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If you do, I think you’d benefit from Starting With Heart and Mastering Your Stories. If you do choose to reply, you could Create Safety by creating a common purpose.

You can also learn to notice your thoughts and impulses so that you can choose more freely.

Mindfulness can help. Defusion exercises can help. Acceptance exercises can help.

Let me know if you have questions!

Pesto!

Do you know where that image comes from?

Nice try, FBI (which would be “Fun Hard Knob”) or CIA (which would be “Big Bear Wand”)

U r edgy

Love your take!

Sometimes labels help. Sometimes they don’t.

Also, Emily Nagoski’s Come As You Are could help!

As with many things, it’s important to ask what things mean to others.

In addition, if you trust the other person, you can also open up about your concerns.

Sometimes, others can give you reassurance. And sometimes they can’t. Both possibilities are something we need to be open to.

It’s important to accept whatever is brought to the table and, based on that, choose what kind of person you’d like to be.

ah gotcha

lol

Thanks for the explanation. Umm, unfortunately I still don’t get it. For the OP to make sense, can someone explain what’s going on?

Good shitpost. Banger piece. Am satisfied.

Many comments have alluded to this: people are contextual.

I’ll add to this that thoughts are very, very flexible.

In some contexts we learn to think one way and in other contexts we learn to think in other ways. Our thoughts always get activated by context, either external contexts or internal contexts. For example seeing an apple might have us think we’re hungry if we’re hungry. Or it may make us think we don’t even want to see it if we just ate a lot. Or we might think of our upcoming presentation and that may be the context for the thought “I’m not prepared enough”.

Not only are thoughts contextual, but they behave in interesting ways. Often, we transfer thoughts from one context to another context. If we think “I’m never prepared for presentations”, we might end up reinforcing ideas like “I’m never prepared [in general]”. We may end up thinking we’re never prepared for dinner with friends or for tough conversations with loved ones.

Another critical feature of thoughts is that we can even change the role thoughts have in our behavior. For example, the thought “I’m not prepared enough for my presentation” may be seen as a literal truth. Or it could be seen as a thought and just a thought. In other words, thoughts can sometimes be taken literally and we can be fused with them or we can look at them from a distance.

These three examples illustrate my point: thoughts are ridiculously flexible.

This flexibility is what explains the phenomena you notice. That is how we end up with a capitalist who may have strong thoughts about family and may stop focusing on profit-maximization when their employee’s daughter die. That is how we end up with a worker who could have strong thoughts about profits and may stop focusing on solidarity with his peers when a promotion is offered.

My perspective comes from contextual behavioral science and relational frame theory.

In your experience, does fighting the feelings help? Answer not using your logic, but your felt experience.

Odds are, fighting doesn’t help. Otherwise you wouldn’t be here asking for help.

You hurt because you care. You care about belonging, about contributing, about being open to others. And, since you care about this and you’ve experienced their opposites, you hurt.

We can’t get rid of this kind of hurt. Would you even want to? Would you want to be indifferent to other people?

I’m not trying to be mean or brutal. I’m just trying to get to a place where this hurt is a meaningful part of your life and not something you keep fighting (and failing to defeat).

So what can you do? You could notice your thoughts as thoughts. You can try giving your brain a name and thanking it for informing you about the things it informs you throughout the day. This doesn’t make thoughts disappear, but it helps seeing them as thoughts and not reality.

You can also imagine that you carry your sensations, memories, moods, thoughts, images, etc. in your hands, as if you were carrying a delicate flower. This is a way to honor your life without running a way from it and also without being entirely determined by it.

Finally, you can ask yourself what kind of person you want to be, what you stand for. What are the qualities of being that you would like to adopt in your life? You can discover this intuitively by wondering what you care for. If rejection hurts, you likely value inclusion. If abandonment hurts, you likely value consistency and kindness.

The task the becomes accepting our current reality (thanking our brain for its suggestions and holding our whole life experience preciously) and taking our next step with the qualities of being that we value.

If you’re curious about this perspective, let me know and I can tell you more about it :)

Depression has lots of ways of manifesting.

One way of describing depression is an unwillingness to engage with life and to feel, because the person has learned that engaging or feeling will lead to pain. This is the functional contextual definition.

Another one comes from Martin Seligman, who defines it as an unwillingness to try things because the person has learned that engaging in something will lead to failure.

In either definition, the unwillingness is contextual. In other words, someone might be depressed regarding work but not their partner. Or someone might be depressed regarding their family but not their partner.

Is it really worth it?

I have an uncle who designed his signature before he learned to write in cursive. When he was a child he just practiced until he found a scribble that looked nice and chose it. That’s what he uses even today, decades later.

His signature doesn’t resemble his printed or cursive name at all. However, if you look at it it fits right in with the weird signatures that people choose to do.

no real benefit

I suppose the benefits don’t seem that great. Though I wonder…

Implementing dates in software is not trivial. A more sane calendar system would reduce production costs in the long run.

Heck, even increasing predictability by having the same weekdays for the same dates would reduce human mistakes of all kinds! I say that because in Lean and Agile, one of the consistent findings is that reducing variability in production processes of all kinds reduces mistakes and increases efficiency.

Imagine not having to take out your calendar every time you’re planning dates. Amazing.

Finally, imagine the greatest benefit of them all: calling September the seventh month, October the eighth, November the ninth, and December the tenth. I always say that if my job was designing a calendar and I showed my boss a calendar where “September is the ninth month”, I wouldn’t last long in that job.

Another comment said you can safely assume he’s your boyfriend. Before I did that, I’d want to have a clear and explicit conversation about exclusivity (do you two want to have it or not?).

As to your broader question, sure the label to the relationship might help in clarifying expectations.

But more important is what kind of person you want to be to him and vice versa. Years from now, if you were to look back on what kind of person you were in this period, what would you like to see? Kindness? Exploration? Consistency? Honesty? Playfulness?

Wait coffee is bad? I thought it made lots of people live longer and stuff

Edit: Checked it out and Wikipedia, the purest source of knowledge, broadly redeems coffee’s health effects