As Louise herself says, you can’t learn life for somebody else; everybody has to learn their own particular lessons. Your particular lessons might be different from mine. My lesson was that I learned something about my reaction to something I read in Dale Carnegie’s famous book about making friends and networking together. He said that the most important thing was not criticizing people. That made me nod because I actually spend a large amount of energy trying not to criticize people, trying to do it less than how we’re taught to behave in school, even formally. But then he added that we should also actively praise people and tell them things we like about them, if we really like it about them. That was different for me, and although I liked it, I’ve found it to be difficult to do.

And then I was reading the chapter “How To Love Yourself”, where Louise says that we shouldn’t criticize ourselves—I nodded—and then also she said, We should praise ourselves to ourselves, for what’s good about ourselves, starting today, and I’m like, Oh! 😮

You mean I can deserve the presence of good things, and be good, and not just release bad things, and be, I don’t know, non-bad, right. 😮

I guess to be fair to me, most people are taught that the world is bad vs anti-bad; they don’t get told there’s non-bad, and they certainly don’t get told that there’s good.

But also I realized something else: I always interpreted, I guess, Louise saying that we shouldn’t criticize ourselves, to it being that we shouldn’t Reject ourselves, you know. But she does say that you Don’t need to criticize yourself to change. But I realize now that the main difference between when I entered my self-help journey and when I was kinda a Bella Swan normie, you know—self-hating, sarcastic, weird, (so to speak), negative, stuck: although I went through sorta a “masculine” normie period where I hid my vulnerability and a “feminine” period where I read “Twilight”, (I’m reading it again now, for the first time—and I mean, it’s not such a wonderful novel, but it is nice to actually be able to read it sanely)—is that when I was a normal high school student with good grades and potential or whatever (my “masculine” normie phase) I was negative and stuck, and when I’d been down and out for so long I wanted to change, I still thought that there was something wrong with me, but I could desire change. (Sometimes.)

But we can, I see now, just change without feeling deficient. Because if your motivation to change is that you MUST improve, because you are NOT right, then you Will Not give yourself permission to relax, you know—or even gain a pleasant as opposed to a merely easily-tolerated life experience, most like.

So yeah. It’s so easy to underestimate Louise; she’s not a philosopher; she’s obviously not an academic, you know—but she’s Louise, and I love her. I love her because she helps me to see the good in myself.

ممتاز ( )