What will your life be like in three years?
In three years I hope to be living in Europe with my beloved Polish Bear 🐻
I hope to be undertaking further study and working and that I have purchased a house along with PB. We are both happy and healthy and cycling around the place having adventures along rivers and lakes. We are spending a lot of time with his family and I’m making a lot of friends in our new city.
Clear-eyed, practical and empathic guide to minimising the impact of the narcissistic person in your life. And for welcoming more peace and order into your life as a result.
Rating: 🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟
Genre: Non-Fiction, Self-Help, Self-Development, Psychology, Relationships, Healing.
Publisher: Penguin Life
Review in one word: Eye-opening
If you are looking for a definitive guide to identifying narcissists in your life then this is the only book you will ever need.
Dr Durvasula is a global authority on identifying and healing from narcissists. She tells you how you can move forward, protect yourself and make decisions, in spite of the devious manipulative behaviour of the narcissistic person in your life.
“Until the story of the hunt is told by the lion, the tale of the hunt will always glorify the hunter. The person who holds the narrative holds the power. Until now, we have only told the story of the hunter.”
She writes in a clear, direct, empathic, and deeply practical way about how you can identify narcissistic people. How to differentiate between when a non-narcissistic person is just having a bad day and when you are wrangling with a narcissist. How to stop gaslighting yourself and what your options are to best protect yourself and others impacted by their behaviour.
“These are specific behavioral patterns that encompass the devaluation you experience in narcissistic relationships.
I use the acronym DIMMER to describe this set of patterns because the narcissistic relationship can be viewed as a switch that dims your sense of self and well-being.
To be in a narcissistic relationship is to have your needs, feelings, beliefs, experiences, thoughts, hopes, and even sense of self be dismissed and invalidated.
This may be as simple as the narcissistic person not listening or contemptuously dismissing something you say (“That’s just ridiculous, nobody cares about what you are saying”).
Over time this can feel dehumanizing because anything you bring up is written off as unimportant or is simply not attended to, and it can slowly feel like you do not exist. The experience of dismissiveness and invalidation can occur gradually, and what initially may feel like a difference of opinion can evolve into a large-scale brush-off.”
It’s Not You: Identifying and Healing from Narcissistic People, Ramani Durvasula PhD
Dr Durvasula acknowledges that in many cases, people can’t just abandon or disown the narcissistic person in their lives, even if they are causing huge amounts of chaos, pain and disorder. If the person in question is a parent, a boss, one’s child or anybody else with a strong claim on one’s life or economic position, it may not even be possible to detach completely. For these situations, Dr Durvasula provides ways to minimise the mental, physical and emotional toll it takes interacting with the narcissistic person.
“Radical acceptance gives you permission to heal, because you stop channeling your energy into trying to fix the relationship and instead focus on moving yourself forward. The alternative is to remain stuck in the unfounded hope that it could get better and stay in these invalidating cycles in perpetuity.”
It’s Not You: Identifying and Healing from Narcissistic People, Ramani Durvasula PhD
If you have ever been bullied, harassed, made to feel tiny, disbelieved or gaslit by a narcissist, you will read the first part of this book and have A-HA moments one after another, after another. This may make you feel angry and cause you relive the moments when they betrayed you. It may bring into sharp clarity the tactics they use to get what they want. There was a lot of takeaways from this book, but the main one is that narcissists don’t change. If they use manipulative and dark tactics to control you in the past, they will continue to do so in the future. This is both deeply sad and also in a way liberating, as it allows you to take the necessary steps to reduce or limit contact with them, or go no contact altogether.
“You aren’t damaged just because you were in a narcissistic relationship, and you aren’t somehow less than because your parent was a narcissistic person or you are with a narcissistic partner. Seeing the narcissistic behavior doesn’t make you “bad” but rather quite courageous. To clearly see and accept a pattern that is painful to acknowledge yet be willing to make realistic choices and protect yourself is the height of fearlessness and resilience”
It’s Not You: Identifying and Healing from Narcissistic People, Ramani Durvasula PhD
“In my experience as a psychologist working with people recovering from narcissistic abuse, I have observed that it is the injustice raised by these relationships that has the most profound impact on healing. The process of grief can be facilitated by some sense of closure, fairness, or meaning—and none of that is happens when you are grieving these types of losses, especially in the acute phases of grief. The injustice can also feed the rumination process. Narcissistic people rarely genuinely apologize, face meaningful consequences for their behavior, take accountability or responsibility, or meaningfully acknowledge your pain. As a result, narcissistic relationships can feel deeply unjust—you get hurt and psychologically wrecked, and they get to move on with their lives with little insight into the damage they wrought. A core belief for you may be that life is fair, so when these relationships repeatedly show that it is not, it can be unsettling and uncomfortable. You may then blame yourself, which is a manifestation of the internal experience of injustice, and this can make it more difficult to let go and heal.
