monstradamus .

Really nice recipes. Every hour.

When someone rejects you, what they are rejecting is their own mental formation of you. It says more about that mental formation than you as a living reality. 

It may feel personal but that depends on how strongly you have identified with that mental formation. 

When you are rejected and it hurts, it is an opportunity to examine what part of you hurts and why. 

Did they hurt your sense of attractiveness? Your sense of love-ableness? Your sense of worthiness? Your feeling as being this or that kind of person? 

If you can take your ego, meaning your derived sense of self, out of the equation, then rejection can be useful. It can tell you about other people. But beyond that, it doesn’t tell you who you are. 

However if we look to our own judgments to know who we are, we will also look to the judgments of others. That is the truth behind Jesus’ statement: “Judge not and you shall not be judged.”

Know yourself through your aliveness, not through your ideas about yourself. This will make everything a whole lot easier. 

And meditate daily. 

Being introverted and having social anxiety are two different things.

1: Introversion is born. Social anxiety is made.

Introversion is a part of your inherent personality—a from-the-womb, dyed-in-the-wool trait. And while those who are socially anxious also carry a genetic predisposition toward it, there’s more than just temperament at play. In an indelicate analogy, genetics loads the gun, but experience pulls the trigger.

Two things happen to make us socially anxious: the first is learning. One way or another, we learn—mistakenly!—that we don’t measure up to scrutiny. We might absorb the worries of a parent who frets about what the neighbors think, internalize the social pressure to be “outgoing” when we’re anything but, or be seared by a social trauma like bullying. However social anxiety works its way into our brain, we somehow grow to believe at a young age that people will judge us and find us lacking.  

The second ingredient for social anxiety is avoidance. We bolt at the end of the meeting so we miss the ensuing small talk, feign illness so we don’t have to go to the holiday party, or stare at our phones whenever we feel nervous, all of which keeps us mired. And, of course, we hide in the bathroom. We don’t get the chance to discover this social stuff isn’t as bad as we think and maybe, just maybe, we got this.

Outfit I wore to dinner with my childhood friends.