I have decided to dedicate a post on Thursday to therapy, and offer you the many tips I have learned on the couch. They will be a good reminder for me, as well, of something small I can concentrate on. Many of them are published in my book, “The Pocket Therapist: An Emotional Survival Kit.”

I used to collect friends like baseball cars.

Visit my Facebook page, and you’ll see what I mean. I thought that I would look popular and successful if I had over 600 friends, so I went click crazy and befriended friends of friends just for the hell of it. Until I realized I could no longer access the news and statuses of the people I really cared about because it would take too long to sort through details–Joe popped a zit on his way to work today!–of the pimple poppers I don’t know from Adam. Short of closing my account, and building a new profile, I have no way of getting back to my core peeps.

This is metaphoric, of course, and made me go back and read Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s words on friendship in her classic, Gift from the Sea:

I shall ask into my shell only those friends with whom I can be completely honest. I find I am shedding hypocrisy in human relationships. What a rest that will be! The most exhausting thing in life, I have discovered, is being insincere.

The most exhausting thing in life is being insincere. As a stage-four people-pleaser, I know that it’s the source of much of my fatigue. Each day, I try to chip away at the artificial layers protecting my heart. I’m certainly not there yet, but I have begun the journey.
Outside of Facebook, that is.

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