Dr. Helen: "Some call them odd, I call them comrades"

"Does the news upset you to the point where you feel it's hard to watch or read anymore?" Dr. Helen asked her readers the other day in "How do you keep from cracking?":

… when my anger and frustration get to be too much, this is when I decide to pursue more positive activities for a while until my mental state goes back to neutral and I can think more clearly.

I think feeling that you have some control over your own life despite all that goes on in the world is important. How do you manage to make your own life better, freer or more fun, despite the problems going on in the world?

Do you have hobbies, interests or pursuits that lead you to a more positive place? If so, share them with me (us), and maybe we can learn something.

For us it's cooking, cat therapy, capturing beauty in unexpected places on "film," Friday WSJ crossword-puzzle dates and the elusive meeting of minds we seek through blogging and twittering. As we wrote in Dr. Helen's comments:

Mainly I blog, which requires keeping up with "the news." Making sense of it all by shaping one's thoughts into a coherent essay and sending the thing out into cyberspace with a click of the "publish" button can produce a certain catharsis and sense of control.

We were touched by reader Topher's true confession:

What you can do — post it on the blog, with commentary or without, and come back later and count the comments. Lots of men don't have an in-person place to talk about it (lest we be "not real men"), so just the fact you give us a place to discuss this stuff without harsh judgment should give you a good feeling you are doing something.

Interesting that so many of us — both women and men — keep coming back to Dr. Helen for psychological refreshment. Is it because we are introverts like the good doctor herself? This from her latest post "What are the best places for the avoidant?":

At this point, if you are an introvert like I am, you totally get what I just said. If you tend more towards extroversion, you will write me off as a kook. Fair enough. I have talked to numerous introverts that go to Wal-Mart in the middle of the night, grocery shop at odd hours and basically avoid people like the plague. Some call them odd, I call them comrades. There are other experts who say that being an introvert is a positive thing. I agree.

Crossposted at Riehl World View and Liberty Pundits.