I'm about half-way through reading Anneli Rufus's Party of One: The Loner's Manifesto, and when I reflect on it, I think about all the different expressions I now have for loners. They're lone cowboys. They're solo travelers and wayfarers. They're individualists. They're nonconformers who are allergic to groups. And I'm thankful for having these labels. They will be my source of confidence.

I was reading in Julia Cameron's The Right to Write that when you label something, you gain power over it. So by extension, when you label something in yourself, don't you become empowered?

I think for the longest time, I've felt insecure about how interested I was in social activities. I've always viewed myself in the false dichotomy of loner vs. nonloner. When I think to myself, "I have friends, but just a few," the "few" part implies that there is a normal number of friends you're supposed to have. When I tell myself, "I'm not anti-social, I just like light social contact," light is relative to some mythical social norm.

This book obliterates all that by just throwing example after example of loners and their wonderful lives. One of the most interesting things to read is about how nuns often have rich love lives. Or the revealing perspective of how our media secretly worships loners. It made me realize that there was a big difference between having few friends and no friends, between having no social contact and limited social contact. The world of loners seems like a rich and long spectrum that while reading this book, you start to believe nonloners are the aberration and exception.

And then I started to feel less weird about myself. I started to feel more self-confident. I started to feel like I could measure myself by my own standards and less by some presumed other-standard floating in the societal consciousness.

And I believe this is one of the principle benefits of self-help literature. It's what I referred to as "kinship" in my unifying theory of self-help. When you think you're the only one with a certain trait or event happening in your life, you can feel all sorts of weird things. You can have an over-grandiose sense of self, or you can feel insecure and deny what you are experiencing. But when someone tells you they're going through the same thing, or that "they know what you mean," it flips a switch in your brain. The keyword is validation.

Psychologically, validation works like this: