Hi friend!

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.

On October 2nd, 2024 I wrote about The Life-Changing Magic of Healing Through Art.

Art has long tried to make sense of troubled states (See: The Rorschach Test). And troubled states have long influenced art.

In 1898, on the outskirts of Vienna, Austria, a psychiatric institute called the Maria Gugging Psychiatric Clinic opened its doors.

The institute had a particularly troubling past. Forty-two years after its founding, the Nazis used the site for their involuntary euthanasia program, Aktion T4. This program called for experimenting and exterminating people with mental or physical disabilities. The Nazis abused and murdered hundreds of people with mental health conditions at Gugging.

That the clinic survived and then thrived is a miracle unto itself.

In the 1950s, Dr. Leo Navratil was a psychiatrist at the clinic. To better understand his patients, he inadvertently created a way to humanize mental illness, expand therapeutic forms, and contribute to the Art Brut movement.

Devoted to his work, he read and researched ways to help his unresponsive patients. After reading Karen Machover's book, Personality Projection in the Drawing of the Human Figure, he created a nonverbal measure to assess and diagnose personality and mental states. He asked his patients to draw a person.

What his patients did in response forever changed the landscape of mental health care.

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October 9th’s 2024 Piece Offered the Things I Am Reading, Watching and Thinking About.

Read the personal backstory to this song, and a psychological resonance to this video.

Every season is bell hooks season.

I have an absolutely WILD story about Frail Sister in the upcoming newsletter. Stay tuned. In the meantime, have a look at the work of Karen Green and her incredible books. (The late David Foster Wallace was her husband.)

To see everything I’ve been digging 👇🏼

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OCTOBER 16, 2024 Was a Bonus Piece for Paying Subscribers On Socratic Questioning.

I spent the entire day working on a piece about how often single, child-free people, (often women) are excluded from the social life of couples.

Then, I convinced myself it was offensive, everyone would hate me, unsubscribe en masse, and send me spiteful emails.

I have slipped into the stream of cognitive distortion.

Instead of sharing the piece I've spent nine hours writing, I am sending you a worksheet that targets irrational thoughts. This worksheet, based on a concept from Cognitive Behavioral Therapy called cognitively restructuring, helps people identify and change unhelpful thoughts using a method known as Socratic Questioning.

Perhaps I’ll return to the other piece and send it next week.

Until then, it’s time to interrogate ourselves, and see if we can begin seeing things objectively.

And by “we”…

(I mean me).

I’m also sharing the excellent resource where I found this worksheet. It’s one therapists use, now at your fingertips (at the bottom).

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October 23 I Shared the Piece I Was Afraid to Send on Oct 16th, and OH BOY, Was it a Hit.

Anxious Preamble:

Last week, I wrote a piece about a phenomenon known exclusively to single people—couple exclusion.

I didn’t send it out.

I worried it might offend, that I’d lose subscribers, and everyone would hate me, so I sent out a solution to those suffering the same reflexive irrational thought cycle I’d succumbed—Cognitive Distortion.

But then a ton of people asked me to send it, so here I go.

I am a never-married, cat-and-child-free, currently un-coupled, woman of “advanced maternal age” who lives with her dog.

The first year of Covid-19, I was single—coincidentally, so was my dog—and we rode it out together in our small Brooklyn apartment.

While others found safety in numbers, I learned what true isolation meant.

Lockdown policies found families, couples and single mothers (thank God) cocooned together, sharing space and company, essentially forgetting about the world outside, including their friends who were alone.

very family I know disappeared to bunker up out of town with other families. They created pods, and ran home schools, had big family-style dinners at long farm tables, and created micro-cultures in mini communes of their own making. I scrolled enviously through their posts on social media.

The silence of that first year was stark—and telling. I have never felt so dead and invisible in my life. As it dragged on, my body responded to the lack of physical contact —no handshakes, hugs, or even a pat on my shoulder for nearly half a year. There were moments I questioned whether I was still alive.

I always imagined that in the event of an apocalypse, someone would make room for me in their bunker, but I was wrong.

Being excluded from pandemic pods was painful but understandable—no one could risk introducing illness into their protective bubbles, but for many single people, it amplified a pattern we’ve long experienced: being left out of couple-centric events because we’re un-partnered. The same invisible barrier that keeps single people out of couple-centric dinner parties was now keeping us out of survival pods.

What exactly is behind this non-life-threatening exclusion—where instead of protecting against a singular, potentially deadly, disease, the safeguard is against the single guest?

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October 27 Was a Bonus Q & A to Paying Subscribers on Feeling Not Good Enough.

A while back I asked my followers on social media to submit questions around the theme of not feeling good enough. I chose the three most relatable and universal.

I’m decided to take a different tact. Instead of answering based on all the information I’ve accrued over the decades, I am going to respond from the lens of psychodynamic therapy—which I was in for 23 years, and have studied independently for decades.

My answers will walk you through the techniques a psychodynamic therapist might use to help get at the core suffering, and give you ideas for how to get unstuck.

Let’s dive in.

Question:

I always feel like I’m not good enough for my partner, even though he tells me he loves me. I constantly worry that he’ll realize he could do better and leave me for someone else. How do I stop feeling so unworthy?

Answer:

In psychodynamic therapy, it might be pointed out that your fear of not being good enough in your relationship likely has roots in your attachment patterns, which are developed in early childhood. Psychoanalysts John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth expanded on Freud’s theories, and developed ideas around attachment theory, which describes how our early relationships with caregivers form the blueprint for how we relate to others in adulthood.

If, for example, you had an inconsistent or critical caregiver, you may have internalized the belief that love is conditional or unreliable. In therapy, you’d explore these early experiences to better understand how they shape your current fears. Object relations theory, another psychodynamic approach, would suggest that you have internalized a "bad object"—perhaps an image of yourself as unworthy—that you project onto your current relationship.

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Parents and Couples Responded to the Single Exclusion Piece and On October 30th I Sent Out The Other Side of the Conversation

Last week’s newsletter was one I was afraid to send out into the world, and originally, I didn’t.

Many people (women, mainly) wrote and urged me to share it.

Despite feeling extra vulnerable, I sent out: The Single Life: On Exclusion, Loneliness and Understanding.

The response was amazing. Single women weighed in via comments, some people sent me texts and others emails.

My piece is just one half of a larger conversation, and I’d like to share the side that weighed in to explain why their single friends often get shafted.

Some is expected, but certain things are unexpected.

A single mother friend whom I deeply adore texted to say that the weeks she’d been thinking about me turned into months because it was hard to find time to hang out and— this next part is important— she’s under the mistaken assumption that if she can’t offer time then she shouldn’t text, or respond to a text.

RELATABLE.

This is an understandable dilemma, and I’ve been there before. It was helpful, and going forward, I’ll be mindful of that dilemma, and shift my own thwarted thinking that not hearing from her means she doesn’t want to see me, or be friends anymore.

Instead of being able to sit with uncertainty, we often spin a story to satisfy the sense of certainty we crave—and we believe the story despite this fact: the story is always fiction.

Another friend wrote to say that the sentiment flows both ways. Sometimes, she said, it’s single people who exclude couples because married people with kids are boring and mainstream.

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