Mindsets

 Fixed Mindset:

"Believing that your qualities are carved in stone--the fixed mindset--creates an urgency to prove yourself over and over.  If you have only a certain amount of intelligence, a certain personality, and a certain moral character--well, then you'd better prove that you have a healthy dose of them.  It simply wouldn't do to look or feel deficient in these most basic characteristics."

Growth Mindset:

"There's another mindset in which these traits are not simply a hand you're dealt and have to live with, always trying to convince yourself and others that you have a royal flush when you're secretly worried it's a pair of tens. In this mindset, the hand you're dealt is just the starting point for development. This growth mindset is based on the belief that your basic qualities are things you can cultivate through your efforts. Although people may differ in every which way--in their initial talents and aptitudes, interests, or temperaments--everyone can change and grow through application and experience."

From the book Mindsets by Carol S. Dweck, Ph.D. 

Midnight

 

Louise Gluck 

Sufjan Stevens - The Dress Looks Nice On You

Sufjan Stevens - Chicago

All Things Go

 I have made a lot of mistakes...not just in my mind, but in my mind, I make more, I think. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c_-cUdmdWgU

Derek Walcott Poem

 Love After Love

The time will come
when, with elation
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror
and each will smile at the other's welcome,

and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.

Thinking

 Thinking about something Dixie said when we were talking last week.  I don't remember what she was saying at the time, but she had been talking about things you do when you're drunk and how smoking weed and driving isn't DUI driving, etc. I told her about the time she brought Sunny and Skyla to stay at the condo with Becca and me, and that Sunny threw her pot on the table and said, "Dixie said you were cool with it." I told Sunny that I didn't care who smoked pot, but that I didn't smoke pot, and I didn't want it in the condo. She said she was cool with that and took it to her car.  I told Dixie it upset me that she violated my feelings and completely ignored my asking that she not bring pot with her. She told me she wouldn't.  I was telling her about that and some other times when she seemed to have total disregard for my feelings, and though I never used those words, whatever I was telling her at one particular point in time brought these words from her mouth: "I feel like I'm being attacked."  I stopped talking, and I said, "Really? You do?" And she said yes, she did.  I apologized and said a friend should never feel like another friend is attacking her.  I haven't felt like talking to her since.  If I can say something to her that makes her feel attacked, and she's tough and will call BS and tell the truth, then I have to question the kind of friend I am, as I often do, by the way.  

Daughter Detox keeps coming to mind. The book I read about how to detox from an unloving mother.  The author talks about the inability for unloved daughters to form lasting friendships or relationships.  That is me alright, whether it is a result of being an unloved daughter or my own inability to know how to do the dance.