The Friend Manual: How to make friends when you're bad at it

All my blog posts…

  • How do you keep friends when you’re in the pit?

    The last four months have been the roughest of my life. My health collapsed. My mental health collapsed. I’ve been to over 50 doctors, psychiatrists, and psychologist appointments — 30 in the first month. I’ve been poked with needles and scanned and transported via ambulance and given bottles upon bottles of pills. It’s one of Read more

  • The “Help” Menu

    In the first week after I crashed, I was pleasantly surprised to receive messages from several people offering condolences and offers to help. “If you need anything, just ask…” was the common refrain. Lovely sentiments. I received the same when my dog and grandma died. But for me, this is an impossible calculus to determine Read more

  • When you’re an ungrateful turd while accepting help

    A post that’s part of the series: “How to ask for help when you’re bad at it.” I’ve already discussed that having to ask for help means that you’re probably vulnerable. And, sometimes, you have to ask for help for something that’s scary or stressful. When I’m scared and stressed, social niceties are about as Read more

  • How to ask for help…part 2

    (Continued from part 1) Uncomfortable truth #1 – Asking for or receiving help means that I have to admit I have a weakness I was going to call this a misconception. But, I think it’s actually a truth, but an uncomfortable truth. There’s a difference between someone doing something for you that you can plausibly Read more

  • How to ask for help…when you’re bad at it

    Oh no. I crashed. After a hard couple of years and an infinitely harder year, my body and brain just gave up. Family flew thousands of miles and sat with me for weeks and did the small and large things I could no longer do and listened to me whine and had great conversations as Read more

  • The Butterfly Journal – How to Right-Size Cognitive Dissonance

    The Butterfly Journal – How to Right-Size Cognitive Dissonance

    Disclaimer, I wrote the first draft of this post in May and didn’t get around to polishing it up until just now. This was before my dog died. It feels…wrong…to takes references to him out. But I am glad this helped me focus more on him in what turned out to be his last months. Read more