staying the course minus the carrots

A few weeks back I wrote several journal entries about resilience. I wrote about not feeling as though I have any. Then I wrote about times when I was resilient, and how it took lots of thinking and writing to learn to see resilience in any of my past behaviors. I also wrote about wanting to develop resilience, to become more resilient.

Perhaps the universe does sometimes give us exactly what we want. I am now in, as best I can tell, something like resilience boot camp. Nothing is terrible right now. But everything is also just a little bit not quite right:

1. I'm finally getting back into the habit of exercise after having that awful Cold to End all Colds and my workouts aren't bad, but they aren't great either. I can feel muscles during and afterward, so that's good. But I feel worn out even while I exercise. I have not had that awesome triumphant badass rockstar experience in ages.
2. I am working on my dissertation most days. But the work is  s  l  o  w  going, and that is being charitable. Yesterday I spent an hour fixing my template because somehow everything went right-aligned. ?! I am lucky to write a sentence--one sentence--these days. 
3. All my acts of housewifery take what seems like forever to achieve. Making the bed feels like a morning-long chore. How is it that one person can dirty up so many dishes in one day? How does one cat shed so much hair? 
4. There has been more (and more varied) social time and it has been taking shapes that are unfamiliar to me. I walk away from this time feeling sort of emotionally sore--not in pain, but as though I've worked some social-emotional muscles and I can feel them. I walk away not quite knowing if I've worked these muscles properly, with good (sustainable, beneficial) form.

I can let go of my worry over my current frazzled state, my fears that I am slipping permanently, and see this state for what it is: Resilience Boot Camp. Maybe I'll put on three pounds that will stick around for a few months. Maybe I won't feel like a rock star in my workouts for a few more months. Maybe I won't write more than a few sentences a day in my dissertation for a few months. Maybe I'll just feel tired and imperfect and behind for a little season. I need to know, to really know, deep in every bone, that that is okay. Every day, by refusing to throw in the towel because I am imperfect, by going through the motions and phoning everything in, I am training myself in resilience. This is hard work and I get to take some credit! I don't have to eat so many cookies or donut holes or chocolates to take credit. I can ease off of that. But I can remind myself that I am kicking butt when it comes to developing resilience. That resilience-development is where I am excelling right now. Every time I make my bed, I get a resilience point. Every time I clean house, do the dishes, mop; every time I bring my lunch; every time I put on nice clothes; every time I don't buy something; sometimes when I do buy something; every time I write one sentence in my dissertation; every time I meditate; every time I do a workout or even just take a walk or warm up or pedal on the stationary bike; every time I refuse to turn down time with friends--all these choices and actions represent ways that I am developing resilience because I do all of them so imperfectly right now and I still have not stopped doing them. I am still dragging myself through each one even though none of them make me feel amazing or awesome or rock star or energetic or relieved. I feel a little behind and worried and disappointed: I want growth to be linear! I want to rock sexy abs! I want to have a perfect shredded body that digests anything I eat on command! I want to have already finished my dissertation and have a job waiting for me! I want to have everything all Figured Out and on display, glossy like a magazine spread.

Right now nothing is bad, nothing is dire. I am not injured. I am not completely stalled. I'm just sluggish. Slow. Easily distracted. Tired. A little sore. Feeling my bones and my age and my worries deeply. If I was in real pain, I would (and should!) stop, rest, and heal. I am not in real pain; I am in minor ache. Proceed with caution, but don't stop moving. I don't want this to be my new forever pace, but I need to see this as an actual pace, and I need to remember to reward myself for movement that is mostly forward. I am going. I have not stalled. I can keep going. It might take a few more cups of coffee, a few more naps, a few more binge-recovery days; it might take a few novels, a massage or two, and a face mask. 

This--and not some glamorous, All Set, shiny, couture fantasy--this is what resilience looks like. It's slogging on and being willing to be ungraceful, inelegant, dirty, a little bloated, tired, frazzled, behind, late, slow, wrong, out of breath, off beat, out of tune, underpracticed, and emotionally disheveled. And doing it again tomorrow. And then the next day. And then, when this season of dishevelment is past, when things are a little shinier, more polished, smoother, faster, and prettier, it means a stronger, more grateful, more joyful core.

There's a fight song in here somewhere, but I'm too tired to write it.

