A Digression from Relationship Stuff 'Proper': More On Our Relationship With Words

If you call it ‘guilt’, you have to atone… which is a hostage situation if you haven’t done anything wrong.

If you call it ‘feeling responsible’, that often leaves you with owning something that may not or should not be yours in the first place.

If you call it ‘debt’, you have to pay it back, instead of shape your life into something you can sustain and thrive in.

If you call it ‘upset’, that might mean hurt to you, mad to them, and to make matters worse, you probably don’t notice that you sometimes mean hurt, sometimes, mad, sad, or even afraid. This matters more than you think, both for you and for them.

If you call it ‘overwhelmed’ or ‘stressed’, that is a path to require circumstances changing, when better answers are available.

As long as it is ‘anxiety’ (rather than mad, sad, glad, afraid, ashamed, and/or hurt), it is an unpredictable unicorn attack.

If you gauge something based on whether it is ‘enough’, the result is almost always to do more.

If you ‘regulate’, you mostly marshal your willpower in a way that is designed to try to not have a feeling you already have, in the first place.

If you call it ‘motivation’, you lose the far more important and far more in your control chance to learn how to suffer gracefully and grieve.

Much of this is about the use of language, very much about how we define terms in the first place. Descriptions masquerading as definitions.

These are not intended to be complete ideas. They are not as multidimensional as they should be, due to the medium. There isn’t even anything wrong with most of them in and of themselves - unless they are ideas employed without an epistemology, a filter, to be more sure of truth and context.