Tag Archives: mindfulness

🧩 Messy Lists, Veto Power, and What We’re Actually Talking About

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Polyamory has a funny habit of turning emotional work into policy debates. Messy lists and veto power are classic examples.

On the surface, they’re about rules. Underneath, they’re about fear, trust, and responsibility.

📋 What a Messy List Is (When It Works)

A messy list is usually an agreement not to date people whose involvement would have outsized impact on shared lives.

Common examples include:

  • Close friends
  • Coworkers
  • Family members
  • People deeply embedded in shared community spaces

At their best, messy lists are risk management, not control.

Healthy messy lists tend to be:

  • Short and specific
  • Based on foreseeable harm, not insecurity
  • Open to discussion and revision
  • Grounded in context, not categories

🚩 When Messy Lists Become a Problem

Messy lists stop being useful when they quietly turn into enforcement.

Red flags include:

  • Long or vague lists
  • Whole categories of people instead of specific situations
  • Rules that expand every time discomfort appears
  • Agreements that can’t be questioned

At that point, the list isn’t about safety. It’s about control.

🛑 Veto Power and Why It Feels Bad (Even When Unused)

Veto power is the ability, explicit or implied, for one partner to end or forbid another relationship.

Even if it’s “only for emergencies,” its existence shapes behavior:

  • People self-censor
  • New partners feel disposable
  • Emotional investment becomes conditional

The core issue isn’t hierarchy. It’s externalizing emotional regulation.

Instead of asking “What do I need?”, vetoes ask “What do you need to stop doing?”

🔄 Where the Two Blur Together

A messy list becomes a veto when:

  • Breaking it automatically ends a relationship
  • Context doesn’t matter
  • Growth doesn’t matter
  • Discomfort alone justifies enforcement

The language may say agreement.
The structure says control.

🧭 A More Functional Approach

Many people move away from vetoes and rigid lists toward boundaries and consequences.

Examples:

  • “I won’t stay in relationships that destabilize my closest friendships.”
  • “I need advance discussion if something affects my work or housing.”
  • “I’ll limit my access to shared spaces if I feel unsafe.”

These don’t forbid choice.
They clarify impact.

❓ The Real Question

Instead of asking:

  • Do we allow vetoes?
  • What’s on the messy list?

Try asking:

What do we do when something genuinely threatens our shared life?

If the only answer is control, the structure is fragile.
If the answer includes communication, boundaries, and accountability, it has resilience.

Polyamory isn’t about avoiding mess.
It’s about learning how to handle it without taking away someone else’s autonomy.

On the Illusion of Self-Discovery 

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In an age where “finding yourself” has become a lifestyle brand, it’s hard not to notice, gently, how strange it all is.

You see it everywhere: bright, hopeful faces on “healing journeys,” framed against sunsets in Bali; corporate executives burning out in glass towers only to reappear months later as “authentic living” coaches after a $12,000 retreat in the Andes. Suburban families decluttering their closets in search of inner peace, as if enlightenment might be hidden somewhere between last season’s jackets and the yoga mats.

Modern self-discovery, especially among the comfortable and educated classes, has become an elaborate ritual. The tools vary: yoga teacher trainings, digital detox camps, van life road trips, artisanal workshops on gratitude, but the impulse remains deeply human: the yearning to feel whole, to understand oneself beyond the blur of obligations.

And yet, with a kind of quiet sadness, you realize that much of this restless effort misses the heart of what older wisdom traditions have long tried to say: that the self you are chasing cannot be caught like a butterfly. The ego, the needy, striving “I”, is not a puzzle to be solved or a prize to be won. It is an illusion to be gently seen through, a dream to wake up from.

In this softer light, it’s clear that modern self-discovery often becomes a new form of grasping. A gentler grasping, perhaps, dressed in mindfulness retreats and ayahuasca ceremonies, but grasping nonetheless. Transformation is packaged, marketed, and sold, with self-actualization offered for a price. It’s not that these experiences are without value; many carry glimpses of beauty and honesty, but when the pursuit becomes a new identity, a new project of consumption, it quietly reinforces the very suffering people hope to leave behind.

Meanwhile, the genuine work, the real, hard, simple work, remains overlooked. It doesn’t glitter. It looks like sweeping a floor without resentment, holding silence without needing to fill it, sitting with discomfort without demanding it change. It looks like living, fully and without drama, in the plainness of an unremarkable day.

Ancient teachings, whether whispered under the Bodhi tree, scribbled in the margins of Stoic letters, or passed hand-to-hand among Sufi poets, point always to the same difficult kindness: You do not find yourself by changing scenery. You find yourself by changing how you see.

And sometimes, by realizing, with a soft sigh, not a harsh judgment, that there was no fixed, shining “self” to find after all.

This truth is not meant to mock anyone’s search. It is not meant to diminish the sincere longing behind every yoga mat, every travel blog, every self-help journal. Longing is sacred. The path is sacred. It is only that the destination, in the end, may be smaller and quieter than expected, not a place to arrive at, but a way of being already waiting inside the life you have.

And that, perhaps, is enough.