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).
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"You fast, but Satan does not eat. You labor fervently, but Satan never sleeps. The only dimension with which you can outperform Satan is by acquiring humility, for Satan has no humility." -- Saint Moses
I struggle with a lot of the same feelings. I don't know that I have an easy answer for you, but I'm trying very hard to be humble and to think about why other people do the things they do rather than just attributing it to their essential failures as a human.
I want to share a moment when I felt like I succeeded last week. I know I'm committing some complicated meta-sin by being proud of my humility, but I can't help it. Good Friday one of our tenants knocked on my door and said his shower drain was draining slow and could I call a plumber. He lives down the street so I walked over. "Draining slow..." the septic system was backing up into the basement bathroom. It had to be snaked, I had just had it pumped so it was almost certainly clogged. So I had to come back on Easter Saturday, when my in laws were on their way and I had a million things to do, and run a power snake down the clean out. Of course the tenants claim that they never flush anything bad down the toilet, but as I suspected it was a tampon from the teenage daughter. Inevitable.
I started to get mad at the fucking idiot that flushed a tampon down the toilet on a holiday and dragged me out there, then I remembered: her parents had gotten divorced a couple years ago, and it was just her and her dad now, her mom had moved back to Puerto Rico. No one was around to teach her not to do that, her dad probably either didn't really know what to do with a tampon or didn't talk to her about it. And once I realized that, I just felt sorry for her, and tried to explain it to her father without getting her into trouble. And you know what? It felt good, it felt much better than getting angry, I was in a good mood for the rest of the day.
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Have you ever written this out so comprehensively before? I find it can be really transformative to externalize things like this. I bet your dad never wrote anything so introspective and self aware. I bet you've changed a little just from writing this comment.
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