Don’t expect the conversation with your friend to extinguish your anxiety; your anxiety won’t go that easy. It’s braided and baked into you, part of your dough. She won’t have any magic words to change that. Honesty doesn’t trump anxiety. What it does often do is reduce it down to proper proportions, make it a more manageable size.
There are people who will tell you that the most important thing to remember when trying to pick someone up is confidence, that you miss all the shots you never take, that the worst thing that can happen to you when you put yourself out there is hearing the word "no."
Taurus: This is a month for feeling the soreness in your legs. This is a month for feeling the ache in your heart. These things feel almost like pain but they’re not, not quite. You’re just getting stronger and you’re getting wiser and you’re learning, over and over again, who you are and what you need.
"...Well for starters, if I were able to accurately adjudicate “Is this just some weird gender thing???” I would be so busy fixing misogyny forever that I wouldn’t have any time for this column."
Dissatisfaction can feel like a hailstorm happening inside our own heads, an endless window-rattling howl-a-thon so insistent and destructive that it seems amazing our partners can’t hear it – and yet, that’s subjectivity. Your partner is probably distracted by his own internal hailstorms, or else by “Bojack Horseman.” You have to tell him there’s a problem for him to know.
Friendships and work relationships can be a bad combination even when everyone’s on their best behavior—and what you have here is the rare trifecta of romantic relationship + work relationship + third-party friendship, all in the unstable context of a brand-new business. If you were writing to me four months ago, I might not have said “what a terrible idea,” but I’d have advised you to tread very carefully. But now that you’re in the…
That is not a MELLIFLUOUS headline, but I wanted to make sure I hit the main bullet points of 1. I am Dear Prudence now, over at Slate, and also 2. I am not leaving the Toast in even the slightest bit, I am doing both things.
1. Instead of taking a clear-eyed view of your recent behavior, base your apology on how angry someone else is. The more upset they are, the more wrong you were. Conversely, if the person you're trying to apologize to insists that it's "not a big deal" or it "happens all the time," you can't have done something wrong. Remember, the goal of apologizing is to keep someone from being angry, because you're responsible for how…
It’s exhausting to be imposed upon, to be the always responsible party – to be, in essence, the parent in what is supposed to be a household of grown-ups.
For those of you who weren't at XOXO Fest this year, here's a video of the talk I gave (with subtitles). It's very funny and you'll learn a lot. It was the first talk I ever gave! I had a pretty great time! Also, my hair looked terrific and I didn't throw up out of nervousness even once.
Sit in your room as if in paradise. Put the whole world behind you and forget it. Watch your thoughts like a good fisherman watching for fish. The path you must follow is simple – never leave it.
