Friday: walk, _The Wedding Party_

I walked with M.

I started reading _The Wedding Party_ by Jasmine Guillory, which is the third in the The Wedding Date series. These books are completely fantastic in every way — funny, great friendships between women, developing relationship, representation of many sorts (and often more than one type in the same person! Yay!). Feel good stories in which the most jarring element is the fact that people in these books can drive around in the Bay Area and reliably find parking. This is a continuation of the Read the Books I Already Own project, altho in a twist, I bought this one in February of this year. And no, I have no idea why I haven’t already read it. But it’s so much fun! I love it.

Continuing to Not Write Advice Book 2

I’ve restarted this thing so many times. First, it was the I Can’t Stop Thinking About Your Brother book, which was intended to help people who were particularly trapped in an unsatisfying family relationship who were trying to calibrate just how crazy the other party was and what they could do about it (as opposed to keep trying to change the other person, wish things were different, vent without doing anything further about it).

That evolved into something else, which was a, hey, you’re really anxious, and you think you have to be in order to get enough stuff done, but there are alternative motivational systems, and that was how this thing became Advice Book 2, mostly shilling once again for the Basic Needs Theory, but with an emphasis on how you can use the energizing effects of taking care of your Basic Needs as motivation, and also if you clearly understand why you are doing something and it genuinely aligns with your desires, that’ll provide plenty of motivation without needing to be anxious.

But I’m stopped _again_, and I think I’ve figured out why (again) which is probably not the last problem with this project, but it is a step. As a society, we really believe in _and enforce_ being “reasonable”, which de-emphasizes being emotional but _also_ makes it really hard to see certain kinds of bad behavior for what they are. For example, my overarching theory of personality disorder is persistently disruptive of reciprocal, prosocial norms. Sometimes, that pattern is fucking obvious. However, _sometimes_ “being reasonable” makes it very hard to see that pattern.

Let’s say I want to do something, and I’m in a relationship (I’m someone’s kid, or spouse or roommate or whatever, and this project impacts on them). I say, hey, I want to do this thing. And the other party or parties say, I don’t want you to do this particular part of it / in this particular way. They do NOT actively engage to help you accomplish your goal — they don’t propose an alternative (or they propose only alternatives that it would have been pretty easy to predict you would not like), nor do they commiserate with your frustration or validate your desire to do the thing or whatever.

That’s _fine_ in an enemy, total stranger, whatever. It’s _reasonable_.

But it’s quite bad in a close relationship and can thwart the participants’ ability to accomplish anything at all over time and will hollow out all the goodwill in the relationship eventually leaving a paper thin shell that literally any sneeze will completely destroy.