The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
I recently created something that "blew up" so to speak, and in doing so viscerally experienced what I think Sartre was getting at with No Exit. The torture of being misread, misunderstood, chewed up and spat out by others' judgement is hard to bear. For days I engaged with every critic I could, tirelessly trying to understand them, to explain that oh no that's not what I meant at all, etc. etc., but for every one that even responded, many more would ignore me, and even more would pop up in their place. Months later I am still reeling from the injury.
The only thing that helped resolve this torment was modelling the whole ordeal as a battle in a much grander scheme. I put my heart and soul into the art, and it resonated deeply with many people, but for most of them it did not. For them the work is only a weapon, one to either gleefully wield or be terrified of and disarm. It means nothing to them. This is not such a hard thing to empathize with, since I do this all the time, and you probably do as well -- every time you go right to the comments after only reading a headline or summary or watching a clip. The critics are not mistaken. They're enemy soldiers to be destroyed. This is probably a less productive way to engage, but it certainly makes it more tolerable. The sensitive side of me lives within the work.
Fancy sharing it with us, so we can put words in your mouth and interpret everything you said in the most maximally uncharitable light?
I want to be the one to imply that OP is shamelessly lying when he tries to 'correct' those maximally uncharitable interpretations.
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