How could he ask anyone else to permanently bear…
Page 58. How could he ask anyone else to permanently bear his company when he could hardly stand himself?
— from Friends, Community & Society (Relationships/Community/Society)
In the book
We make ourselves impossible to reach: we act totally self-sufficient, we hide our needs and refuse to say what we want, we send mixed signals, and — the cruelest trick of all — we reject people first, so that they cannot reject us. And often the root of it is not the other person at all but our own self-contempt; as one honest soul asked, how could I expect anyone else to bear my company, when I could hardly stand my own? You cannot give from an empty well, and you cannot truly connect with others while you are at war with yourself. There is a wider turbulence, too, the one that scales up from friendship to society: the tribal impulse. We do not live as lone individuals in a desert; we live in tribes, and that belonging is a deep human good — but the very same impulse curls, all too easily, into us-against-them. — Friends, Community & Society (Relationships/Community/Society)