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Meditation on mindlessness.

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Every now and then I get stuck in a loop. I find myself doing something that I don’t want to do, and I’ve been doing it far longer than I should. It doesn’t make any sense. I’m an adult. I’m in charge of my life, right?

It sure doesn’t feel like it to me sometimes, and I suspect you might know what I’m talking about.

There are habits that I fall into that don’t do me any good anymore, if they really ever did to start with. Doing the same thing over and over feels safer than trying something new, even if the old thing is a dead end.

This is how I’ll end up eating a whole bag of potato chips in one sitting. This is how I’ll spend two hours scrolling through Facebook to see if anything is happening. This is how I smoked clove cigarettes and pot for ten years.

Mindlessness. It’s all mindlessness. It’s being on auto pilot. It is worse than death because at least with death I don’t have control over my actions. I’d like to think when I’m alive, I do.

The bad part is that when I get in these loops I usually know it. I’m aware of how badly I don’t want to be doing this thing but I’m still doing it anyway. Ten minutes later I’m still doing it. Ten minutes more and I’m still there.

It’s how I end up plodding through books that I don’t really enjoy. They aren’t for a class. They aren’t assigned. Most of the books I read I got for free or really cheap too, so it isn’t like I’m wasting money if I stop reading a book that is going nowhere.

Sometimes when I am stuck in a loop, I start to think like this and it helps me so I offer it to you:

Would Jesus be spending his time like this? What if he were here with me? Would I be doing what I am doing?

It works for food too – would Jesus be eating this? Is it healthy? Would I serve it to him? Wouldn’t I serve him good food, something healthy and tasty?

As for the state of my house, would I be embarrassed to have him over? Is it welcoming, or a mess? And what would we do? Would we sit around watching tv or checking updates on Facebook?

So, if I wouldn’t treat Jesus like that, why am I treating myself like that? I need to show myself the love that Jesus showed.

I sometimes get Scott to let me do something nice for him by talking him into the idea that it benefits me. I’m trying the same trick on myself. Instead of thinking about my own needs, I’m imagining what if Jesus were here. Would I be doing this?

Would I be treating my body this way? Would I be spending my time this way? Would I be talking to myself this way? Would I be living this way?

Now, understand that I wasn’t raised with a guilt and gloom image of Jesus. Jesus enjoys a glass of wine and playing board games. But he also values doing the real work too. It isn’t all fun and games either. There is a balance there.

What would Jesus do, indeed. I always hated those rubber bracelets. They seem so cheap, so trivial. I felt that the people who wore them didn’t have a grasp on the real Jesus anyway, because their Jesus was anti everything. The Jesus I know is about love.

I feel like Jesus wouldn’t waste his time but then I remember that he spent a lot of time alone, hanging out talking with God. So there was certainly some down time, but I can’t compare that to surfing the internet mindlessly or reading boring books or ignoring things that need to be done around the house or eating junk food.

I think what I’m trying to do is use Jesus as a reminder to be mindful. I’m not giving Jesus control. That isn’t what it is at all. I’m not trying to guilt trip myself into doing or not doing anything. I’m trying to come up with a trick that helps me get unstuck from a groove, a rut.

So far, when I remember to do it, it works.

On process and pain – chewing the steak.

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We all have problems. Don’t identify with your problem.

You aren’t an addict. You aren’t an abuse survivor. You aren’t a cancer patient.

With the new guidelines for talking about children with disabilities, we are supposed to talk about the child first, and the disability second. He isn’t an autistic child. He is a child with autism. He is a person first. He isn’t defined by his diagnosis.

Apply the same rules to yourself. You are a person first. The diagnosis is second. It isn’t you. It isn’t who you are. It affects you, certainly. But you are so much more.

When you define yourself by your diagnosis, you are giving it power, and you are diminishing your own.

Now, you also aren’t going to win any friends if you are constantly talking about your terrible childhood or your abusive husband or your sciatica or how you have to take care of your Mom with Alzheimer’s.

We all have problems. We all have something we have struggled with. Sometimes we have overcome it. Sometimes not. Sometimes it seems we can’t ever catch a break. But if you only talk about this, you are going to be lonely. The only companion you will have will be your problems.

