[have a question you'd like me to answer? hit reply on this email and ask! I'll answer here, keeping you anonymous...Dear Abby's got nothin' on me!] Question from a reader: How do I stop working so hard to please my self-absorbed mother? Dear Adult Daughter… People-pleasing (aka “fawning” or “appeasing”) is a stress/trauma response/adaptation. It is something your very young nervous system did to keep you safe and alive. Understanding that (and not making yourself wrong for doing it) is the...

Someone recently called me out for being hypocritical because in one day I posted what they saw as two opposing opinions: one was about living a life so saturated in love that no one can convince you to hate, and the other was about cutting ties with...certain people. The person identified themselves as one of those "certain people" and then went on to tell me how good they are because of the volunteer work they do, and so on. It made me glad I've done my shadow work around being...

I have a like/dislike relationship with AI. I dislike it for a few reasons, not the least of which is that four of my copyrighted books were illegally downloaded from pirated databases to "teach" AI large-language models. There's also a bit of "I'm old and can't deal with the pace of technology so get off my lawn" energy in there too. ;-) I like it because it allows us to do things like this. This is my current self holding my four-year-old self (if you want to make one for yourself, keep...