TL;DR is a monthly digest summarizing the vital bits from the previous month's How to Live newsletter so you don't miss a thing.

Here’s everything from October—the free essays you might have missed and what paid subscribers got behind the paywall.

In 1898 when the artist Paul Klee was 19, he began keeping a diary. Across four notebooks, and spanning two decades, he wrote, drew and painted through his formative years.

He wrote about his travels, childhood, God, crushes, his life plans, his fraught relationship with music, aging, the “muse” and so much more.

After his death, his son Felix Klee edited and published Diaries of Paul Klee 1898-1918 in German in 1957. It was later translated into English and published in America in 1964.

Below are the diary drawings that struck me most, as well as access to all four of his notebooks.

Find the rest below…

Dear parents of anxious children,

I am your anxious child, all grown up, reporting from the vast and wild fields of that experience.

Do you find yourself at a loss, with a child constantly acting out, purposefully trying to be difficult for no reason? Have you tried everything and are at your wit’s end?

Does your child keep complaining that they can’t sleep, even though they haven’t tried? Are they having tantrums over smaller and smaller things; melting down faster than ever? Do they keep losing or misplacing valuable things, forgetting how to help around the house, or refuse to come out of their room?

Yes? Great. You’re in the right place.

Something most parents don’t understand is that their child is not actually “acting out” or “being difficult for no reason.” There is always a reason. No child acts out just because.

I want you to try something. The next time everything in your day goes absolutely upside down: you’re running late for work and the subway leaves just as you reach it, the next subway stalls in the tunnel for 20 minutes, your phone dies while waiting on a potential job offer, your kid gets the flu and they’re now staying home on your one night off—describe to someone else your complete and utter frustration but you can only use the limited vocabulary of a 5 year old.

Hard, right?

Kids don’t have the words to describe how they feel—hell, adults can barely do it, yet so often we unrealistically expect our kids to meet us where we are, and not where they are.

When you don’t have a language to explain the sensations you’re experiencing, the experience becomes amplified. In the space between having a bad feeling and failing to explain it, is a channel where anxious kids fall, treading water, desperate to be rescued.

They need a bridge. You are that bridge.

People have been fighting about emotion for as long as we’ve been able to communicate. Some of the oldest written arguments are from ancient Greece. The Stoics said passions were errors of judgment that needed to be stamped out.

Aristotle said to feel emotions in the right amount, at the right time, about the right things. (Sure, okay dude.)

In the second century, the physician Galen spent pages of a long treatise attacking the Stoic philosopher Chrysippus, who had been dead for nearly four hundred years. In 1677, Spinoza mocked Descartes, dead since 1650, for claiming that the soul and body meet in the pineal gland in the middle of the brain. (I mean…can you blame him?)

In 1872, Charles Darwin published a book arguing that your facial expressions are inherited, shared with animals, and older than you are. Much of it was a takedown of the anatomist Sir Charles Bell, who believed God had given humans special face muscles for showing feelings. Bell’s theory had been written partly to refute Darwin’s grandfather, Erasmus, so Darwin was settling a family score.

Boys. They’re so emotional.

As I work on a longer piece about the long history of men fighting about emotion (and women are called hysterical??!!), and prep for Intro to Kinesthetic Realism, I’m offering you Darwin’s book, for free.

Because sometimes I’m just like that.

As an adult, I’ve always been driven to identify the root cause of every problem (except math. To hell with you, math!)

Perhaps it’s because I discovered decades ago that being able to name a difficult feeling or experience releases its grip. At least, that’s the effect it has on me. But the grip tightens when I’m trying to identify the roots of someone else’s problem, whose manifestation causes me suffering.

I am not a micro manager, and I don’t feel compelled to control how other people do things. I am mainly compelled to control how I do things. In my apartment, for example, there is not one right way to do the dishes or load the dishwasher (confession: I don't have a dishwasher). There is no one right to be; there is no one right way to clean.

I don’t believe my way is the best (often, I assume it’s the worst). I am a go-with-the-flow type of person (sometimes to my own detriment) and follow the road that feels right to me, but may not be right for someone else.

So, naturally, people who need to control their environment, and the people in it, are curious creatures to me. The closer I get to someone in possession of these traits, the more their inflexibility impacts me.

While I understand that people’s issues are not personal, as in, they are not about me, the expression of certain problematic behaviors that are directed at me conjure the very feelings I believe the controlling person is trying hard not to feel.

When a person doesn’t identify or deal with the origin point of their problems because it’s uncomfortable or scary, they tend to engage in behavior that inadvertently consigns someone else the emotion they are afraid to feel, or they accidentally re-create the scenario that most terrifies them.

For instance:

Imagine a person who fears being forgotten, and who has not faced down their fear. They might create emergency scenarios that require others to rush to their aid, as a maladaptive way to get their need to be remembered met, and to prove to themselves they are worthy of being cared for and loved.

But when they haven’t dealt with the fear of being forgotten, the need isn’t quenched, and the demands become bottomless. So they create scenario after scenario, each one more amped up than the last.

From: Come quick, I think my dog is dead!

Only to discover, upon your arrival, that all is well, the dog was actually just sleeping.

To: Come quick, I think I’m having a heart attack!!

Only to discover, upon arrival, that all is well, it was gas pains, not a heart attack.

This can become a cycle of problematic behavior, where the person who needs soothing is overly reliant on others to do for them what they cannot do for themselves.

Until next week, I will remain,