Buddhism has a story that speaks to this. A lady’s child had died, and she was unable to accept it. She carried her dead child around the village, going to every house asking for medicine. They were all horrified. One kind person suggested she go to the teacher and sent her to Buddha. Buddha told her to go to each house and ask if they had experienced a death in the family. If nobody had died in that family, she was to get a mustard seed from them. She was to collect all the mustard seeds and bring them back to Buddha, who would then make a medicine for her.

She went all over the village and wasn’t able to find a single family that had not experienced death. She came to realize that her experience wasn’t unique or special. She came to realize that death was part of life, and to hold onto it and identify with it was causing her more problems than the death itself.

Simply going to each person’s house, she created her own medicine. Buddha taught her to look outside of herself, and to not identify herself with her suffering.

How often do we hold on to our pains and sufferings, just like that lady carried around her dead child? How often do we think we are alone in our suffering, that we have it worse than anybody else?

We all suffer. That is just part of life. Holding onto it makes it worse. Accept your loss and your pain, but don’t identify with it. Accept it, because to not accept it means to not process it.

Pain, like a big steak, needs to be chewed thoroughly to be digested. Choke it down and you’ll get sick. Spit it out and you’ll miss the lessons it has to teach you.

Pain teaches us about holding on and letting go. It teaches us about what we think we have to have in our lives and what we really need. It teaches us to accept, and live in the now, rather than in the past or the future.

The past never was as awesome as we think it was. Even in the past we were looking back to “the good old days” and thinking about how great things will be “if only I get…if only I can have…when I finish…” In the future we will do the same thing.

The only island is now. When we aren’t on that island, we are drowning in the sea, stuck away from the solid stability of that island. The past isn’t real. The future isn’t real. The more we live there, the more we are missing out on the only real thing that is, and that is now.

How to get back to now? Start looking at it. Start being thankful for it. Make a gratitude list. Notice what you have, right now, and be thankful.

Pain teaches us about ourselves.

Once we are through chewing on it, we need to swallow it, and then digest it. Then it does its work and then we have to let it go. Holding into pain is just like holding onto poop. We get sick if we can’t eliminate our toxins. But it still has to go through us, all the way. Resist it, fight against it, and you’ll only hurt yourself. Just like a tree in a strong wind, if you don’t bend, you’ll break.

About face – on social media addiction.

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Facebook has been my addiction for several years. The more I use it, the less I actually do that is meaningful. I’m trying to resist the impulse to check it multiple times an hour.

I’m like my Mom, who lit up a cigarette every 20 minutes she was awake. Instead of flicking my Bic, I’m clicking a mouse. I probably won’t get cancer from checking Facebook this often, but I’m just as surely losing pieces of my life.

So, like with any other addiction, I need to study it and replace it. I need to study the power it has over me, and dig down to what “hole” I’m trying to fill with it.

Then I need to address that underlying issue and fix it or make peace with it.

Part of that is filling the “hole” with better things. For me, that means writing and drawing and beading. If it was warmer outside I’d probably add in walking. Maybe I’ll do more yoga.

But I feel it is critical to not substitute one addiction for another addiction. Even healthy things can be misused and abused. It isn’t about the thing but the reason behind the thing or the intent.

If we are not being mindful, we are being mindless.

Being mindful is what makes us different from animals.

Prayer makes me mindful. Being thankful makes me mindful. I’ll start there.

Also, part of it is being observant. I’m noticing that I want to check Facebook, and just observing that feeling but not yielding to it. That alone is a big deal. I’m trying to make it harder to do as a way to remind me of my intention. Instead of having my phone right next to me, I’ll have it in another room, and turned off. Instead of having the Facebook icon on my Kindle, I’ve removed it from the carousel so I have to go into the Apps page to access it.

These things slow me down so that I remember. It has to be a conscious, intentional act to check it. That is my goal – to have everything I do be conscious and intentional.

New Year’s reflections for the library.

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It is a new year. What will this mean for the library?

It is looking good for the employees. Everything looks stable. Our jobs are affected by the economy, but it is all balancing out. We are slated to get a raise soon, after five years of hiring and wage freezes.

There is a new branch manager. She in one day has already impressed me. She wrote us all a thank you note after her first day saying that she is grateful to be working with us. She has shown appreciation for the innovations we have taken. She has worked in many departments of the system and actually knows how to do everything that everyone does.

This is already more impressive than the last branch manager who only managed to stay hired because the administration was afraid of her hitting them with a racial discrimination lawsuit if she got fired. We all still have a lot of resentment over that. We were abused by an incompetent bully for 12 years and they knew it all along. And when I say incompetent bully, please understand that she was both incompetent and a bully. As for being a bully she was a master.

