what you can afford, emotionally.

I mean, you'd never tell somebody they ought to be satisfied with, I don't know - a McD's burger? when what they really craved, and what their body probably actually needed was a big, thick, juicy steak, right?

You'd say that their so-called 'preference' for McD's was actually an addiction, a maladapted coping system that did the best it could with what it had for a long time, and now it can't tell the difference.

The thing that's *missing* from this - way of thinking? approach? - is that, just as not everyone can *afford* a big, juicy steak every time they have a hankering for one, sometimes people can't *emotionally* 'afford' the cost of doing things that other people have plenty of emotional resources to *do*.

This is convoluted, I *know* - thinking out loud, remember? sounding boards and all that...

So: People who tell you you 'should' stay in contact with *some*body just because it's better than nothing are telling you it's ok to eat junk food if that's all you can *get*. Because what's the alternative? Starve, right? And of course nobody wants to do that - though we may choose to be a little hungry and instead buy small quantities of the best food we can buy. But even that 'fails' as a choice - once you let your machine run low on *any* kind of fuel, it starts running *badly*, and then *other* things start to run amok. Kind of a dominoes chain of impending doom, or something.

Anyway, the *point* is, I wish people'd be fucking *consistent* about this stuff, and recognize how the so-called 'advice' they're giving with one side of their mouth is almost 180 degrees opposite to something they just said five *minutes* ago, or maybe two *seconds* ago, or possibly even in the other half of the very same sentence they just finished speaking.

Gah.

Oh, the other thing I meant to say was, along the lines of being able to ‘afford’ to be around less-than-ideal people: The thing that ‘fills up your tank’ and allows you to *cope* with these people is: Having people who *don’t* rub you the wrong way in your life.

So: Having *strong* connections, somewhere, somehow, in your life, is what makes it possible to put *up* with these other ones. And there are a *lot* of the ‘non-optimal’ ones. So the more support you have, the better you’re able to handle all that.