Thanks, E. Jean

A note I wrote to E. Jean, my favorite hero nearly 2.5 years ago:

Dear E. Jean, I'll be blunt: I am afraid I have been channeling Edward Casaubon for much of my life. Channeling a postmodern E Casaubon, that is. My reasons: (1) I am in my third year out of coursework and have yet to produce a viable chapter; (2) I am dating a man as virtuous, lovely, and great-spirited as Dorothea; (3) I am convinced that I am incapable of enduring friendship. The first two worry me least (the man is not a worry at all, in fact). The third, however, is dispiriting! As a good postmodernist/Kierkegaardian/existentialist (circle one), I am well aware that I cannot deserve any friendship: friendship is a daily offering of generosity, not a professional contract. Etc. But how do people do it? Let me state in my own partial defense that I am not entirely a social cretin. I can be charming and rather humorous company. I enjoy being around others about as much as I enjoy solitude. Still, I marvel at the friendships my friends experience with others. They endure over the course of many years—decades, even. They may ebb and flow, but there are phone calls, visits, emails—communication—across all sorts of distances. This is not my experience. Once a friend has left my zip code, friendship, like an unwatered plant, loses its bloom. Ah, my would-be Philoctetes, you say, why not call up these pals, send them emails, letters, flowers plan visits? I do... Perhaps not as much as I ought to do, but I have such a sense of intruding on their lives, taking up their free time or of insisting that they talk to me, now! that it is difficult to sustain the effort. If this had happened once or twice, I should think nothing of it—not all friendships are of the life-long or even years-long nature. But this has become such a regular pattern for me that I am faced with the strong possibility that there is some relationship between this incapacity for friendship and my own character. How can I overcome the limitations of my own character and learn to have lasting friendships?

Some things have changed in the interim: I have produced almost and nearly viable chapters. The current draft of chapter one my dissertation director has in his hands may indeed be viable. I do now worry whether the man and I will be able to forge a relationship that endures into the future. What hasn't changed is my fear of forcing myself on others. I feel I speak the language of friendship brokenly, with insufficient vocabulary and no grasp of verb tenses. 

I suppose the answer is in the metaphor I just wrote: If I wish to become more fluent in friendship, then I must devote much more time to it.

Leaning into the discomfort of happiness

This, I think, is the name for the work I have to do this year. I need to learn to lean into happiness even though it makes me very uncomfortable. 

I have been learning and re-learning many things over the past year. I stepped up my exercise habits and have been re-learning many new things about breathing and form and pacing. I learned a few things about teaching when I taught my first class and I learned a bit about book indexing when I indexed a book for the first time. I learned more about how to edit electronically when I took the last class I needed for a certificate in copyediting. I have learned, finally, (I think!) what it is my dissertation can do, and I am in the process of finding out how much of what I currently have written I must release in order to craft a single, elegant argument. 

I have been learning about the effects of stress and anxiety and worry and negativity on my eating habits, on my digestive health, and on my voice. 

For many of the things about which I have been learning, I have relied on sources pretty far removed from myself. I have a nice little library of workout videos, for example. I learned how to index by reading about it and then just by doing it. When I taught, I tried to follow the examples set for me by the excellent teachers I have had, but otherwise I learned by paying attention to what I did and the results I got. As I've been learning to calm my anxiety, I've been seeking out online articles and self-help books about meditation, digestive health, and letting go of perfectionism.

For my voice, however, I have found a teacher. I need a teacher. I need there to be someone who does not live inside my head who will push me to do things I find uncomfortable. Although Jillian Michaels tells me to "dig, dig, dig, dig, DIG!" in her fitness video, she can't see my response. Sometimes I dig and I push harder; sometimes, at that point, I'm shaking my head at her and drinking water. She has no clue, and that helps me to feel safe. It is much the same with all the lessons I seek online and in books: I can retreat into self-congratulatory smugness and no one will push me to see it. I can pick and choose what I want to take from those lessons and there is no accountability.

I know that what I need to do in order to improve--in order to learn--is to be teachable. In order to be teachable, I have to be soft and flexible. I have to be sufficiently and appropriately vulnerable. In order to do that, I have to stop hiding behind the cynicism, skepticism, defensiveness, negativity, and weakness I've been using as a shield to protect me from feeling so vulnerable not only around other people, but inside myself: I am so worried about having to feel happiness, joy, excitement, wonder, awe, pride--all these pleasant emotions terrify me. Learning brings up all of these emotions. Being able to do something I couldn't do, understanding something I didn't understand--these are very, very good things. 

