Oceans Don’t Fear the Sun

I deserve love.I deserve attention.I deserve affection. I deserve love.I deserve attachment.I deserve support. I deserve to be wanted.I am wanted.Just not recognized. Not recognized for being who I am.Not recognized for being what's wanted.Not recognized for being full of love. Full of love but not freely flowing love.Love that's guarded, sheltered, frozen.Love that's been …

Appointment with a Shaman

In the spring, I got a referral to a local counsellor, who is kind of a shaman. I had heard mixed reviews of her, and her waiting list was going to be rather long. I found a picture of her on the internet, a woman with curly black hair holding a drum. It took a …

Empathy and Decision-Making

Empathizing with someone's decision-making process is a lot harder than empathizing with their experience of something happening to them. For most things, to empathize with someone's experience, all one has to do is imagine having the thing happen to you. But to put myself in the shoes of someone making a choice, I would have …

Depression

I'm too depressed to have any hobbies I'm too depressed to make new friends My depression wouldn't be solved by therapy My depression would be solved by friendship The superficial aspect of relationships takes a kind of energy that I don't have with depression My depression is not any less because it's not diagnosed by …

Cultural Minorities

Being in a cultural minority means constantly identifying and rejecting ideas thrown at us by the mainstream culture. I heard someone saying that parents who pursue alternative education for their children should allow and coordinate for their kids to spend time with kids who go to regular school, so that the kids in alternative education …

Indigenous Land Ownership

It's become common for me to hear "land acknowledgements" at the beginning of meetings, where the speaker talks about the lack of transaction between the First Nations people who lived on the land and the European people who industrialized the land. To me, that's not acknowledging the land, it's acknowledging the people who used to …

Entishness

There's a quality in some people that I'd like to call entishness. About a year ago, I was spending time with one of my friends, S, and we both noticed that I spoke a lot less than they did. I somehow learned to speak up more in our conversations without being very conscious of it. …

Why Therapy is Bad II: Scarcity of Emotional Support

Why Therapy is Bad Part I Just like school artificially restricts the supply of learning by telling would-be mentors that they're not qualified to teach, psychotherapy artificially restricts the supply of emotional support by telling us we're not qualified to … listen. Psychotherapy commodifies emotional support just like prostitution commodifies sexual relationships. But imagine if …

Relationship Privilege

Note: This post is grumpy. I don't know if I'll ever write about relationship privilege in a non-grumpy way, so I might as well post it. Some people have relationship privilege. They find friendships and partners relatively easily, as if there's a gravitational force around them. Some of us have less relationship privilege, understand the …

Monogamy and Relationship Energy

I was trying to understand someone's attachment to monogamy as a relationship goal, and I asked whether they thought that someone having more than one romantic relationship would take away from each relationship. They seemed to think it was obvious that that was true. I didn't agree with the idea at the time, but didn't …