Our circulation manager is leaving. She is moving to the Main library. This is a promotion for her, and a relief for us. Five years ago I would not have thought this. Five years ago I would have been terrified at the idea of her leaving.

Not now. Now we are all celebrating it.

She has changed. Or I have changed, and I can now see her for who she is. She was never empathetic. She is more interested in getting the job done than getting people to go along with her. People get in the way. She doesn’t understand that if she is going to get something to happen, she has to get all of the staff behind it. She doesn’t get that part of being a manager is actually dealing with people. She has said many times that she doesn’t like dealing with people, so it amazes me that she got a customer service job.

I’m sure a lot of how she thinks has to do with her upbringing. She didn’t really have a childhood. Her parents weren’t really parent material and she had to do a lot of the work. But she is in her mid 40s now, and it is time to unlearn a lot of bad habits. Not listening to your staff when they work up the courage to tell you that something is wrong is a good thing to unlearn, especially when you’ve asked them to give them feedback.

We are all glad she is going. We have noticed in the time she has been working at another branch to fill in that we are all more relaxed. I’m a little concerned now that she is going to spread her negativity not only there but also to the rest of the system. But then, that was their choice. She was hired for that job, so that is what they wanted. Perhaps they can’t see her the way we can. Yet.

As for the patrons, who knows? I suspect there won’t be a lot of change. I suspect we will still have the patrons who come in all day, every day, and play games on Facebook rather than deal with their problems. I suspect we will still have patrons who come in reeking of alcohol who check out the limit on DVDs for the same reason.

Plenty of people use the library to escape. The funny part is that escape works different ways. You can escape your problems by playing games or watching movies or reading the same fluffy fiction over and over. You can also escape them by self educating. With the first, you aren’t fixing the problem. You are just putting it on hold. With the second you are doing something about it.

Both are running away from your problems. It is just that the second one is running toward something.

So it will be a new year at the library. There will be some welcome changes. There will be some predictable consistency. But most of all there will be stories. And thus there will be things to write about. Sometimes I think that is why I stay here.

That, and the fact that I’m not sure what other marketable skills I have.

On quitting smoking.

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Many people stop doing something bad or start doing something good for their New Year’s resolution. Why not combine the two? If you are going to stop smoking, I suggest you start walking.

Take the time you were going to use on your smoke break and go for a walk instead. Many people take a 15 minute smoke break. 15 minutes is a great amount of time for a walk – but even 10 or 5 minutes is good.

Walking does for you what smoking does, but better. It is calming. It is a mental break. It takes you away from your problems, both literally and figuratively. But while smoking takes away from your health, walking adds to it.

Walking clears out your head like nothing else.

You can walk anywhere. You don’t have to have a walking path around your workplace. You can go for a walk inside your building. While it is better to go outside and get some fresh air and sunshine, it is important just to walk. Walk up and down some stairs. Walk around the hallways. Get outside and walk around the building. But just walk. If you limit yourself to walking outside, 90% of the time it will be too hot or too cold or too wet. Rarely will it be just right. Savor those days when it is nice outside, but don’t just walk on those days. Walk every day.

You don’t have to walk fast. Just walk. Ambling is fine. A stroll is good.

Think you are too out of shape to walk? All the more reason to walk. Just get going. Do what you can. You’ll get stronger. People don’t walk because they are in shape. They walk to get in shape.

Some people use this as an excuse – “I’ll walk a mile and then I have to walk a mile to get back where I started.” Walk in a circle. Find a path and loop around.

You may be self-conscious at the start when you are walking. That is normal. You are doing something different. You are taking care of yourself. The shame you felt from sneaking away to smoke will be replaced with pride that you are doing something to help yourself. Try to recruit others to go walking with you instead of smoking. That way you have a group. You can cheer each other on.

Realize that every excuse you come up with is your unhealthy self trying to stay that way. Your healthy self is really weak right now and you can’t hear its voice very well. See those excuses as a sign that you have to stick up for your healthy self. Just go ahead and do it. The more you put it off, the longer it will be before you start feeling better. Every little bit you do towards the good will give you energy and momentum to do a little bit more.

Go walk instead of smoking. Your life will thank you for it.

It isn’t about the money.

