i'm going to write about or transcribe some writings on emotional maturity and emotional intelligence. i read something to r. and said it was from brain droppings, meaning brain pickings, brian droppings i just recalled was the title of a george carlin book. i didn't read it i don't think but the title lingered. i may have also thought of the rabbit droppings mister eats by the swamp. i guess they're nutritional. rabbit droppings, brain pickings. 
i think i'm emotionally immature yet. i think i can't often shift with the context. i think i've learned some things that lay inert in me waiting to be implemented.

maturity is the ability to live fully and equally in multiple contexts. 
david whyte

maria popova says emotional maturity is not a passive thing but an active process of sculpting character and chiseling away childish impulses for weaponizing our feelings of shame, frustration, and loneliness. that is what i gotta do, i'm slowly seeing.
like happiness — another life-skill we have miscategorized as a passive abstraction — it requires early education, consistent relearning, and unrelenting practice.  

it's not a stopping point, to say i missed my early emotional education- it's too late, though that's what it feels like, like the fate of the earth. it's the starting point we keep getting thrust back to, until we get it. 

the assumption is that emotional insight might be either unnecessary or in essence unteachable, lying beyond reason or method, an unreproducible phenomenon best abandoned to individual instinct and intuition. we are left to find our own path around our unfeasibly complicated minds —
alain de botton

emotional physics. for children it would be natural, elementary. later it's damn complicated. but we are still children in the natural world, and in the built world, which is terrifying to contemplate.

de botton says, we've made exponential progress in the material and technological fields combined with perplexing stasis in the psychological one. 
we're brats in conning towers with warheads. 

the emotionally intelligent person knows that love is a skill, not a feeling, and will require trust, vulnerability, generosity, humor, sexual understanding, and selective resignation....has the confidence and tenacity to try to find an accommodation between their inner priorities and the demands of the world.
...knows how to hope and be grateful, while remaining steadfast before the essentially tragic structure of existence. 
...knows that they will only ever be mentally healthy in a few areas and at certain moments, but is committed to fathoming their inadequacies and warning others of them in good time, with apology and charm… there are few catastrophes, in our own lives or in those of nations, that do not ultimately have their origins in emotional ignorance.

now this post has gotten too long, i know, sorey. i should distill more, but maybe i will. i'm going back to talk therapy this week. i've started so many times part of me feels futile and disheartened, like mister at the bottom of the stairs, again. but i know it's different this time, i just have to learn how. how different, different how.

thanks to r. and sorey.