I am so ashamed of showing how pleased I am about something that I lacquer over the pleasure with negativity, as though that will protect me and my feelings of pleasure. Sometimes, however, before I feel the feeling before I've had a chance to coat it. Usually this happens with some kind of art: poetry, music, painting; sometimes it happens with a story about some bit of human interaction. When I allow myself to be moved, to feel the uncoated feeling, usually I cry. Often the tears are not polite, company tears, either. I don't want to do this around other people. If I let myself stay soft around others, I risk cracking open and that seems manipulative and inappropriate.

This is what I worry about as I try to shift from a default response of negativity toward openness, positivity, hopefulness, and trust. I am afraid that as I lean into the discomfort of happiness, I will break open and that others will have to witness the breaking. I am afraid that I will be laughed at and scorned as I begin these steps toward openness and trust and joy. I already feel guilty about the discomfort I will cause others as I aim for discomfort myself.

not waving, but--

Today I lost it. Angry, tantrumy, teary mess. 

Two professors emailed me about a teaching possibility for next year. Very reasonably (I thought), I explained to them why this was a completely unworkable, unreasonable idea: I need to focus on finishing my dissertation by January so I can defend in March and graduate in May. I have been telling myself the story of this timeline for months. It has become something of a mantra: chapter 5 August chapter 6 November chapter 1 January revise February defend March graduate May. Teaching full time would force me to revise the mantra and I have been so proud of the mantra: finally I might redeem all that time I wasted, all that privilege squandered. 

I am teaching now and it is all I feared it would be: more work than I have time to do; no idea how well or poorly I am doing; no clue how to prepare or improve; no pleasure or satisfaction or reward. I hate things I am not already very good at and I am not already very good at teaching. The thought of taking it on full time--more accurately, the thought of trying to do so--scares the shit out of me. I am already more lonely than I thought I could be--I who require large doses of solitude, I who can't handle too much social time am overwhelmed by my feelings of isolation and aloneness and insignificance. The thought of taking on such loneliness for years? I lost it. Freaked out completely. Sobby irrational mess. 

The boy says I have to do it. That I can. That it's necessary to try. I knew he would say so. 

To be at all ruffled would be sufficiently irritating. That I have become entirely disheveled, emotionally speaking, is distasteful. I am just the kind of person I despise. 

I will, with red-faced soul, retract my reasonable arguments and try. Or try to try.

the limits of metaphor

I want to be happy. Maybe it is more true to say that I want to want to be happy. Or that I want to do the work, to put in the effort to be the happy person I believe I can or could be. Being happy would require letting go of many thoughts, thought patterns, fears, judgments, insecurities, and self-doubts. If all of those things could simply be gone--if my psyche could be hollowed out in a soul fire so that nothing but the foundation and walls remained--I'd be delighted. I don't want to have to do the work to carry all those things out of the room of my soul. I don't ever want anyone else to see it happen or to note the changes. I don't want the neighbors to notice all the trash I have to take the curb every day. I don't want my friends to walk in and say "My! You have done a lot with the place!" What I hear in those words is "And why on earth didn't you do this sooner? See. It is all your fault. You have willfully made yourself miserable and it's about time you wised up a little."

A tiny voice way back somewhere invisible tries to tell me that if I can cart out all this emotional junk and trash, I will hear different things in those words. That I will have let go of the filter that hears judgment in acknowledgment. I can't imagine what that would be like. I do know that I am the one judging myself. How did I let things get to be such a mess? What is my problem? My soul is cluttered Hoarders style. Do they shoot a series of that show for folks whose hearts are packed full of junk?

I understand my metaphor and the metaphor makes sense. If I could physically remove things from my soul--as I have been decluttering my home, for example--the task might be easier. I would see the holes for what they are as soon as I removed something. This is all internal work and I can't always see what it is I am doing. I don't know what it feels like to remove something and I don't know how to tell whether I have gone out in the middle of the night and taken it back from the curb. If I can learn to stop feeling rage at co-worker X for complaining about absolutely everything, does that have any effect on my irritation at co-worker Y? How do I take anxiety about the future to the curb? How do I package up nagging for pick-up? How do I get my arms around pushing others to love me so I can get it into the truck and take it to the dump? The metaphor grows and it still doesn't offer any guidance when I want practical solutions.