It’s Not You: Identifying and Healing from Narcissistic People, Ramani Durvasula PhD
“It’s also time to rewrite your narratives on resilience. Your feelings and emotions were either not allowed or were gaslighted in your narcissistic relationships. People who have less power in their families, relationships, and the world at large learned long ago that their emotions are often not tolerated or permissible. Many of you learned long ago to push your feelings down, and that strength and resilience were associated with being stoic. In many cultures, not expressing emotion and leaving feelings unexpressed are mistakenly framed as resilience. But silent endurance is not resilience, even though it may be more comfortable for the people around you. As you reshape your narrative, connect to any feeling and emotion you have and are experiencing as you go through life”
It’s Not You: Identifying and Healing from Narcissistic People, Ramani Durvasula PhD
The second part of the book shows how you can integrate new ways of seeing the world and seeing yourself that are far more healthy, allowing you to disentangle yourself mentally, physically and emotionally from the narcissistic person. This part of the book was incredibly helpful, practical and useful.
Dr Ramani Durvasula is a knowledgable and incredibly helpful clinical psychologist with decades of experience in-person therapy. She became a Youtube sensation with her incredibly popular channel where she dissects every aspect of having a relationship with a narcissist. I would give this book five stars. There are many books out there about coping with narcissists but this one is realistic, clear-eyed and practical.
Invent a holiday! Explain how and why everyone should celebrate.
Imagine if there was such a public holiday as ‘Get to know your inner child’. What an interesting public holiday this would be!
It would be confronting, painful and eye-opening for many people.
It’s common to bury one’s feelings along with pain accumulated during childhood and youth. Yet this occurs at great cost to adult development.
Some people become angry and bitter, others are avoidant and live lives of isolation, still others become controlling or demanding. There’s no right or wrong, no accusations. However it’s all just unallocated pain that needs to see the light of day. A public holiday for people to befriend the person they were as a child could change the world.
Maybe crazy and insane people like Tr** would be less crazy and power hungry. Maybe there would be less anger, fear and pain, less violence and chaos in the world if people fully addressed what happened to them when they were young and defenseless.
Of course, such a public holiday would be considered naive and even amusing to people who weild power. So fanatical are they about portraying strength, but real true strength only comes from uncovering and acknowledging darkness.
The problem of childhood neglect and abuse and its mental health impacts on adults also underscores and highlights why protecting children is so important. Their identities are selves are fragile and forming. Adults who don’t address the demands of their inner child become the walking wounded hurting themselves and others. I don’t know if any of this makes sense to others. Thanks for listening.
Rating: 🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟
Genre: Punk, Thrash Metal
Label: Rough Trade
Review in one word: Exhilarating
I don’t often review music, yet as I clean my house, go on walks, work, have friends around, hang out with my partner or read books…well I’m constantly listening to something! So here it goes – my favourite album of 2024 dropped only a few days ago, it’s Cartoon Darkness by Amyl and the Sniffers.
I have loved this band ever since I first heard them. This is their third album and I think it’s definitely their most impressive. Amyl and the Sniffers have created an energetic, emotionally intense and sonically complex album that exceeds the range of their previous (mostly garage punk) albums and encompasses thrash metal with satisfying meaty guitar solos, funky dance-punk earworms, romantic and melodic punk-ballads and funny satirical songs that give the middle finger to Amy’s bitchy critics.
Frontwoman Amy Taylor has enough raw energy to power a thousand suns. She is the female incarnation of how Iggy Pop was in the 70’s (both have a physically commanding, charismatic and eye-popping stage presence). I can’t wait to see them live!
The album was recorded with producer Nick Launay (Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, Yeah Yeah Yeahs) at Foo Fighters’ 606 Studios in Los Angeles in early 2024 and released only this week.
There’s loads of complexity to this album in terms of the depth and meaning of lyrics, musical styles, but overall the music fits together perfectly as a cohesive album.
In tracks, like ‘Bailing on Me’ Taylor seems to be channelling Courtney Love’s late 90’s album Celebrity Skin, with the melodic singing and gentle melancholy of the lyrics.
‘U Should Not be Doing That’ is an infectious and funky dance-punk track that has Amy talking back to her horrible critics and showing them for being the pathetic keyboard warriors they are.
‘It’s Mine’ is my favourite track of the album and is a real thrash metal banger…it’s about overconsumption and people feeling that they have right to have whatever they want in life. The perfect song to put on with a lot of bass if you want to truly immerse yourself.
‘Motorbike Song’ is a classic Aussie pub punk song and reminds me a bit of The Angels or the Saints.
‘Big Dreams’ has the melancholic and emotionally wrought vibe of an REM song. The lyrics are about living a life being stuck in a suffocating environment. This hits hard and in a deep way when combined with Amy on the back of a Harley in one long continuous take. Powerful stuff.
I have been so excited to see this band go from being a bunch of flatmates who formed a band in Melbourne to their launch into the outer reaches of the stratosphere in terms of international respect, adoration and recognition.
Something deep inside of me loves the chaotic intensity of fast and furious post-punk and punk. In particular, I have always been drawn to female-led, feminist and aggressively angry bands fronted by women like Sonic Youth, L7, Hole, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, the Gossip, the Dead Weather, Sleater-Kinney, Siouxsie and the Banshees and Snunk Anansie, Peaches and PJ Harvey. Amyl and the Sniffers are up there with these bands in my opinion – they are one of the greatest female-led rock bands ever.
To me, the women in these bands represent a strong form of womanhood as they refuse to comply to conventions of what a woman should be. They say ‘fuck all of that’ and it’s so liberating to see and hear a woman refusing to comply, to be good, quiet and passive. Instead these women exist outside of the status quo like sorceresses, weaving mesmeric magic and intriguing everyone.
So what exactly is Cartoon Darkness? Well it’s incredibly political and profound actually and captures the Zeitgeist of what’s going on in our world. Amy explains on the Rough Trade website:
“Cartoon Darkness is about climate crisis, war, AI, tiptoeing on the eggshells of politics, and people feeling like they’re helping by having a voice online when we’re all just feeding the data beast of Big Tech, our modern-day god. It’s about the fact that our generation is spoon-fed information. We look like adults, but we’re children forever cocooned in a shell. We’re all passively gulping up distractions that don’t even cause pleasure, sensation or joy, they just cause numbness.”
“Cartoon Darkness is driving headfirst into the unknown, into this looming sketch of the future that feels terrible but doesn’t even exist yet. A childlike darkness. I don’t want to meet the devil half-way and mourn what we have right now. The future is cartoon, the prescription is dark, but it’s novelty. It’s just a joke. It’s fun.”
Amy Taylor
“The adversity of life is desire never fulfilled. Doing the dishes cleaning, but never the one eating the meal, so close but it’s never enough, and trying to celebrate the ignorance of youth despite it being robbed away, so choosing ignorance, choosing to be dumb and choosing love, despite everything, choosing bad decisions for love, for life, because it is short, or is it long? Surrendering to joy, surrendering to being a vision, in your own power, because making decisions based on emotion rather than logic is liberating, and despite the external inferno, you walk away unscathed, through flames, burnt but only superficially, unstopped, unaffected, unhuman. Life is work, life is not free, we can never work enough because the end goal doesn’t exist, so all we can do is choose to be wrong.”
Amy Taylor on Chewing Gum
There’s so much emotional nuance and depth to this album it will actually take me a long time and a lot of repeated listens to get to the bottom of it all. There’s equal measure of heavy themes and bright, funny and cheeky moments. I hope you will enjoy the danceable party anthems and that this album lightens your life as much as it has mine.
When I was in Chefchaoen, Morocco in 2009 and looking out from the rooftop of the hostel I was overtaken by a feeling of awe and amazement at the sheer size and scale of the world.
Gone was the small-minded, insular and parochial place of my origin and instead I was in place where people had lived out their lives in a completely different way, speaking a different language and writing a script so unlike my own. Believing in a God so unlike my own and listening to the circling winds of folklore and stories so unlike my own ancestral stories from the white world and the Māori world. Every few hours I would hear the minarets ringing out over the surrounding hills with the call to prayer. The call was made in the most solemn, peaceful, reverent and beautiful voice. It felt like hearing someone else’s dream or many people’s dreams echoing out over the sky. On the air you could smell the burning hash from the mountains where farmers grew it and burned it off.
