can’t get clean again after they start drinking or reengage in an addiction. It is a risk, for sure. However, if you are able to end your addiction and return to recovery, relapse can open the door to a better understanding of your addiction and, therefore, to a stronger recovery. I don’t believe you start over if you pick up a drink. I believe you pause and begin again with a new perspective.

from World of Psychology https://psychcentral.com/blog/the-value-of-a-relapse/