Personal Confession
There is no shortcut to emotional intelligence (unfortunately for me)
I don’t spend a lot of time reading online about emotional intelligence. I used to, but I don’t anymore. The internet is bursting at the seams with stories about how to build emotional maturity, but the vast majority of them all seem the same to me. They all seem to go like this:
Hello! I am Dave, a pretty normal person. I used to make a lot of mistakes and irritate my friends and coworkers, like most young foolish people, but I learned some lessons about emotional maturity and now my relationships are deeper. …
Some people write to make money, some people write because they love writing. Both kinds of writers need the same skills to succeed.
When I talk to amateur writers about what their goals are for their artistic career, their answers generally fall into one of two categories:
- You want to pursue an artistic passion. You love writing. You love telling my stories. You love meeting other writers and being part of a beautiful storytelling community. You’re not interested in “making money.” (But if money comes your way, you won’t turn it down!)
- You want to start a side hustle. You love writing, of course, but you also want to get paid to write. …
Your preconceived ideas about writing are probably holding you back
Many aspiring writers begin their writing career with a lot of preconceived notions about what it means to be a writer. That makes sense; writing is one of the oldest professions in the world, and people have been commenting on what it is like to be a writer for as long as there have been written words. We’ve all seen quotes by nineteenth- and twentieth-century writers on the joys and pains of being a writer.
But like most ancient professions, writing has changed a lot over the millennia. In the days of Athenian philosophers, writing was a way of recording…
No one has “an alcohol problem” because there is no such thing as a healthy drinker who does not.
People who are regular drinkers who read my articles about alcohol tend to have the same sort of thing to say: “Well I’m glad you quit alcohol and your life is better, but you must have had a drinking problem! I mean, only people who have drinking problems need to quit to have better lives.”
It’s a line of reasoning that goes something like this:
- Alcohol is just a thing. It’s people who choose to use alcohol.
- Some people choose to use alcohol to the degree that it damages their life. …
Your life may have some problems, but you can let yourself relax
I’m sitting in my parents’ backyard right now. Birds are chirping. The air conditioner is running a few yards away. Someone a few blocks away is having construction work done; power saws whir in the background. The sun’s rays shimmer through the next-door neighbor’s pine trees.
There aren’t words to describe how perfect the moment is.
That’s not to say everything in my life is perfect. There are plenty of things going wrong in my life, believe me. They woke me up at 4:30 this morning — I was crying before the sun even rose. But none of those situations…
Labeling things as “good” or “bad” can keep you stuck in your symptoms
Disclaimer: I am not a mental health professional. I am merely a longtime patient looking to summarize and practice what they’ve learned. My blog articles are no substitute for professional mental health care.
“Love is the absence of judgment.”
― Dalai Lama XIV
The topic of judgmentalness is interesting because I think when most of us think of the phrase “being judgmental,” we think of someone who is prejudiced. Maybe we picture our old and slightly racist grandmothers, or we picture the father who never approved of what we were wearing when we were young. …
Some free-form thoughts on spending years without social media
In the latest issue of Medium’s The Edition, VP of Content Jermaine Hall shared with us members a number of wonderful articles, and two of them were about social media: “How Social Media Has Made Us All Rivals” by Luke Burgis and “Instagram Has Become SkyMall” by Clive Thompson. They are, as most articles about social media usually are, criticisms of the current social media model and suggestions for ways social media companies could perhaps scrub the tendency to encourage suffering out of their business models. …
These simple mindsets will get you through tough times
My life has been difficult for a few years now. A decent portion of this difficulty is self-inflicted. I’ve been through things no one should have to go through and I’ve done things nobody should do. It feels like three months can’t go by without another crisis in my life. I’m working hard in therapy and have been for years now, but big life changes don’t happen quickly.
Here’s how I keep my head up when it feels like it’s all too much.
Give Yourself a Break From Worrying
I know what it feels like to have something terrifying looming over you. You made a mistake…
Feeling stuck in life? Get un-stuck by trying something new.
Listicles about productivity tactics can easily be trite, but this one means a lot to me. Every single change on this list has been something that completely transformed my life. Any one of these changes alone can be a powerful reset button to the quality of your life. Taken together, they’ve transformed me from a barely-functioning neurotic mess to someone who can juggle mental illness, therapy three times a week, and a blogging business.
If they worked miracles for me, chances are they can help you at least a little.
#1: Content Blockers
If you repeatedly find yourself off-task, scrolling a particular website…
I didn’t have an “alcohol problem” because it’s alcohol that’s the problem, not me.
My relationship with alcohol is not like most people’s. For starters, I never drank alcohol in college. (I didn’t smoke pot, either, or do any other drugs — I was totally sober). I went to a few parties freshman year, but I didn’t find it tremendously fun to watch people stumble around like they were poisoned, so I spent nearly my entire college career just hanging out with people on their couch, watching TV, playing video games, and talking philosophy.
My desire to quit drinking stemmed from the fact that I was a heavy drinker in high school, albeit for…
