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Joan Didion Quote

I hear a new tone when acquaintances ask how I am, a tone I have not before noticed and find increasing distressing, even humiliating: these acquaintances seem as they ask impatient, half concerned, half querulous, as if no longer interested in the answer.As if all too aware that the answer will be a complaint.I determine to speak, if asked how I am, only positively. I frame the cheerful response.What I believe to be the cheerful response as I frame it emerges, as I hear it, more in the nature of a whine.Do not whine, I write on an index card. Do not complain. Work harder. Spend more time alone.

Joan Didion

I hear a new tone when acquaintances ask how I am, a tone I have not before noticed and find increasing distressing, even humiliating: these acquaintances seem as they ask impatient, half concerned, half querulous, as if no longer interested in the answer.As if all too aware that the answer will be a complaint.I determine to speak, if asked how I am, only positively. I frame the cheerful response.What I believe to be the cheerful response as I frame it emerges, as I hear it, more in the nature of a whine.Do not whine, I write on an index card. Do not complain. Work harder. Spend more time alone.

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