I realised how small and insignificant my life was and how there are infinite ways to be in the world and move through the world. That nobody owned me or could lay claim to me or my thoughts and what I wanted to do with the remainder of my life. I was my own person completely, rootless but grounded within my own self.
I really recommend travelling alone if you want to have an experience something like that.
You have three magic genie wishes, what are you asking for?
Endless money: they say money corrupts people, it’s certainly possible that having endless money would make me a different person. I would likely become too lazy with endless money, however I would like to think that I’d use the endless money to resolve the world’s most pressing problems: climate change, extinction, war and violence, human rights and animal rights abuses.
Endless time: we only get around 4000 weeks of being alive as human beings. In the vast expanse of deep time this is absolutely miniscule. Imagine being able to live across multiple millennia…how much you could know and understand! How many things would it be possible to achieve, you could build cities, create 1000s of books, learn 1000s of new skills, know and love so many more people and animals with so much more time!
Endless health: I wouldn’t say immortality because I wouldn’t want to be some old 2000 year old prune, but remaining fit, active, healthy and looking good would be something I would love to achieve.
How about you? What are your three genie wishes?
The #science of optimism, hexahedral imaginary #architecture, the most popular dreams across every country mapped, how to make good small talk, golden roman bracelets and more. It’s edition 138 of #InterestingThings
Paolo Soleri’s ‘Hexahedron City’ (1969), with its superimposed pyramids, each twice as tall as the Empire State Building, was designed to be adaptable to any terrain and able to house 170,000 people.
In experiments like Arcosanti, Soleri’s work begins to intersect with science fiction… And if you notice any resemblance between this image of his dome residences and Luke Skywalker’s home in the desert of Tatooine, it’s not a coincidence… A dome and a sunken space to seek shelter from the sun and sandstorms, a kind of anti-heat igloo that George Lucas created by integrating pre-existing Berber architectures in the Tunisian locations of Episode IV Photo by Jessica Jameson.
A growing body of research suggests that optimism plays a significant role in promoting both physical and mental well-being.
People with an optimistic mindset are associated with various positive health indicators, particularly cardiovascular, but also pulmonary, metabolic, and immunologic. They have a lower incidence of age-related illnesses and reduced mortality levels. Optimism and pessimism are not arbitrary and elusive labels. On the contrary, they are mindsets that can be scientifically measured, placing an individual’s attitude on a spectrum ranging from optimistic to pessimistic. Framing the baseline of each subject in this way, researchers are able to verify the correlation between optimism level and relative health conditions.
When a neanderthal was modelled using 3D skull data for Netflix series, they gave her a warm and approachable face. But according to this article, that’s not scientifically accurate and tells us more about us than it does about her. Via Phys.org.
We don’t know what kinds of facial expressions were used by or were meaningful to Neanderthals. Whether or not Neanderthals had the vocal range or hearing of modern humans is a matter of debate and would have dramatically influenced social communication through the face.
None of this information can be deduced from a skull.
Facial surgeon Daniel Saleh told me about the cultural relevance of Shanidar Z: “as we age, we get crescentic creases [wrinkles] around the dimple—this changes the face—but there is no skeletal correlation to that.” Since facial expressions like smiling evolved with the need for social communication, Shanidar Z can be seen an example of overlaying contemporary ideas about soft tissue interaction on the bones, rather than revealing any scientific method.
This matters because there’s a long, problematic history of ascribing emotions, intelligence, civility and value to some faces and not others. How we represent, imagine and understand the faces of people past and present is a political, as well as social activity.
Historically, societies have made the faces of those they want to be connected to more emotionally empathetic. When cultures have determined, however, certain groups they don’t want to connect to and, in fact, want to marginalize, we have seen grotesque and inhuman ideas and depictions rise around them. Take, for example, anti-Black caricatures from the Jim Crow era in the US or cartoons of Jewish people made by the Nazis.
By representing this 75,000-year-old woman as a contemplative and kindly soul who we can relate to, rather than a snarling, angry (or blank featured) cipher, we are saying more about our need to rethink the past than any concrete fact about the emotional lives of Neanderthals.
There is nothing inherently wrong with artistically imagining the past, but we need to be clear about when that happens—and what it is for. Otherwise we ignore the complex power and meanings of the face in history, and in the present.
An Achaemenid Gold Bracelet (5th-4th Century BC), put on an arm found in today’s Tajikistan. The Trustees of the British Museum. How amazing! Found via Archaeohistories on Mastodon.
People usually only disclose their deepest disappointments, proudest accomplishments and simmering anxieties to close friends and family.