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I got my Christmas bonus last week. Of course, it isn’t called a Christmas bonus. This is a government job. It is a “longevity” check. But we get it around Christmas, and not on the anniversary of our hire date.

Every employee who has worked for Metro for at least five years gets this check. It is a tiny thing at the beginning, and a little more each year. There were years where the budget was tight and we didn’t get it at all. Things are better now, and it is a nice thing to have back.

I noticed my reaction to it this year. I have this reaction every year, but this time I noticed. I’m trying to observe myself from the outside. I’m trying to see what I do out of habit and instinct and ask myself why. I want to see if that reaction or course of action is still useful. Sometimes we outgrow our actions, but we still do them because we haven’t thought about them.

I saw this money and wanted to spend it right away. I didn’t even think about buying presents for others. I didn’t think about sending some of it to a charity. I wanted to spend all of it on myself.

I wanted a treat, or a toy. I didn’t want to buy anything I needed. I wanted to buy something I wanted. I don’t even have anything in mind. I just wanted to spend this money, and spend it fast.

This is why for many years I didn’t have much of anything in my savings account.

I’ve gotten over that feeling for the most part. For the most part I’m sane. For the most part I save money and pay extra towards the principal for the house and car notes. But right now the desire to burn through that money shone like a torch.

I didn’t. I thought about it. I saw that feeling as the outsider it is. I saw it as a symptom. I saw it as being not really from me, not the real me.

I started to think about what that feeling meant. At first I thought that I was going on survival mode. If I convert that money into something physical, I can see it. I can keep it with me. Just like wandering tribal people who move their camps with their flocks, I wanted to convert that wealth into portable currency. Money is better if you can wear it as baubles on your coat, you know.

But where does that feeling come from? I’m not planning on escaping. I’m not foreseeing any need to bug out any time soon. Even if the zombie apocalypse does happen, I don’t see that bartering with beads is going to be the mode of commerce. But who knows? It worked for the Dutch when they bought Manhattan.

So I dug deeper. There had to be more to this feeling.

It is all about comfort and self soothing. This past month has been hard. Financially, materially, it has been fine. Emotionally, not so much. There’s been a lot of upheaval in my family recently. Too much drama and not enough sense.

When bad things happened I used to soothe myself with eating sugar and carbs, or smoking, either pot or clove cigarettes. I used to soothe myself in the same way that many people soothe themselves – to do everything possible to not actually address the situation itself. Sadly, a lot of our soothing methods result in even more problems.

I’ve gotten past a lot of those soothing methods, but apparently I’ve not purged myself from the “need” to spend money to cheer myself up. I’m glad I saw it as the craving it is, and didn’t succumb to it.

We can all learn from our cravings. They teach us what we really are searching for. I didn’t really want to spend all that money. I wanted what the money could buy. And really, I didn’t even want that. I wanted what it represents.

In this case I was searching for security and stability. I was trying to retreat into primitive ways of coping, rather than dealing with the problem at hand. Part of the solution is to stick with the feeling. I’ve spent so long trying to run away from my feelings that I’m not sure how to have them sometimes.

If you use crutches all the time, then you never develop the strength in your legs to stand on your own. Losing the crutches doesn’t mean that you suddenly have the ability to run, much less stand up straight. And it hurts, these first few unassisted steps. You want to grab the crutches back, or find something else to hold on to.

This is why a lot of people at AA meetings are chain smokers. They just traded one addiction for another. The problem hasn’t been addressed. It has just been transformed into something a little more socially acceptable, and a little less likely to result in legal problems.

I’m stripping away my crutches and my props, one by one, and it is hard. But it is essential. Sometimes I’m tired of all this growth I’ve done and I want to sit back and take a break. I don’t, well, not often, and not for long. I’ve learned that if I take a break, the break morphs into a full stop, and then I have to get started all over again.

Phone

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People. Turn your phone off. You can survive without talking on it all the time.

Show respect to the people around you by not sharing your personal information as you yammer on the phone. Be kind to the person behind the counter and don’t talk on your phone while you are checking out.

You don’t need your phone on all the time. It is ok to turn it off. Or at least turn off the ringer. Trust me. You aren’t going to get a call from the Pope. It can wait. Nothing has to be dealt with right away. It can go to voicemail.

You look crazy when you have a Bluetooth device in and you are using it. You look like you are talking to yourself.