I absolutely hate the thought of others witnessing any growth or change on my part. That's too much. Too close. To fragile. Too intimate. I don't know how to be graceful in this. I don't want to talk about it. Don't want to think about it. Don't want to think about talking or thinking about it. It seems, of course, that this is just what must happen, just what needs to be done. I am rebelling. Throwing a tantrum because I can't change the shape of the world. I suppose people must do this all the time--grow and shift and change and things. I suppose I do so, too, and that others notice it and adjust. I am resigned to that and it still bothers me. No one else tells me about ways in which I may have changed or grown (or shrunk); I can't see it, either. How will I know, then, if I change any of these thoughts or attitudes in positive ways?

habits

Thinking  more about what I wrote the other day. I see that I have been relieved (!) of many of the activities that have often soothed (or seemed to soothe) my anxiety, loneliness, and self-doubt: I no longer have recourse to shopping, whether for clothes, or cosmetics, or for household goods; I drink far less often; I see fewer friends; I cannot treat myself to a fancy coffee or a piece of pie as  little pick me up. I see, too, that my increased sugar consumption is very likely related to the loss of all those things. Also that my new exercise habit and my recent hunger for fiction are other, healthier responses to the loss of old self-soothing activities. 

It is good to lose shopping and alcohol and sugar as means for alleviating the anxiety of growing up. Seeing my habits and behaviors and tics and tendencies in this way, I see that there is more room for improvement: I plan to give up trimming my cuticles. Now that I see why I have been eating sweets more frequently, I can look for non-food and non-sugary food replacements. (I envision an upcoming mild obsession with sweet potatoes.)  I appreciate the exercise and the fiction-reading more: these are strong, healthy, good things. I can keep including them as part of my daily routines.

I also see that, as I have been paring my life down--paring my activities down--I am taking somewhat better care of myself: I do the dishes and the laundry more frequently. I have not run out of toilet paper or cat litter in months. I don't even remember having made the bed many days but I look over my shoulder to check and it has been made. The laundry doesn't pile up. My pantry is well stocked. I find I have time to make steel cut oats in the mornings and soup on the weekends. This does help to relieve some of the anxiety about the little daily chores that never go away.

And I see it that way: I am paring down my life. How much can be eliminated? How much is necessary? What is it I need and what is it I want and at what point can I tell the difference?

I keep looking for things to eliminate. Not activities or people, but things. I've purged my bookshelves recently; now I see that I can do so again. There are clothes to eliminate. Some furniture (my filing cabinet is a source of pure stress). And I would like to have some new things; in particular, I dream of crisp ivory bedding to replace worn duvet covers and sheets. In general, however, this seems to be a time in which to grow lean. A time that leans away from activity, community, luxury, decadence. A time that is full of time, and time is just the thing I need: there is an enormous amount of writing and reading and research to be done and this requires uncluttered time. This is a time to strengthen the muscles of my body with exercise and a time to stretch my imagination with fiction; this is a time in which to sink into research and make my mind supple by writing.

I wrote the other day that I am annoyed with myself and vexed to be unable to avoid myself. As I pare my life smaller and smaller, I am finding it more and more difficult to hide from myself and that might be the source of my annoyance. What is it, really, that I am afraid of? What is it I've hidden or scooted to the side by shopping my way through anger and sadness? What is it that I numb with sugar and with obsessive cuticle trimming? What is it about pushing my body to do a few more pushups or a few more squats that brings me to tears--not from physical pain but from sudden emotional rawness?

Peeling away habits of destructive coping rituals leaves me feeling exposed and undersupported. The new and healthy habits I am developing don't seem to obscure the fear and anger from which I have been trying to escape. Instead, they lead me back to them even while providing some kind of support for me while I learn to look clearly at myself.

a new piece of the puzzle

I think I find poetry so hard to bear because it is so very strong, so concentrated. I find the dilution of prose easier to swallow. 

And so I prefer my poems very short. My attention wanders after more than, say, twenty lines. Not for lack of interest, but because the twenty-first line undoes me. Perhaps I should approach the poem as I approach the push-up: add one new repetition daily and rest as needed. 

The poem requires me to relinquish speed and I may as well admit that I generally choose to wolf down great mouthfuls of oatmeal prose and not sip slowly the port of poetry.

But the message I am finding in all things these days is Slow Down. Muscles are built and made strong by tearing them up. The heart is a muscle, too. Perhaps while I paradoxically simultaneously tear down and build my muscles with pushups and lunges I can tear down and thus build my heart with poetry.

growing pains

I have never had to end a friendship before. Friendships have slipped away, dissolved, or gone underground. Slack and tension have been adjusted and readjusted. In my adult life--perhaps all my life--I have not had to choose to end a friendship.

