Being negative is easy. There will always be a downside to everything good, a hurdle to everything desirable, a con to every pro. The real courage is in finding the good in what you have, the opportunities in every hurdle, the pros in every con.

When you are stuck in a group of people who merely trade turns at talking about themselves instead of actually conversing, it could be a matter of their not really knowing how to converse as opposed to being too small-minded or excessively Facebooked.

If you are being shuffled around, then you should feel shuffled around.

I'm sure there are people who can toggle quickly from all-in caregiving to structured socializing, but I can't think of any offhand.

There is a difference between your parents' not reporting to you everything they do and keeping secrets from you.

All of us assign different values to things, and not all of those values are going to line up with others'.

Awkwardness is when there's a risk of a perception gap between what you mean and what you appear to mean.