My husband gets so upset when someone calls when he is driving or we have just sat down to eat supper. I tell him to not answer. The phone is there for him – he is not there for the phone. He is slowly starting to understand that it never is an emergency and people can wait. If it is an emergency, they need to call 911.

I once worked with a guy in his 20s who had a hard time grasping that he could not have his phone at the front desk. He said “what if my family needs to get a hold of me?” They can call the office phone and ask for you. He didn’t grasp that he wasn’t the person they would call in an emergency anyway. He was the one who constantly needed to be rescued.

I’m in my 40s. When I was growing up, nobody had cell phones and we did just fine. If our parents needed to reach us at school, they called the office. If our friends needed to call us, they called our home. If we weren’t there, our parents took a message. It wasn’t ever something that had to be dealt with right then.

It isn’t really that urgent now. Nothing has changed, except we have been trained to think that we have to be connected all the time. We are being programmed to do a lot of things all at once, and we aren’t doing any of them well. We’ve forgotten that tools are there to serve us. We aren’t supposed to serve them.

People will call the library to renew their items. I’ll ask for their library card number and they’ll explain that they are driving. They can’t give me the card number because it is on their keychain, so they can’t safely look at it. I tell them to call back when they are parked safely. There is nothing that needs to be done while you are driving that is more important than driving.

I know people who use the time they are driving to make all their calls and pay all their bills. What did they do before cell phones? Everything got done. Somehow we have forgotten this.

I think we have lost something in our need to multitask. We have forgotten how to remember what we were going to look up. We have forgotten how to take the time to be courteous to the people around us. We have forgotten how to do anything later and let things wait.

We have become addicted to doing everything right now, when really nothing is that pressing. The phone uses us more than we use it. It has convinced us that we have to have it. Consider turning off your phone, for even one hour. Do you feel twitchy’? How about a day? A week? Getting nervous yet?

Perhaps we need to start a 12 step program for cell phone addiction.

If you feel you have to use something all the time and it is something that you lived without before it existed, that is a sign of a problem.

Sure, cell phones and smart phones make things easier in certain ways. But they don’t seem to really improve our lives. We seem to have trained ourselves that we can’t do without them.

We’ve done the same with fast food and prepared meals. We’ve forgotten how to do things ourselves. We’ve forgotten how to take care of ourselves. In our “need” to multitask and do everything right away, we’ve forgotten how to do anything well.

Our lives have become like fast food by using cell phones. It is fast and not real. We have sacrificed quality for speed. Faster doesn’t mean more efficient.

Multitasking is newspeak for screwing three things up at once.

Who rescues the rescuers? On addiction, passivity, and power.

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Who rescues the rescuers? When there is a natural disaster there are always people who go rescue those who are trapped by the floodwaters or under the flattened building. Who takes care of them? What kind of lives do they live so that they are able to help others? Maybe we can learn from them so we don’t need to be rescued so often.

If you keep not looking out for yourself, you’ll keep needing to be rescued. Your problems will always be someone else’s problems to fix in your mind. The mark of an adult is the ability to take care of yourself. Adulthood has nothing to do with age. There are plenty of people in their fifties and older who still need to be rescued.

For some people, life is all about reacting to problems instead of planning ahead. For some people the same bad things keep happening over and over and they just don’t seem to notice the pattern. They are always late with their bills, late getting ready in the morning, just late late late. They find they have some incurable disease because they ignored the symptom or they didn’t take care of themselves for years. They barely have enough energy to take care of themselves, much less anyone else.

What do you do if you lock yourself out of your house? Wait till your parents or roommate come home? Call a locksmith? Or do you already have a spare key stored away in a safe spot? Do you have a ritual to make sure you always have your keys with you?

Then there is the idea that “you can always go home.” Plenty of people have their parents as a backup plan in case they get laid off or they get divorced. They will move back in with their parents. But what if you can’t? What if your parents are dead? What would you do differently about your life then to make sure you are OK? Would you move in with your friends, or would you have been saving money all along? Would you have had a backup plan?

Always thinking that someone else will take care of it will mean you always need someone to take care of it.

I knew a guy who was constantly running out of gas, locking his keys in his car, and forgetting his wallet. Every week one of these things would happen, and his parents would rescue him. How much of this was his attitude, and how much of this was their rescuing him? What would he have done if they were out of town? Be more mindful? Plan ahead?

