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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Notes -
Thanks for the insightful reply. I think you're correct to point out the way my present mindset is coloring the things that I think are valuable and those that seem not to be. No shade to the arts ("the arts") intended, I suppose I might be a bit disappointed in the extent to which I specialized. I've been actively spending time improving my painting skills, and that is something important I don't plan to discard.
As for the rest, I think you're right re: my idealization and I appreciate hearing it. I think I might be clinging to this as "the answer" to other areas of dissatisfaction in my life. I have a tendency to fixate/obsess on one thing or another and this is probably the latest manifestation of that (and it happens to be much broader in nature, I think, than my usual obsessions (e.g. houseplants or fashion). Ultimately, I'm feeling a lack of social connection and a frustration with what feels like hollow interactions with people who don't seem to understand me (and vice versa). Years of self-help psychology, therapy, and other forms of "healing from trauma" haven't been terribly effective. But now I'm rambling so I'll leave it there. Thanks again!
Your self-awareness, lack of defensiveness, and clarity of prose all suggest to me that should you find a group of likeminds--as long as they don't happen to also be assholes--you will thrive exactly as you imagine. Maybe you're already there.
It was once put to me that no one person has to be my everything. The same is of course true of social circles.
Again, thank you! I'm working on it. Never managed to maintain a friendship for more than a couple years (even in school) but I've learned a lot about how to keep showing up and be intentional, so hopefully this time I'll do better.
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