The Steady One - On Holding the Boundary, Losing Your Patience, and Finding the Way Back

Somebody in every household is the steady one. The one who stays reasonable at bedtime, who holds the line at the supermarket, who absorbs the day’s weather so that everyone else can have feelings about it.

It is an exhausting job and nobody tells you what it costs.

The Steady One is written for the person doing it. It is honest about the moments the steadiness gives out, the shouting you swore you would not do, and the particular shame that arrives about ninety seconds afterwards. It is equally honest that this is not a character failure but a nervous system reaching the end of what it had.

Across short chapters it looks at what a boundary actually is, why holding one while staying warm is so much harder than either alone, and how repair works when you have got it wrong.

There is no method to follow and no promise that you will stop losing your patience. What there is, is the case that going back matters more than not going wrong.

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