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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.

DECEMBER

Happy New Year, my beloved subscribers,

Thank you for the gift of your readership. 

This newsletter means a lot to me; I put everything into it weekly.

Thanks for your enthusiasm, engagement, emails, and help raising mental health awareness by sharing articles on social media and spreading the word about How to Live to friends and family.

I can’t promise this year will be easier than the last, but I promise to continue offering you the information I wish I’d had when I needed it most.

xxx, Amanda (and Busy, the dog)

This piece from December 6th, 2023, Was About This Secret Insight to Failure as the Key to Success.

What if we’ve been thinking about failure wrong? 

A thought experiment: Consider that failure wasn’t conclusive or absolute but a necessary aspect intrinsic to the nature of trying. 

Through this framework, life would feel different, our outlooks would change, and our sense of self-worth would shift and bloom.

Yet, our society leads us to believe (and accept) that one misstep is a failure, and we’re urged to abandon our efforts and seek easier paths.

This, my friends, is a bullshit angle.

We often get in our own way by setting unreasonably high standards for ourselves.

For many, a win means external validation, which is fun—duh—but it’s fleeting and out of your control. What is in your control is internal validation. And one way to give it to yourself is to set realistic standards and not compare your life or selfhood to others.

This is hard to do in a world that tricks us into thinking there is one template upon which a life can be valid. 

The wins of our society look like this: Get a rewarding and fulfilling job, find “the one,” get married, have a wedding, buy a house, get a car, have kids, maybe a dog, and go on Caribbean vacations. 

But this model of living is a trap because not only does it offer only one option for what a successful life looks like, it’s framed within the context of permanence.

Achievement needn’t be external to count. A win looks like facing and overcoming internal obstacles. Our inner life is often disregarded as unimportant, but without contact and engagement with our deepest self, how can we have a genuine connection with the deepest parts of others?

READ THE FULL PIECE HERE

This piece from December 13th, 2023, explored the difference between Dissociation, Depersonalization, and Derealization.

You’re going about your normal business, and seemingly, out of nowhere, you have an odd, dislocated sensation.

You look down at your limbs; they feel and look unfamiliar and separate from you. Enough that you wonder, “Are these even mine?”

Or, you feel yourself floating away and up to the ceiling, where you seem to cling, balloon-like, staring down at yourself like you’re in a different tense—the third person—watching yourself in the scene below.

Perhaps you’ve had the unnerving experience of feeling like the world around you is a cardboard cutout or a board game, and everyone, including you, is just a piece being played.

If these descriptions sound familiar, you may have dissociated.
Dissociation means to emotionally detach from your immediate surroundings enough that you feel a sensation of being disconnected, separate, and apart.

Daydreaming is a type of dissociation. So is fantasizing, but as long as they don’t negatively interfere or disrupt your daily existence, they are not considered disordered.

While there are many types of dissociative disorders, including Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID), today’s focus is on two particular types of dissociation: depersonalization and derealization.

These terms can create confusion, so let’s sort them out…

READ THE FULL PIECE HERE

The December 20th piece was my annual Mental-Health Related Gift Guide for Everyone of ALL AGES!

The list is jam-packed with goodies, but here are a few of my favorites:

The BetterSleep App

This app is legitimately life-changing. I fall asleep to it every night. I have a selection of about seven sleep meditations I rotate through, but there are also stories for adults and kids. You can track your sleep; be prepared to discover that you snore. This one is for everyone of all ages!

The Calm Ball

Remember the Magic 8 Ball? This is the same idea but for CALM, not luck.

Mindfulness Pendant

This Mindfulness Pendant is a breathing and fidget tool in the form of an aesthetically pleasing necklace. It’s also 20% off right now. YES, PLEASE!

READ THE FULL PIECE HERE

The December 27th piece was About the Trouble With Best-Of Lists and Included an Alternative Way to Weigh In.

The presence of a bad review crushes as much as the absence of your work on year-end roundups and best-of lists.

But let’s be clear: there is no such thing as a “best” anything.

There is only “out of the narrow pool of things I managed to experience this year, here are the ones that most moved or impacted me.”

A best-of-list can be entirely subjective or entirely political. Artists who can afford to hire publicists to help get them on these lists. It often feels rigged, and perhaps it is.

So, instead of a best-of list, I am offering A HANDFUL OF MY FAVORITE THINGS from 2023 and A HANDFUL OF MY LEAST FAVORITE THINGS from 2023.

My favorite things delighted, taught, invigorated, and inspired me. 

My least favorite things left me gutted and dissociated.

HERE ARE A HANDFUL OF MY FAVORITE THINGS from 2023.

FAVORITE FINDS

1. Sonia Delaunay

2. Abortion Trading Cards

3. This perfect Diptyque Bais candle dupe on Amazon sells for $30, which is $40 less than the original!!

4. A lightly used copy of the original Peoplemaking by Virginia Satir was left on Dekalb Avenue. It sells on Amazon for $134!

FAVORITE READING EXPERIENCES

1. Rachel Aviv. Strangers to Ourselves: Unsettled Minds and the Stories That Make Us

2. Antoine Wilson. Mouth to Mouth

3. Robert Lopez. Dispatches From Puerto Nowhere

4. Abdi Assadi. A Healer’s Handbook

5. bell hooks. The Will to Change

6. Rick Rubin. The Creative Act: A Way of Being

AND SO MUCH MORE!

READ THE FULL PIECE HERE

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