Anxious to Please by James Rapson & Craig English
The title caught my attention because as a service submissive, I am anxious to please.
The day passed...I got home and laundered all the new clothes I found for Boy, put the new canisters in the dishwasher, the books made it upstairs, and "Anxious to Please" landed on my bedside table...atop my "To Read" pile.
Halder and mylie came over and helped me finish the yard and floors (thank you thank you thank you! you guys are awesome!!!). We had dinner cooking when Beloved and Boy returned home, enjoyed the evening, discussed co-living issues (yes, they ARE moving in with us...more on that another post), and helped clean up the kitchen before taking off.
Beloved check his mail and headed upstairs for bed while I checked mine. I followed him barely twenty minutes later and was in bed by 10:05pm. At which point, I started tossing and turning, couldn't relax, couldn't get comfortable. I had a million things on my mind, and finally I gave up and got up twenty-five minutes later. I didn't want to log in, so I grabbed a book..."Anxious to Please" was on top...and figured I'd start reading and get bored and fall asleep.
By the end of page 2, I was nervous. It's that funny sort of nervous you get when a stranger sums you up perfectly in the first five minutes. I was reading EXACTLY myself. By page 7,the end of the intro, I knew I couldn't stop. By page 17, I was considering getting up to get a highlighter and start making notes in the margins...I haven't done THAT since college. By page 22, I felt the need to vomit because...because it's all true! I am not sure I can even begin to describe the horror and panic I felt. By page 26 and the end of chapter 1, I knew I was going to be logging in to blog.
Here are some snippets.
So what's wrong with being nice? Nothing - in the right context. Being nice makes life more pleasant, and can help things flow more smoothly. Nice People go further than this. They can't help themselves...When things aren't working, they try harder - and most of the time, they're trying harder to be nice.
[Nice People] often live what Thoreau called "lives of quiet desperation."
Nice people yearn intensly for a life that is truly worth living.They ache for an abiding sense of belonging, for an inner peace that can last longer than a few moments, and for authentic intimacy.
Many adults wrestling with [the need to please] will deny that they are chronically unhappy...Frequently they are coping with a crisis of one sort or another and the emotions of that crisis serve as a cover story for the persistent roiling within.
They don't choose to obsess about what others are thinking and feeling; they simply can't shut it off.
[T]he term selfesteem is almost a misnomer, because...they do not know or even care about their own opinion - it's not relevant.What they care about is the way in which others esteem them...because of this, they do not have a very clear idea of who (or even where) they are; their sense of self is indistinct at best...At times, a Nice Person will work so hard to suppress their insecurities that it ends up looking like the opposite. It is common for others to perceive the Nice Person as being supremely confident....
Nice People are beset by feelings of guilt, worry, and longing mixed with thoughts of incompetence and unworthiness. They don't have a clear sense of who they are, and never quite get the feeling of belonging or "fitting in" that they yearn for. To make matters worse, they don't know what to do to comfort themselves or to get feeling good again.
That's some heavy stuff to think about...and it's scary how much I identify with it. The end of the chapter promises to help with awareness and transformation (do I want to be a Mean Person???). I guess I'll be reading more...soon. It's after midnight and if I don't get to bed, Beloved will come looking for me, Master or not!
No comments:
Post a Comment