by Tom Tomaszewski | Mar 2, 2025 | Be Somebody Else
Mindfulness involves understanding how to live at your most ready, when life is at its most precarious. It involves recognising injustice and doing what you can about it, navigating danger, and reading how power operates. It’s how to survive oppression, economic instability and trauma.
The resilience you cultivate in mindfulness is a social thing: understanding that people survive through networks of care, mutual aid, and shared emotional labour.
Western mindfulness often stops at self-care, rarely extending into structures that promote communal healing. But mindfulness, when it’s not just another wellness industry product, is inseparable from justice. It’s about making space—individually and collectively – to think, grieve, and persist.
by Tom Tomaszewski | Feb 19, 2025 | Be Somebody Else
People sometimes talk about affirmations. Forget those, they are a pipe-dream. You need confirmations: bullseyes on a target, not a pep talk. Real things … which maybe don’t feel so real.
Every day find something directly connected to you that is working out. Even if it is simply putting one step after another, this is something you are doing without falling over. Think about it slowly and it will feel like a lot.
Doing this, you are researching the way you do things. You are exploring your own signature in the world, the sign of you like the thing you write out at the end of an important document. People know you by it: the way you do things. The way you do things is everything. Without a signature you have no identity, nothing to remember and nothing to be remembered by.
Confirmation is remembering who you are.
How do you begin? You begin with understanding how you hold a line. People talk about ‘keeping boundaries’ but that already sounds unreal. Draw a line on a sheet of paper. You can see it: a line. Now that line might be a boundary or the beginning of a drawing of a house (or anything else). Whatever it becomes, that line says something. You drew it, it’s not going anywhere. It’s a start or an end of something just as it sits there on the page, a line that you drew.
The more you do this the better the things you will discover to confirm.
Here is an example of something very good. Your child arrives home from school looking happy. You recall that you disagreed with your partner over which school they went to. You stuck with what you believed through arguments and some unpleasant stuff. You were called stubborn.
Now, here’s your child looking happy. What is there to confirm? That this moment exists because you held a line. That your refusal to back down wasn’t just stubbornness—it was commitment, a belief in something real. You weren’t just difficult; you were right. And now, here’s the proof, standing in front of you, smiling.
You can hold a line. You can assert yourself.
Drawing a line is the same thing as getting angry, even if you don’t feel it. Anger lets you start or stop things, divide things up, continue things, put things together, delay things. It’s your accelerator or your brake. Thinking with lines, like this, lets you draw a line even if anger frightens you – even if you say you don’t feel it. Keep drawing lines, and eventually, you won’t just feel it — you’ll know exactly what to do with it.
by Tom Tomaszewski | Feb 15, 2025 | ALIENATION
One of the hardest things about living with, working with, or staying attached to someone with a severe dependency problem is reckoning with the gap between their rational self and their utterly wrecked self.
I’ve heard so many people in early recovery explain, with impeccable logic, why they need to keep spending time with someone who still uses enough drugs to drop an elephant — or why they still frequent the same bars that have been the graveyards of their dignity.
It’s easy to get drawn in. Their reasoning will always sound convincing — until you remember that, not long ago, this same person was drinking to blackout, nodding off at the wheel, maybe even while driving a train.
This seemingly rational person is also, I’m afraid, a bomb of chaos waiting to go off.
But give it time. The shift comes when they start sounding less sure, less rigid, less self-righteous. When they say things they regret and truly regret them. When they pause, reconsider, hesitate. And, at times, when they are still resolute, clear, full of enthusiasm.
That’s normal. That’s good. Just give it time.
Which brings us to politics.
People who are very good at sounding fiercely ‘right’ — aggressively correct — should never be left in charge of anything, let alone a nation. When people talk about ‘the right,’ they usually mean a political stance, not a deeply troubled, divided state of mind — the one behind I AM RIGHT. But maybe they should. A mind like that doesn’t unite. It carves us into factions, whips us into certainty, turns doubt into weakness and opposition into enemies.
We’d better look out.
by Tom Tomaszewski | Feb 2, 2025 | Be Somebody Else
Somewhere in the horrible fog of antagonism and bitterness engulfing disagreement over whether or not EDI (Equality, Diversity and Inclusion) is a good thing lies a well-hidden truth. Business, politics, sport, music, literature, art … the situation is as it always has been. Most of it is extraordinarily mediocre.
When I managed an addiction treatment clinic I learned that if a fuss blew up something was usually getting swept under the carpet. If you hung around long enough you’d start to notice its effects: a malaise of repetition, stagnation and rule-bending or breaking. Thus it is: mediocre people would rather rail against EDI rather than face up to the grinding mediocrity of groups set up ‘on merit’.
EDI insists on collectivity over individuality. It makes it harder for repetition, stagnation and rule-bending or breaking to occur. If you don’t believe this, try it out.
‘On merit’ does not like EDI. EDI exposes the ‘on merit’ crowd’s dependence on … people like themselves. Angrily holding onto the status quo involves something not dissimilar to in-breeding. In certain esteemed circles it actually involves in-breeding. Back-scratching, nepotism, hereditary benefits, clubs, schools. Whatever the effect of EDI I can say, having looked under many a mental bonnet, that … things can only get better.
EDI is good for you. It shakes groups up. Of course if we are talking about the bureaucracy that might accompany EDI, that is another matter. Bureaucracy, you see, is where the ‘on merit’ crowd go when they get worried that the enterprises they have spawned might need to be accounted for.
by Tom Tomaszewski | Jan 30, 2025 | ALIENATION, Be Somebody Else, HESITATION
Worrying is necessary. Every group needs someone who knows how to worry, someone prone to anxiety who tends to experience life as if its continually undecided, on the verge of veering off-track (or worse). Avoidance – that too. All groups need somebody who’s a studied avoider.
Worriers and avoiders have to be valued (they need it) and … then they tend to worry less and stay involved. If they aren’t they tend to become frantically anxious or go missing.Ignore these people at your peril. Dismiss their worries or their second thoughts and watch as a crisis unfolds.
Life is about discovering how to live together. Attachment theory avoids this.
