Beloved reader,
Do you ever find yourself calling your closest friends on certain days and finding that they're either too busy or overwhelmed by their own circumstances to offer any meaningful support?
This happens to all of us at one point or another — the call that goes to voicemail, the unanswered text or email — but that isn't a sign that your friendships are deficient on the emotional availability spectrum. It simply means that almost everyone is in a similar situation as you.
However, let's face it: commiseration with a loved one is transiently calming, but commiseration can quickly co-conspire to produce inexhaustible kvetching.
The solution lies in deepening our own interior lives; constantly fortifying our architectonic essence. We need to sustain ourselves if we are to successfully sustain others who are more vulnerable than we are. This is not a radical concept, just common sense.
We cannot give what we do not have. We never could, and pretending otherwise is doublethink working us over with a broken-backed self-deception mottled with martyrdom.
We got this, beautiful reader. Let us be available to all the allurement of daily life without entirely depleting our limited reserves.
Let us cultivate and cultivate our interiority until we transmute ourselves into trees whose branches droop with fruit, to share when ripe not with resentment but heightened relish.
With love and joy.
Diriye
Image by DIRIYE OSMAN.
Song of the moment: 'Hello' by ERYKAH BADU and ANDRE 3000.