Friends in Journal

My friends are great. Too great....
They brought over meals and gifts for the new baby, and I really want to say ‘thank you’- and now Xmas is right around the corner! I think I will give them Xmas presents and a thank you separately. I should see them twice before Xmas but it doesn’t leave me a lot of time to think of and get something lol.

I was talking to DH about responsibility last night, and I had another one of those genius moments. They just come out of nowhere. I didn’t even realize what I was saying until it was out, and I was like, dayum. That’s amazing.
There are 2 ways to get into trouble with responsibility- is what I said- and both are terrible. One is to take too little, which is the obvious and catastrophic state of most people today. The other is to take too much. But they both have the same result; powerlessness, paralysis, helplessness, slavery to external circumstance.
The reason that taking too much responsibility results in the same disastrous outcome is that, instead of giving people their justified responsibility for their own choices, one takes it from them and says “if I explain it better, change my approach, appeal to them on their level, they will do better.” And this is the sticky trap of manipulation. One cannot at once try to manipulate others and be an authentic, open, honest self capable of representing one’s own genuine experience and preferences.
So in the state of taking away responsibility from others and trying to tease some desired result from them, one is also self censoring to whatever degree one perceives the other to react badly to oneself. That is a built in limitation of expression; ones choices and actions are limited to that which pleases or is perceived to please the other.

All that and the real principle is justice. Each individual is response for only their self. In recognizing this, we each act out of honest self expression and accept without manipulation the honest expression of others. That would mean, though, the often too painful to contemplate reality of sadism, sociopathy, cruelty, etc. We’d rather not stare those things in the face.
Ironically, choosing to idealize and manage the people in our lives leaves us vulnerable to harm at their hands. And, since we refuse to accept their behavior at face value, we are blinded to any possibility that they, or anyone else, might act differently; effectively making impossible any improvement in either their behavior or finding people who already behave better.