Narrative Responsibility

Or, Why Would You Want to Share Your Story, Anyway? Well, the tl;dl is that people both want and fear being seen as they are in equal measure. So, then, was Sauron's bigger sin making the One Ring itself, or looking right through everyone's egoic defenses? Is there an ethical way to navigate that power?

An ethical topic to consider in the age of social media and content creation: Does your story belong only to you, or do others have any rights over it? Under what circumstances might it be valid to honor – or ignore – those rights? Are there times when the rights of the society one belongs to might outweigh the rights of the individual person/s involved? 

Settle in for a double-length episode of Storytime with Auntie E where I talk about how I got diagnosed with ADHD in middle age, why it wasn't caught any sooner despite some pretty obvious-in-hindsight signs, and how it has shifted my view of both the past and my present experience of self. It's rambly. It spans a quarter century of living. It feels mildly self-indulgent to spend 45 minutes teeing...

Some thoughts about our cultural concept of innocence, specifically the innocence of childhood, and an outline of the authoritarian parenting style, and how these are playing out in current events. Bonus reminder of how reality paradigms are formed for individuals and cultures, and how they can be updated. 

A sort of companion episode to "The Frogs, the Poets, and the Fools." Is thinking a broad or specific verb? Should it be used only for analytical and logical tasks, or can it also be a more organic and integrated process? Come settle the debate between competing meanings and maybe learn a few new ways to use your mind…whatever you want to call them!

Some thoughts about comprehension, the inadequacies of language, and the fundamental pointlessness of generative AI for translating individual human experience into a form someone else might possibly be able to understand. Bonus content about what it means to understand courtesy of an ongoing debate with my yogi friend.

Did you know that fiction is one of the best tools we have for deeply understanding another person's experience of consciousness? Pull up a chair, it's story time with Auntie E, and she's got a tale of science fiction, splintered focus, and how Murderbot's view of its own system helped solve a problem that six years of test-iterating couldn't....

The mental load of CARING about the emotional and existential experience of everyone in a household is often carried by women. This invisible burden contributes to heightened stress and poorer mental health for women, functioning analagously to a "pink tax" paid in order to have a family. Let's dream of a future where that isn't true - and talk about some strategies to bring us closer to that drea...

Our relationship to our own MBTI type - as well as other type preferences - is often a result of the family and culture we grew up in. Those experiences impact what we seek in adult relationships and how well we can relate to different personality types. Type alone is never enough to answer compatibility questions. It is ALWAYS type plus context!

So...what kind of relationship do you want? What roles do you want to play in your romantic partnership? And how might you show up differently in one relationship vs. another? Come explore the types of intimacy in more depth - it's the relationship parallel to our unfolding mandala of self. 

Part One. Because there is just too much that goes into the question of why you should date any particular person than their MBTI type, and also because there is more that goes into how you view someone's MBTI type than your own type. Today we dig into the two most common dating strategies, "opposites attract" and "like calls to like," and how each of them might look at Jungian cognitive types. 

A somewhat pedantic ramble about what is meant by "thoughts" and "thinking" and "emptying the mind" in the context of mindfulness practices. Bonus content: the actual point of mindfulness, why equating mindfulness with discipline supports the patriarchy, and a side quest into the nature of conscious awareness. TL;DL? Go stand by a field and listen to the frogs. 

We all know the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything, is 42. And we know the best approximation of this canonically unknowable question is "How many roads must a hu/man walk down?" What does that really mean in practice? What does it mean to be a human who has walked those 42 roads? What might those 42 roads be? And does it matter HOW we walk them or simply THAT we...

ADHD and disconnection from the body amplify and reinforce each other. Disruptive ADHD symptoms make the body less comfortable for the conscious mind to inhabit, but being disconnected from the subtle signals of the body makes managing ADHD symptoms harder. What's an ADHDer to do? 

CW: language, eating disorders, body dysmorphia, and unwanted sexual attention. Western culture has a terrible history of treating the female body as an object that exists for the pleasure - or displeasure - of everyone except the girl or woman who inhabits it. Her body is a safe place for her to inhabit only so far as it earns her safety and approval from the people and society around her. So spl...

We do not exist as islands unto ourselves. We are plugged into cultural systems of belief and behavior, and those systems deeply impact our relationship to ourselves and what we internalize as normal or ideal. Moreover, those systems are often inherited from times that have little or no relevance to our modern perspective, yet the echoes of their beliefs linger in our institutions and language. Th...

Geting more movement getting more into your body is often pushed as a panacea to many health and mental health issues. But exercising in a way that makes your body uncomfortable or even distressed has the opposite effect from what is intended, and drives you further OUT of your body and out of alignment with your inner truth. Luckily, you can change your underlying philosophy around movement and a...

Ever heard the phrase "get out of your comfort zone" and just felt something in you just tense up with rejection at the thought of doing even more than you already are? Maybe your discomfort zone isn't about doing more, but rather about doing less. Let's examine what conditions inside the environment of your own body that you've normalized, and see if they are, in fact, optimal conditions for grow...

If we're gonna talk about letting go of copes, we gotta talk about why we were doing them in the first place. Which means looking at the schism between our "self that acts" - our conscious, egoic self - and our "self that is," the gentle body self that has to come along for the ride with whatever our action-self chooses. The body: your original ride or die. Who knew?

When was the last time you critically examined your relationship with alcohol - or any other substance - and considered sobriety? Pull up a chair for storytime as I walk you through my journey of being sober-curious for most of the past two years. I share what I've observed in myself and American culture, what I've learned helps to reinforce the decision to abstain, and what I've decided about alc...

Part two on the topic of comfort eating, or emotional eating. This is the section with practical action steps for using the coping mechanism of comfort eating in a way that serves you better, finding other tools that you can use instead, and some of the specific dynamics you can watch for in your own body if you're still not convinced comfort eating is a problem. 

Comfort eating - or emotional eating - is a means of soothing ourselves in times of distress. But it can quickly turn into a habit, or even an addiction, that wreaks havoc on our physical health long-term. How does it get started? Why does it persist? And, really, what IS so bad about it? This is part one of a two-episode arc on this issue!

My most controversial opinion: talent does not actually exist. What we call "talent" is higher than expected skill development at a task or higher than average capacity for an underlying cognitive function. This is a distinction worth making when our cultural narratives of talent as innate and fixed can inspire or deter someone from pursuing a goal.

Every experience that we have can be judged as good/bad, worthy/unworthy of the coin of time we spent on it...or it can be viewed more neutrally, simply as a resource. A resource for what? Skill-building, discernment, wisdom, character.... We can even think in terms of our RPG character levels, and consider what experience points we might be able to gain from something we lived through. Let's talk...

Our psychological type - our MBTI type preferences - has a profound impact on our relational needs and capacities. That is, how we tend to want to be related to in order to feel acceptance, connection, and intimacy with other people, and what we have a lot of energy for doing with other people to meet their needs. Let's unpack the eight Jungian functions' relational needs and consider whether we'r...