Key notes:
It’s always a crapshoot what proportion of these free workshops is the upsell, this one was mostly content till almost an hour in. I’m interested in learning more, but more like $150 interested than $350 interested 🤷‍♀️
A humorous and insightful look into what advice works, what doesn’t, and what it means to transform yourself.
I liked their format, starting with a list of “lessons” they liked from several books, then several things that didn’t work for them, then their “wishlist” of things that were missing from the oevre, which were all good ideas and ways to treat yourself kinder. That said, the chapters mostly felt too short to really reflect on the topics, and this book wound up feeling like a book report. There were some repeat offenders of bad books I now know never to pick up (most of those were titles you probably already have on that mental list), and a few new ones that sounded potentially worthwhile, but in all this was less than the sum of its parts. I’m not a podcast listener so I went into this cold.
On social events: “I call it my seventy-five-minute rule, and it’s based on the idea that staying at an event for an hour is polite, but staying for just over an hour is better, because it looks less obviously like a time limit.”
Life has a lot of hard parts that can’t be compartmentalized or broken down. Some things just have to be done slow and steady all the time, or ignored for a while and then done all at once.
“My “looking-forward” list also reminded me of the importance of novelty. When we’re living our day-in, day-out lives, it’s easy to fall into a rut. That rut can feel comfortable. But it can also keep us from growing, being challenged, and experiencing a genuine sense of surprise in the world… As I see it, it doesn’t even matter if we do most of the things on our looking-forward lists. It’s fine if we do just a few. More important is that we’re engaging with our fantasies and keeping an eye out for new things to dream about.”
What’s empowered me most in life has been speaking out and standing up. What’s made me feel less afraid and more in control is being anything but quiet. And what’s made me feel more connected with each moment has been getting out of my head and more into the world around me.
Best-selling author and activist Sarah Wilson on using routine to bookend your days, tilting rather than abiding by strict rules, cool aloneness as an antidote to loneliness, and showing up to our appointment in life – in our own way.
Like the idea of bookending days with a morning and evening routine. I appreciate her comments about the process being non-negotiable because she feels better when she does it. It’s nice to hear from someone else who struggles with sleep and mental health.
“For an adult, the big, difficult feelings are expressed a little more quietly… Instead, we backslide on our smoking, spend too much money, eat potato chips even though they give us gas. We let the dishes pile up, stop washing our faces, cycle through the same three grungy outfits day after day. It’s not just laziness, or self-indulgence, or fatigue. It’s self-expression and protest: I will act miserable because I am miserable and I want to act the way I feel, and I don’t need to act like I feel better and you can’t make me. It’s a way of externalizing feelings that may be too big to communicate or contemplate on their own: maybe I can’t deal head on with the void of the future, but by god I can sit here refusing to get up until I need to pee REALLY bad. It is, in its own way, a kind of self-care.”
I have had moments in my life which I don’t look back on kindly where I just balked hard and refused what was on offer. But maybe I shouldn’t beat myself up for those moments of listening to myself and admitting I don’t wanna, even if they didn’t turn out well.
Related:
https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/are-you-suffering-2020-election-burnout-you-re-not-alone-n1245586
“‘All my coping strategies are failing,’ one person told me recently. ‘I am coming undone.'”
“What’s changed is that our surge capacity — the body’s ability to process stress — was depleted months ago. We have so much grief and nowhere to put it. When you can’t process something, it builds up, like bile. And no matter how creatively or diligently you try to ignore it, it’s still there, slowly festering. At some point your body begins to betray your best compartmentalization strategies. Our dreams have become vivid and terrifying because sleep is one of the places we allow ourselves to confront our sadness and fear.
This sort of chronic instability, and the burnout and exhaustion that accompany it, fundamentally changes us.
— Anne Helen Petersen