A self-help hard limit

Now, I'm quite heavily into my self-help just at the moment. Of course I am! What else is there to do when you bump up against the realization that nothing's working in your life and the common factor is you? No one else can do this work for me and there is much work to be done. The truth: I'm finding self-help really helpful! Thanks, in particular, go to Neale Donald Walsch.

Virgil turned me off self-help books with the sniffy remark that self-help book readers simply read self-help books rather than change things. I went off meekly and (with the exception of one anger management book) did not revisit self-help until he broke up with me a few weeks ago, at which point I realised I had to make my own choices based on what works for me and not Virgil. (We're now back together - just - but living apart. It feels fragile and uncertain to say the least. We've barely talked about next steps.)

I don't want to make a crutch out of it but other people's wisdom is a resource that we should not be too proud or cynical to receive. Sometimes, though, I hit a nugget I simply cannot swallow: who said that deep down we're afraid not of failure but of how powerful we are?*

Oh. Really? If only! Yep, that's it. I'm not afraid of not being good enough: I'm actually just scared of being too good, too successful! Specious nonsense... I think about how much money there is to be made in telling people what they want to hear.

*A quickie internet search reveals the culprit to be Marianne Williamson, purveyor of miracles, in A Return to Love.