But our experiments tested the seemingly radical idea that deep conversations between strangers can end up being surprisingly satisfying.
Misconceptions over the outcomes of deeper conversations may happen, in part, because we also underestimate how interested other people are in what we have to share. This makes us more reluctant to open up.
It turns out that, more often than not, strangers do want to hear you talk about more than the weather; they really do care about your fears, feelings, opinions and experiences.
The results were strikingly consistent. For the experiments, we recruited college students, online samples, strangers in a public park and even executives at financial services firms, and similar patterns played out within each group. Whether you’re an extrovert or an introvert, a man or a woman, you’re likely to underestimate how good you’ll feel after having a deep conversation with a stranger. The same results even occurred in conversations over Zoom.
In one telling demonstration, we had some people engage in both a relatively shallow and comparatively deeper conversation. People expected that they would prefer a shallow conversation to the deeper one before they took place. After the interactions occurred, they reported the opposite.
Moreover, the participants consistently told us that they wished they could have deeper conversations more often in their everyday lives.
The problem, then, is not a lack of interest in having more meaningful conversations. It’s the misguided pessimism about how these interactions will play out.
It’s possible, though, to learn from these positive experiences.
Think of the trepidation kids have of diving into the deep end of a swimming pool. The uneasiness is often unwarranted: Once they take the plunge, they end up having a lot more fun than they did in shallower waters.
Our data suggests that something similar can happen when it comes to topics of conversation. You might feel nervous before starting a deeper conversation with someone you barely know; yet once you do, you might actually enjoy digging a little deeper than you typically do.
I am delighted to know that people still buy and collect rare and beautifully designed cassette tapes. This one by French musician Claire Kelp features stickers in a retro 8-bit style that can be attached to a colourful case. Also the music itself is an extremely relaxing new age ambient sound. It really is lovely!
French artist Guillaume Legros, known as Saype is making big waves in street art by painting huge frescoes of gigantic children and hands joined together. He does this on mountainsides and on the grassy lawns below the Eiffel Tower. Saype’s intention is to bring people together to think about the environment, community, connection and caring for our planet for the sake of our children. He uses his own 100% biodegradable paint. Via Inspiration Grid on Mastodon.
Photos by Saype and Valentin Flauraud.
I love octopuses! They are incredible creatures with an alien-like keen intelligence. They feel, think, taste and understand the world through interdependent brains in their arms and if one arm is cut off they can regrow another one. This sort of intelligence arose independently over millions of years from mammals. Their amazing ways and playful curiosity astounds me and that they are farmed for food or put into tiny glass boxes for humans or even killed live on a plate – this breaks my heart into a thousand pieces. This video surprised me, I thought it would be some moron doing cruel “entertaining” tricks using an octopus. Instead it was a scientist who clearly loves them, he explains their intelligence succinctly and created an intricate maze for his octopus friend to navigate through to get to a cache of tasty crustacean snacks. Afterwards, he reasoned that if the octopus successfully navigated through the maze, she would be ready to be released back into the ocean, which is exactly where she belongs and exactly what he did.
Did you enjoy this collection? let me know what you think of it below. Thank you for reading my dear friends!
Photographer Frank Hurley snaps his whimsical and wise looking Greenland esquimaux dogs named Basilisk and Ginger during an Antarctic expedition between 1911-1914. Image discovered via the State Library of New South Wales. See original.
I love big, energetic and athletic dogs like this. I’m inspired by my friend A Weirdo With on here, who wants to have some Great Danes. I have read about Siberian Huskies as a breed and apparently they need about 2 hours of exercise each day. So a dog who needs a lot of attention and time. I am still not perturbed by this and would love to go ahead with getting a pair of them. I have fantasies of have two of them driving me in a sled through the snow in Polish forest…maybe one day!
“And the people stayed home. And read books, and listened, and rested, and exercised, and made art, and played games, and learned new ways of being, and were still.
And listened more deeply. Some meditated, some prayed, some danced. Some met their shadows. And the people began to think differently.
And the people healed. And, in the absence of people living in ignorant, dangerous, mindless, and heartless ways, the earth began to heal.
And when the danger passed, and the people joined together again, they grieved their losses, and made new choices, and dreamed new images, and created new ways to live and heal the earth fully, as they had been healed.”
~Kitty O’Meara
The moment I heard my first love story
I started looking for you, not knowing
how blind that was.
Lovers don’t finally meet somewhere
They’re in each other all along.
-Rumi
Content Catnip
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