I have now done so. I did not do it well or gracefully. I don't feel pleased with myself. Though I could have done it differently, I still think it having done so was the right thing to do.

I wish now that I had invited more honesty and that I had been more honest myself. I wish I had thought about why I wanted (did I want?) that friendship. I wish I had been able to better express my own growing pains. I wish it were easier to hear someone say "I value our our friendship" and I wish it were easier to ask for patience and for support.

In general, I am feeling more capable these days. More resilient. I know myself to love and need solitude and I also now know I am not afraid of it. I have been learning that I do in fact have more than a few good friends. And there are acquaintances/casual friends I admire very very much. I am learning that I don't have to spill my guts to everyone in order to be their friend; I am also learning that I can have different friends who fill different roles. I am learning, it seems, lessons I should have learned years ago and didn't. And I am learning that, for the most part, I don't have to spend time with people with whom I can't express my best and growing self. I don't need to make a friendship "work"--either it is a friendship (and therefore works) or it is not and I don't have to try to force anything.

Perhaps I have been making strides, then, in self-care and self-love. Perhaps something about the idea that even at my worst, I am lovable and worthy is sinking in somewhere. I am not worthy *because* I can stifle my needs and thoughts and feelings and therefore make a friendship work. And I am not unworthy when I try and fail to express my thoughts and feelings well. I am already worthy and already allowed to be a friend and have a friend. I am not perfect, and perhaps I am not even very good. But there are still, somehow, people who love me. Even better--there are people who are happy to love me. Even though I am nowhere close to perfection. That is such a lovely thought--a thought I can sink into--and it is a thought I want to hold on to. And I think that, for now at least, to hold on to this thought, I need to let go of habits of relating built around the belief that I, just as I am, am insufficient.

It is hard to resist the temptation to be very angry and disappointed with myself for having let go of this friendship in such a graceless way. So I'll distract myself with work, writing, and by spending time with the friends whose care I increasingly desire.

On being a difficult person

It is difficult to read self-help/personal development blogs, books, and articles that recommend that one cut negative people from one's life; that one avoid difficult people; that one manage difficult people. As though only easy/positive people read these blogs, books, and articles. As though people were always and to everyone either positive or negative; either easy or difficult.

I am a difficult person. I have been accused of being very negative. Should everyone cut me out of their lives? I suppose it is up to them, but I tend to be happy when people choose not to do so.

Nothing in any of these articles is very helpful for difficult people. The writing assumes that difficult people simply like being difficult, refuse to change in ways that are clearly positive (because the positive people have already so identified them), and require management or a very wide berth. But what is a difficult person to do about her own difficult-ness?

Remember, you positive, easygoing, laidback, cheery, easy to get along with folks: negative, difficult, awkward, uncomfortable people have feelings as raw and real and delicate as your own. In fact, it is possible that the difficult people in your life are even more sensitive to negativity, difficultness, awkwardness than you are. Some of us are hypersensitive to ourselves and to others. This makes us super self-conscious much of the time. It also means that we can go from being a-okay, happy to be around folks and out in the world to being overstimulated, deeply uncomfortable, and shut down or closed off within minutes. This can be triggered by anything--by things that seem like nothing to those around us. It's not our fault. Are we responsible for it? Sure! But what is it you'd like us to do? No response we can make that accounts for our intense discomfort will feel acceptable to you. If we simply leave and retreat to our homes or rooms or beds, refusing to take calls until we feel sufficiently lacquered over to handle company or the world at large again, then you call us selfish, closed off, abrupt and uncomfortable. If we try to wait for the moment to pass (just a little!), taking breaths and smiling weirdly (or not able to smile at all), saying little or nothing and hoping no one will notice until we've collected ourselves a bit before participating again, then you tell us we've shut you out, we're acting weird, you don't know what to say to us, we're changing the energy of the moment, we've made things awkward again. If we tell you we can't be in touch for a bit because we're in a rough spot, then we're not letting you be a friend, we're pushing you away, we're devaluing the relationship. If we try to tell you about our sensitivities as we experience them, sharing what is really hard to share, you often don't understand--that made you upset? That much? Can't you just get over it now that you know? No, no we can't. That's the point. That's what we're trying to say. That's why it feels so hard all the time and it takes so much effort so often just to appear natural. Alternately, you turn our stresses and worries and overwrought feelings into a judgment of your character, or our relationship. When we say "interaction X" left me feeling raw and drained, you take it personally, as though we are accusing you of having done something intentionally hurtful. What hurts is not you or your behavior (much of the time); it is the feeling of outside air on a soul that feels scantily covered. Sometimes a breeze makes its way beyond the insufficient skin and that breeze--delightful to others--can be painful for some of us difficult, highly strung, negative people. And it doesn't stop being painful.

