Self-Ashtualisation

   Whenever I shared my life progress with her, a mentor, keenly interested in my growth, would often respond, ‘Your learning curve is huge.’ As a highly sensitive individual, I would often analyse and reanalyse the meaning of those words. What I have found over the years is that even now, my views on what they mean keep changing, depending on what’s happened in my life and how I’ve responded to those events. For instance, if I feel down in the dumps when something, for want of a better word, bad happens, I would perceive ‘your learning curve is huge’ as extremely patronising and condescending, the way a cocky adult might say, ‘Grow up and buck up, kiddo,’ or ‘You’re still young and inexperienced. You know nothing,’ to a child or a younger adult. Occasionally, I would even regard the sentencing sentence (yes, me and my daft pun again) as a backhanded compliment, something along the lines of, 'Ooh! You've learnt an unbelievable lot for your age, haven't you?' When some

Books? Hooked. All booked up, in fact – and fiction, though sometimes life’s not without the occasional bookish friction, more precisely called the DNFriction, whose short, sharp existence, read and unread, has the surreal smell and sound of the soundest non-fiction. Neat words? Not quite, as you’ll soon discover in my probably-quite-judgy-eyed, not-quite- confident conclusions – all unfinished, inconclusive and off course, of course.   The first book I’ve ever unfriended from my precious reading time zone is a bit of a presumptuous character, for it contains this character who keeps assuming I know everything, when I most certainly do not. You know, you know, you know! In every page she keeps screaming, or rather pretends to shout at other characters, when you and I know she’s yelling at me, me, me, defensively urging me to keep reading that plotless book she’s in, one that needs urgent attention, as much as it can get – and maybe more as I snore

   Self-help books, We have all heard of those mysterious entities, haven’t we? Some of us find them absolutely inspirational whilst others, total tosh. The question I am asking in this post, as the title has highlighted, is, ‘If they were human beings, would they be genuine or toxic friends to me?’    I have decided to use the friend analogy because to me, reading a self-help book is like getting to know a stranger. I don’t trust them right away, but I’ll be openhearted so that I can get to know them. Cultivating friendships takes time – at least for an introverted person who values deep and genuine relationships like me – and so does digesting the content of self-help books. As I read and after I’ve finished reading a self-help book, I’ll reflect on these questions, because I need to and because being a highly sensitive person and consequently reader, my mind can’t help doing so: ·        Is it trying to empower or overpower me? ·        Is it judgemental or accepting of me?