First paragraph of the OP and I knew in my bones it was written by someone with a personality disorder. Since her death, her husband published his memoir in 2023. The serial cheating, open suicide ideation, unresolved childhood trauma and general toxicity to herself and others is completely consistent with the tone of the article.
that's the exact opposite of my takeaway from the memoir. that book was written with intense love and i encourage anybody to read it, one of the best books to come out in a decade.
it appears you took the tabloid stuff and ran with it as a reason to disregard anything she says due to mental illness. at least that's how your first comment seems. including all of your comments against her in this post, you clearly have a bone to pick and i disagree with all of them. but that's all i'm gonna say about that, except, maybe you should listen to what she has to say in the article and also read the book "molly" by blake butler and have your views on love challenged.
I went by the reviews - I don't intend to read the book. Her husband believes she suffered from borderline personality disorder. Have you had a friend or family member with BPD, or another cluster-B PD?
These are clinical standards for self-absorption and toxic personality traits. In their relationships, cluster-Bs select for supplicants who will love them despite their toxicity. What you're saying about the memoir is consistent with this.
Her mental health conditions aren't a reason to disregard everything she says, but she is providing social and interpersonal advice here, in a way that is likely to encode the dysfunctional schema and disordered thinking she suffered from in life.
For an opinion piece that is about how to empathize with other people, I think it is relevant information that the author probably had a clinical impairment in their own ability to empathize with and understand others.
got it: don't take interpersonal advice from somebody who has a personality disorder. especially when their advice is a piece of literature that is quite obviously a cry to be listened to. also, disregard my own judgement in the assessment of the piece of literature, and ignore my own criticism of the piece. really, just ignore the piece as a whole because of my judgements.
and yes, one of my best friends has BPD and i dated somebody who had it, and listening to them and their subjective experience and tips on how to communicate with them was the best thing i could ever do.
> and tips on how to communicate with them was the best thing i could ever do
I'm interested in how you concluded the advice was so beneficial. Was it a reduction in conflict and fewer emotional outbursts from your BPD partner? A feeling that you're better able to soothe them and manage their feelings?
i read it and i'm not sure the point you're trying to make? that section is about empathy from the POV of the person with BPD, not about empathetically listening to somebody with BPD
edit: it appears we're talking past each other. i like this piece of writing and you don't. that's fine. do you have any suggestions for me to read about how to listen, written by one of your favorite writers or poets? this will help me better understand how to listen to you.
> evaluate the content in context, the author is irrelevant
But the author is part of that context. Especially with this kind of content where one explains how they think people should behave we can ask the question if the author embodied the guidelines they are talking about, and if so where did it took them. Did they had an enviable life full of things the reader would find valuable?
I disagree. The speaker is not part of the context when evaluating the correctness of a given assertion. This is a fundamental fact, for example when the speaker is unknown. If it helps, in situations where you’re reading something controversial or where you’d be tempted to make unfounded inferences based on the speaker, you can simply pretend that you’ve “discovered” the assertion rather than that someone has said it to you.
Granted, it can be a bit unnerving to accept something without a human being willing to stand with you to defend it when you reach the limits of objective reality (such as the issue of varying perspective). Typically the advice here is to “stand up for what you believe in” - but honestly that’s overrated when survival is on the line (and you potentially haven’t yet absorbed the info as part of your identity).
> The speaker is not part of the context when evaluating the correctness of a given assertion.
On a philosophical level this sounds true. On a practical level evaluating correctness has costs.
If you tell me the James Webb Space Telescope detected this and that i won’t launch my own space telescope to verify it. I need to figure out if I trust you as a source. There if you are a crackpot journalist with seemingly no connection to JWST my trust will decrease, at least until i find independent sources.
And that is a hard scientific claim where in theory one can conduct an independent experiment and judge the facts for certain.
The kind of claim this one is on about is much harder to verify. It is of the form “live by these rules and you will have a better life”. There both the interpretation of the “rules” and the “better life” is fuzzy. And even if you get it right in your own experiment it will take years until you see results.
Just on a practical level. Imagine that a thin and sporty person tells you that the secret of them maintaining their healty weight is starting every day by eating two scoops of ice cream. Now imagine that the same statement is said by an obese person. In both cases it takes the same amount of effort to evaluate the correctness of their statement but which case is going to make you want to investigate it more deeply?
"You Mean I'm Not Lazy, Stupid or Crazy?!" is one of, if not the, most popular ones. Saw a lot of myself in there.
What are the things "most people" agree ADHD "is"?
Above all else, it's an executive functioning disorder. Not entirely dissimilar from OCD in some ways.
You find yourself unable to focus on what you know needs to be done, quite possibly because you're unable to tear your focus away from something else.
Inattention, impulsivity, hyperfocus, hyperactivity. Adult ADHD does not often involve physical hyperactivity.
Hyperfocus can be an incredible boon if you happen to be hyperfocused on something useful. But the catch is that it's not a switch you can flip at all and you can't necessarily choose what you're focused on.
There are different subtypes such as "primarily inattentive" etc.
A lot of people don't believe in ADHD or think it's a "lack of discipline" etc.
Like many disorders, symptoms of ADHD are things everybody experiences to an extent and it becomes a "disorder" when it starts to impact one's functioning. In much the way that everybody is sad sometimes but when it becomes pervasive we call it a disorder called "depression."
I think what I've said above is all mostly universally agreed upon.
Actually hyperactivity is very common in adult ADHD, it just manifests differently. It tends to take the form of repetitive movements like shaking a foot, rocking a leg, fidgeting with your hands, etc. It's sort of a naturally developed coping mechanism.
People with adult hyperactive/impulsive or combined type ADHD often don't think of this as hyperactivity, partly because they're so used to it they're barely aware of it, or the fact that it's not normal.
It is not immune to enshittification though. I currently have a notification from a parcel delivery guy I added to my contacts at some point at the top of the GUI. It's the new story functionality. O already switched to Nekogram on Android which so far does not have that feature but both web clients recently got it too.
(It should be reletively easy to remove it from the open source clients though)
