thank you friend for sharing your experiences and stories. > I've noticed relying on my friends to vent just sours relationships. As much as people gloat about

thank you friend for sharing your experiences and stories. > I've noticed relying on my friends to vent just sours relationships. As much as people gloat about support systems, it's mainly a farce. People will only tolerate hearing so much of your internal dissonance, concerns, and stressors. i resonate with this a lot. have you heard of the author Francis Weller? “At the core of this grief is our longing to belong. This longing is wired into us by necessity. It assures our safety and our ability to extend out into the world with confidence. This feeling of belonging is rooted in the village and, at times, in extended families. It was in this setting that we emerged as a species. It was in this setting that what we require to become fully human was established. Jean Liedloff writes, "the design of each individual was a reflection of the experience it expected to encounter." We are designed to receive touch, to hear sounds and words entering our ears that soothe and comfort. We are shaped for closeness and for intimacy with our surroundings. Our profound feelings of lacking something are not reflection of personal failure, but the reflection of a society that has failed to offer us what we were designed to expect. Liedloff concludes, "what was once man's confident expectations for suitable treatment and surroundings is now so frustrated that a person often thinks himself lucky if he is not actually homeless or in pain. But even as he is saying, 'I am all right,' there is in him a sense of loss, a longing for something he cannot name, a feeling of being off-center, of missing something. Asked point blank, he will seldom deny it.” ― Francis Weller, The Wild Edge of Sorrow: Rituals of Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief this a great conversation with Weller that i seem to return to about once a year: https://charleseisenstein.org/podcasts/new-and-ancient-story-podcast/episode-04-grief-and-reverence/ https://charleseisenstein.org/podcasts/new-and-ancient-story...