When he got addicted to prescription pain pills that he was taking recreationally, he again blamed it on others. He was passive about it. “Why do bad things keep happening to me?” he wailed. Bad things don’t keep happening. He kept letting them happen.

Nobody forced him to take drugs recreationally. That was his choice. It didn’t happen to him. He did it to himself. And he kept doing it, until his wife left him and he’d pawned everything he had to get the next fix.

When does it become too painful to keep doing the same thoughtless things? When does it become easier to plan ahead? When do we wake up and take responsibility for our lives? When do we become people who don’t need to be rescued?

Maybe it has something to do with nobody is around to rescue us anymore, and we have to fly with our own wings for a change. Just like with baby birds, it is hard at first, but then we get strong.

Death story (people tend to die the way they live)

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One of the most helpful things I learned when my Mom was dying was in the middle of the night.

Normally the nights were uneventful, but this one was a doozy. She was yelling something about the mama and the baby and the man and it didn’t make sense. I have a pretty good ability at being able to understand people who can’t communicate well, but I was at a loss here. I was alone with her, as I was during most of that year she was sick. When her sickness became terminal, we were even more left by ourselves.

She was under the care of hospice by that time, but that didn’t mean they were there. She was at home, not in a facility. A nurse would come by once a day for about twenty minutes. Towards the end a sitter would come for a few hours as well. A social worker would come out maybe once a week and say useless things like “what do you regret not having done with your life?”

The goal I suspect was to figure out if some of these unfulfilled life goals could be completed. In reality the effect was to drive home how much of her life hadn’t been lived.

This night she was wild. I called the number that hospice had given, asking what to do. The nurse decided to send someone out to the house. That was a long wait, alone in the dark with someone who was hysterical and dying. Somehow things seem more intense at night.

When the nurse came, he talked with her and listened to her and he was just as confused by what she was saying as it was. It was as if she was having a waking nightmare. He gave her ativan, which is really valium. That did the trick. He left me with some and told me how to administer them to her when she got to the point that she couldn’t swallow.

We sat and talked for a bit, and I’m grateful that he saw that part of his field of care involved me. Often the caregiver is ignored in favor of the patient. Both have needs. This was a new and strange thing for both of us.

He said this – “People tend to die the way that they live.”

This has stuck with me all this time, nearly 20 years now.

He asked if she smoked cigarettes. Yes. That was what was killing her. She smoked for half her life, and I remember that she lit up a cigarette every twenty minutes. It had become such an addiction that she didn’t want to go to the movies because she couldn’t imagine an hour or so not smoking.

That is an addiction. That is a desperate need to relax using chemicals.

Being terminal is stressful. Dying at 53 is stressful. Having not fulfilled your life goals is stressful.

It would be a miracle if she learned how to deal with her emotions not using chemicals now. So she didn’t. She was on ativan until she died, as a substitute for nicotine.

I find it funny (not funny ha-ha) that she didn’t want to take her pain medicine because she didn’t want to become an addict, not realizing that she already was one. But socially accepted addictions are different, right?

If people tend to die the way they live, how will you die?

More importantly, how will you live, knowing that you will die?

Sleep (vs. alcoholism)

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I know a lady who says she can’t get to sleep unless her husband is lying next to her in bed. He is retired from a third shift job and simply will not come to bed before 2. She often has to be up for work at 6. The math just doesn’t work out.

He says he is not tired. She’s repeatedly asked him to come to bed so she can sleep and he repeatedly says he will be there “in a minute.” An hour or two later he is still up, mindlessly surfing the web.

She spends the day dragging. She has almost fallen asleep at work because of lack of sleep. She has a heart problem that is exacerbated by not getting enough sleep.

I’ve started thinking about this in terms of alcoholism. Say she is the sober spouse, and his drinking is affecting her. If he listens to her needs and comes to bed, then it is OK. If he doesn’t and she suffers, then there is a problem.

So, what to do? Should she take sleeping pills? Should they get marriage counseling?

Or would a divorce be better?

Sometimes you have to separate yourself from people and situations that are harmful to you. You may want to be part of a “happy family” but if it is a family that is just for show, then the only person being fooled is you. The same works with friends. Better to have just one real friend than a bunch of people who aren’t really very loving to you, who don’t really care about your well-being.

Or, what about this? Perhaps her need to have him there is psychosomatic. Perhaps she needs to think back to before she met him and remember how she got to sleep then. If you can’t sleep because someone else isn’t present, is that their problem, or yours?