A Self-Help Room of One's Own

 Virginia Woolf (A Room of One's Own, Hogarth Press, 1929) knew the necessity of solitude, for anyone thinking and working creatively (although it obviously didn't help her in the end). 

In a Self-Help Room of One's Own, one helps oneself to private, quiet solitude. You help yourself to the right lighting, by intuitively opening and closing blinds or, at night, turning on a lamp: simple things, on which simple sanity rests. You access personal agency.

You help yourself to a supply of books, music, pictures on the wall that take you away, suggesting other lands, times and dimensions. Special stones, pottery, shells, driftwood adorn surfaces, arranged for pleasure. There's no need to stress about things, in a private Self-Help zone. The light changes, the atmosphere is elastic. Mother Earth herself is changing her atmosphere and climate, and no doubt has her reasons. Finding balance, is one guess.

One changes the climate in a Self Help Room as if it was a personal planet. It is a personal planet: Planet Helped, where one helps oneself to freedom of thought, freedom of choice, freedom from "influencers". This kingdom is governed as a Nostrocracy, meaning its laws are nostrums, nostrums being "our own remedies": private helps for self, self-selected.

Seems an over-simplified view? Sometimes simplicity helps.

Yes it IS my fault, thank you very much

"It's not your fault." That's what people say when they're trying to be nice, trying to be comforting. But that's not what they're being. If "it" isn't my fault, then whose is it? Who's in control? The Universe, or me?

I don't like the way The Universe keeps muscle-ing in on my business, trying to dominate (and forever changing its plans at the last minute). My faults are me. Take them away and you take my identity. Then what am I left with -- my virtues? Not much substance in that. Anyway, "virtue" is all the same, but faults are individual. So don't take mine, Universe. You think everything's about you. You've already got enough faults of your own -- whole earthquakes-worth of them, spread across billions of planets. So you don't need to take credit for mine.

I'm happy to take the blame for them. To let someone else take it is to cede control -- and if that was lost, it would be my fault. What's the use of being independent if you can't be independent from Everything? So when things go wrong it wasn't "it", it was me. I'm in charge. So dear friends, life coaches, therapists and whatever … please don't tell me whether something's my fault or not. Next thing I know you'll be telling me something wasn't my accomplishment. 😉