Anne Bogel, Modern Mrs. Darcy, wrote a post years ago that she recently linked to again about boundary setting. Some people are great with setting firm boundaries. I am not one of these people. I am good at the initial impulse to set the boundary, but then I start to worry—either about how the boundary will impact the other person or my future self. Or, more often, I don’t even realize that I’ve crossed a boundary point I should have set until I realize that things have become too much.

Which, she explains, means I’m a sponge.

She sums up a section of the book The Highly Intuitive Child: A Guide to Understanding and Parenting Unusually Sensitive and Empathic Children, explaining the difference between ducks and sponges. Ducks allow “other people’s emotions roll right off them, like water off a duck’s back. These people may be warm, caring, and sensitive, but they still have no trouble distinguishing other people’s emotions from their own.”

Their anger doesn’t have to be your anger. Their frustration doesn’t have to be your frustration. They can think and feel what they need to think and feel, but you don’t have to carry their feelings with you.

Sponges absorb other people’s emotions. They “soak up other people’s feelings, experiencing them as their own, and physically registering those emotions. This isn’t a choice; it happens automatically.”

And then she gives an example which I recognize in myself.

There are strategies in the book for navigating sponge-hood, which, like Modern Mrs. Darcy, I didn’t even realize was something I did until I read her post and narrowed my eyes thinking, “This feels very familiar.”

So are you a duck or a sponge?

Not sure what #MicroblogMondays is? Read the inaugural post which explains the idea and how you can participate too.

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There is a meme going around saying something like if you (a woman) has a credit card in your name or your own credit history or rented an apartment, etc, thank Ruth Bader Ginsburg. And all these things are true—her work during her career (before and during the Supreme Court) greatly impacted our lives.

But the point is… the woman who worked to get us these rights just died. Meaning, this is super recent history. 1974. As in, when my mother was single, she couldn’t get her own credit card. Older rights feel stable—if they haven’t changed in 100+ years, why would they change now? Younger rights feel tenuous, like they could be snatched away at any point.

I was trying to put into words why the loss of Ruth Bader Ginsburg feels so much larger than the loss of a single person. Anne Helen Peterson said it well: “If someone has only been granted rights in recent memory, it’s easy and understandable that a lot of us are imagining just how readily those rights could be taken away.”

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Are you also doing #MicroblogMondays? Add your link below. The list will be open until Tuesday morning. Link to the post itself, not your blog URL. (Don’t know what that means? Please read the three rules on this post to understand the difference between a permalink to a post and a blog’s main URL.) Only personal blogs can be added to the list. I will remove any posts that are connected to businesses or are sponsored post.

It is entirely possible, as The Atlantic states, that people are journaling about their life during the pandemic, but I don’t truly believe it’s as widespread as they make it sound from the article.

Back in March, I thought more people would return to their blogs to write through the pandemic. Many did, dusting off old sites and proclaiming they were going to write again. And then they never returned after that initial post. Or they returned two more times and then disappeared again. Or they wrote an initial post, disappeared, and then popped up again in July to point out that they didn’t blog like they said they would.

No one owes anyone a blog post. This is not meant to make you feel guilty if you did exactly what I describe above. The point is that I’m surprised that more people didn’t return to their blog and go back to writing regularly, at least for a short period of time. I’m surprised more people aren’t journaling their way through the pandemic in the same way they’ve journaled through other crises in their life. The vast majority of bloggers I’m reading right now are people who consistently blogged before and during the pandemic.

Of course, perhaps more people have taken their words offline. Like Doogie Howser, they’re typing their journal in a Word doc. (I have zero memory of word processing programs prior to WordPerfect and Word. What did we use?) Or they picked up a new Moleskine and they’re jotting down their words with pen. But I suspect the vast majority of people aren’t doing more than writing quick Facebook posts or tweets.

Are you surprised that more people didn’t return to blogging during this?

We were finishing Rosh Hashanah dinner when we heard the news about Ruth Bader Ginsburg. We had been laughing about my low spelling group from elementary school, but my phone kept going off behind me. Over and over and over again. So I turned around and saw the top text from my cousin letting me know that she had died.

Our table got very quiet, and then ChickieNob started sobbing. The first fifteen minutes or so was just about calming her down and trying to make sense of things and wondering about her family—to lose her on Rosh Hashanah Eve, the last few minutes of the year.

Once she had calmed down, I came upstairs to cry by myself.

So many times since 2016, I’ve felt complete despair. I can’t say that this despair is different or worse or more hopeless than all the other moments of despair. But there is an emptiness inside of me. Like the outline of my body is despair, and the inside is completely hollow.

I like books. Do you like books? One of my books (at least, the e-book version) is on sale today for 99 cents. 99 cents! You cannot get a cup of coffee for 99 cents. You cannot even buy gum for 99 cents. Actually, you may be able to buy gum for 99 cents… It has been so long since I’ve left the house that I’ve forgotten the cost of gum.

You can only mail one letter for less than the cost of my book. If you try to mail two letters, you will be paying more than an entire novel.

I could spend the next 50,000 paragraphs listing all the things that are more expensive than my book. Instead, I’ll spare you and tell you to get yourself Measure of Love.

Pretty please?

Or, at the very least, tell your friends.

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Stop procrastinating. Go make your backups. Don’t have regrets.

Seriously. Stop what you’re doing for a moment. It will take you fifteen minutes, tops. But you will have peace of mind for days and days. It’s the gift to yourself that keeps on giving.

As always, add any new thoughts to the Friday Backup post and peruse new comments in order to find out about methods, plug-ins, and devices that help you quickly back up your data and accounts.

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And now the blogs…

But first, second helpings of the posts that appeared in the open comment thread last week. In order to read the description before clicking over, please return to the open thread:

• “Celebrating Ten Years” (My Path to Mommyhood)

Okay, now my choices this week.

World Childless Week was this week, and many people wrote about it. Finding My Plan B – The Black Women in the Room has a post about living her Plan B, which was finding her voice. That plan gave birth to a book and so many amazing opportunities to tell her story and support others. She writes, “During this journey I have come across so many women, especially black and Asian women who have been silenced by the cultural parameters that tell us not to bring shame on the family, not to talk about our problems outside of our home … I’ve been honoured to be in a position to listen and support them on their own childless journeys.”

My Path to Mommyhood celebrated ten years of blogging this week. So much happened in ten years, and she takes us through the journey. I love this line: “It ended with a lot of work, a lot of sadness, but also a lot of hope that finally we could have a life that wasn’t predicated on waiting for a life to begin, but LIVING in the one we have.” As I said to her: “Thank you for always making me think AND making me feel.”

Lastly, The Next 15000 Days has the best conversation stopper when a man drops multiple assumptions into a single question: “No one has ever offended me the way you just did.” Seriously.

The roundup to the Roundup: Measure of Love is on sale. Your weekly backup nudge. And lots of great posts to read. So what did you find this week? Please use a permalink to the blog post (written between September 11 – 18) and not the blog’s main url. Not understanding why I’m asking you what you found this week? Read the original open thread post here.