December 2024 booklet

Here are the titles and brief descriptions from this month's booklet.

• Towards an Ideal: Explores how our desired feelings are culturally conditioned and questions whether therapeutic approaches that focus on changing feelings might miss the value of simply experiencing what is present.
• Trust: Examines the pain of broken trust and disappointment while acknowledging that risking trust is essential for living fully, comparing it to how artists who create new things often venture out repeatedly in love.
• Forecast: A personal account of anxiety, depression, and work struggles, describing the author's physical and emotional pain while attempting to contextualize these feelings as temporary despite how permanent they feel.
• On Listening and Feeling Loved: Reflects on a broken friendship and the importance of truly hearing others rather than imposing one's own perspectives, using the example of the author's mother respecting their preferences as an illustration of love.
• Self Love: A poem exploring the relationship between acknowledging one's own worth and the pain of self-denial, suggesting that hearing and being heard facilitates recovery.
• Beauty and Wisdom: A poem asserting that beauty and wisdom are accessible to everyone, celebrating diversity and suggesting that these qualities can be found in unexpected places.
• Feels Good: Questions cultural attitudes toward pleasure, particularly in Christian contexts, arguing that experiencing pleasure is a form of self-affirmation necessary for recovery and authenticity.
• Self Compromise: Examines how the author compromised their own needs in relationships, particularly focusing on the necessity of anger to reclaim selfhood after a breakup.
• If She Wants: A poem about respecting another's boundaries in friendship, accepting uncertainty, and offering apology without expectation.
• On Vulnerability and Self-Love: Explores how vulnerability requires self-acceptance and how others' vulnerability creates space for our own authenticity and connection.
• On Security: A poem reflecting on childhood experiences and questioning notions of security, desire, and belonging.