An adden­dum to my writ­ing on the topic of “affirmation.”

To pre-empt any con­fu­sion (though I believe cousin Cather­ine under­stands pre­cisely  what I wrote about) I’m talk­ing about affir­ma­tion as writ­ten about by Con­rad M. Baars, M.D. in his book, “Born Only Once: The Mir­r­a­cle of Affir­ma­tion” which I absolutely devoured tonight, in one sit­ting over coffee.

The sec­tion on Self-Affirmation was enlight­en­ing, not merely as a means of learn­ing that I alone can­not affirm myself, but as a means to build a deeper under­stand­ing of my clos­est friend­ships as well.

It also sad­dens me to real­ize that the state of being inad­e­quately affirmed is so preva­lent, espe­cially among my generation.

I won’t apol­o­gize for my sad­ness, but instead, will try and pon­der every­thing that I’ve read tonight, to see how I can truly, effec­tively come to “be” and then as a result “do” what­ever is best to help be an affirm­ing per­son, once I myself am prop­erly affirmed, how­ever long that may take.

Like­wise, I’m not going to apol­o­gize for being angered by the occa­sional actions of my friends, but I do hope that I can learn to help my friend­ships be mutually-affirming instead of mutually-denying, and at the same time, I hope that those friends of mine who are them­selves inad­e­quately affirmed, just like I am, will exam­ine their own attempts at self-affirmation, and real­ize that there is so much more out there for them, just as there will be for me, once we come to be fully affirmed.