Cut us out of your lives if you must--you do us no favors by remaining in relationship with us if it bothers you that much; remember, we can be highly sensitive and are often keenly aware of your discomfort and of the fact that we can do nothing about it. And if you decide to "let" us stay, do stop trying to manage our difficultness. Part of what makes us so uncomfortable to you is the fact that we don't try to manage your discomfort around us--we aren't able to change ourselves in order to make you feel more comfortable in our presence. Yes, we know you are uncomfortable with our sensitivities, our weirdness, our lack of reliable social grace. And many of us understand just why you are uncomfortable--after all, we make ourselves uncomfortable, too. But we (some of us at least) are able to let you have your discomfort and we can, to varying extents, sit with that discomfort we both feel. Can you do that for us, too? Can you let yourself be uncomfortable with us? For many of us sensitive, difficult folk, that is one of the most longed for expressions of friendship: the ability to acknowledge our discomfort, awkwardness, unease, self-consciousness, and rawness, to sit with it without trying to "fix" it or "cure" us, and to love us anyway, somehow.

Of course we understand that this doesn't look like the kinds of friendship other folks get to enjoy. It looks, well, negative. It looks sparse and chilly. But this is what we need if we are going to share the other parts of our personalities with you. Even those of us who are rather difficult are rarely difficult all the time. We might go through phases--whole years maybe--when it feels that way to you and also to us. But we have moments of pure sunniness. Some of us are quite clever, hilariously funny and entertaining; we can be deeply supportive and we can be creative and warm in the ways in which we show care; we can be or play the part of the outgoing extrovert at times. We can be amazing friends, lovers, and partners. But you won't get to know or experience that unless you are able to love--equally--all of the ways in which we are also difficult.

It would be nice to see any of this addressed in the advice offered for "dealing with" difficult people. (One "deals with" pests, generally; perhaps if you can't think of difficult people in any other terms than having to "deal with" us, then you might take that as a sign that you can't help but see difficult people as the enemy, in which case, yes, avoid us. We will be grateful to you.) As a difficult person myself, I tend to find such advice very depressing. I am difficult but I am not (usually; I, like any "easy" person, have my moments) a jerk. And I don't like being difficult. Very often I wish I could be otherwise. The truth is that I can't. And it hurts to read that one should not share one's dreams with difficult or negative people because they'll just look for ways to bring you down. It hurts to read that folks think that their successes produce negativity in difficult others. Maybe in/for some people it does. But then there must be as many ways of being difficult as there are of being not-difficult. It hurts to read that difficult people need to be "right" all the time. Sure I like being right. I like it a lot. In terms of interpersonal relationships what I need more than being right is acknowledgment that I am not necessarily wrong. Just because my feelings are nothing like what your feelings would or might be doesn't make me any more wrong or right than you. It just makes me and my feelings very different. The more you tell me that I am wrong to feel in some way, the more I will dig in and assert the reality of my experience. It hurts to read advice suggesting that you not respond to someone's negative or difficult attitude. Would you refuse to acknowledge or respond to a friend's sickness if she had, say, a cold? If your friend were missing a leg would you tell her to get over herself and just run a 5k with you? Or would you respect her limitations (whether permanent or temporary) and adjust your responses accordingly?

I started by asking what a difficult person is to do about her own difficultness and I haven't even addressed that all. This is amusing as I began by criticizing other authors for not addressing just that question. I've not come up with any ways of becoming any less difficult myself, for example. On the other hand, I am not entirely convinced that being difficult is itself a problem. There are many things we value because they are difficult--running marathons, climbing mountains, earning advanced degrees, performing brain surgery. I suppose I am trying to learn to value the ways in which I am difficult, which is itself a difficult thing to do. I invite others who are not difficult, or who are less difficult, or who are differently difficult to challenge themselves to learn to value difficultness in the relationships of which they are a part, too.