Dear Anita,

good morning.  My motivation is to please the strangers, these people. I am thinking about why that may be. One thing that comes to mind is to please them like I would please my mother, it’s not that different, rushing home with some great news, look mom look how happy this will make you! The next thing that comes to mind is to show off my inner abilities, look how well-versed I am, look how friendly I am, look how relatable I am, not necessarily in a narcissistic way, but it is almost the only way I know how to succeed. As though an athlete only knew how to run and not to walk, someone might say look here he is showing off his running patterns always rubbing, but maybe it’s that he never knew it was OK to walk. Those are my two thoughts as of now, what do you think

Dear Anita,

I read your last post a few times this weekend. In fact, every time I read it, I took something new for me. This last time I read it, it is quite late at night, I woke up in the middle the night with a lot of my mind. I reread your post. The last line is what I feel is your major question, what is the real thing? What about the real thing, real interaction? In your scenario, I am throwing something out there, whether it is to my mom or to strangers, throwing them a bone, saying, look at me I have knowledge I am relatable, will you catch it, how’s that sound to you? Does it sound palatable? Does it make me you happy? Perhaps I drive a portion of my self-worth from this, given that it was so important to appease my mother, and give her information that would make her happy perhaps I am still doing this out in my own world.

So you asked, what about the real thing. Interesting you ask. I have managed to have a good amount of real relationships. At this point in my life I have done a pretty good decent job waiting out the relationships that are not the real thing. There are friends who came into my life through the 20s that serves a different purpose is whether it was friends of convenience or situational, friends of glitter and not much substance outside of funny, or simply people that you no longer have anything in common with.  I am waiting out many of these people these days as you know. But the question remains what about the real thing? Well the first thing that comes to mind when you asked this is my husband. The only true real thing, relationship, to the realist extent is the one between my husband and I. And based on this conversation and what we spoke about this weekend, this need to speak and connect with others. I noticed that I don’t take this realist relationship to be up as much substance and worse as it really is. I believe that throughout my life the realist relationship is what I loaded by all of the non-real relationships. I can think back to my high school and college boyfriend, I have mentioned him in the past, I was so hung up on these so-called friends to really give him the respect and validation he deserved. Let’s fast forward to now, I’m not that different. I will say that I blame some of this on the society we live in, social media obsessed etc. But for me, are those distractions, societal Ways, societal pushes perhaps more of an issue? As in, I am I am more prone to being distracted by such things because I am already outwardly? Yes that makes sense, but I think that instead of focusing on the triggers that make the baseline problem worse. I need to once and for all look at the baseline problem. Like we have been in our exercises. Let’s say that we are analyzing a girl, she has trouble focusing on her boyfriend, and instead as I was on the phone with a myriad of friends and family. She is also on Facebook constantly commenting and doing this and that. It is easy to look at her and say she needs to shut down the phone, and the Internet.

But over the weekend when I was analyzing this, I thought about, what is more important is why is she always on the phone and Internet. Does she perhaps have a fear that if she does not connect with these people all the time that they will no longer be her friends? Is she perhaps so tuned into these things because they are a source of her validation, such as being liked on social media? Or lastly, if she simply unable to focus on one thing at a time, easily getting bored by someone finding needs to entertain herself constantly with variety? Maybe it is many of these things.

When it comes to me I have noticed, in the small observation over the weekend that it is simply uncomfortable to focus on one thing. I think that in the past it felt too simple, it felt like something would be missing or that I was missing something better side.  A simple analogy is like this, it’s like feeling that if you go on a long walk, you were warned her the whole time if the food in the oven at home is cooked enough or if you should have put on the timer for long. But when you get back the food is fine, or the food is not fine but it had nothing to do with your walk, or most importantly there is no food in the oven at this later time, but you’re mine still goes there.

the feeling of seeking and needing to escape does come from the frenzy of the mind. This escaping has never led me to any place of productivity. Of course not.

So the real thing is diluted by the seeking and escaping. I have been more mindful over the last few weeks about my interaction with my husband and quality time. I have been doing a good job. Yet – I know that it feels like a full time job to do so. It is effort because it is not innate or natural. And that is okay.

I also know that it is innate for me to be distracted away from him at the drop of a hat and find myself occupied by some other thing/person/idea.

It almost feels like my entire attention us to go to this these days, but yet there are a few other things on my mind that I also want to attend to, one of which is developing my wellness program. It sounds silly, how to be a good wife but simultaneously also develop a business? To me it almost seems impossible at this time given that I am in the middle of the healing journey. Perhaps if I had already conquered/or already had the tools set in place to have a healthy marriage and be a loving doting wife that is supportive and not attacking etc – I could move on to another goal and balance. perhaps I am unable to at this moment..

Anyway I don’t want to distract this conversation with the idea of a potential business. I want to first focus on talking about the meat of all of this, the idea of real interactions, and then perhaps I can tell you a little bit more about my plans

i