Sleeping (1971), John Wesley

Trauma is a shapeshifter. It plays tricks on our minds, our emotions, our memories. It reformulates our conceptions of ourselves, reshapes reality, distorts our perceptions, unsettles our assumptions.

One of the most identifiable traits of someone who’s experienced real trauma is that they don’t want to call it trauma. How else to cope with the echoes of grief or shadows of fear that live inside your cells, than by reducing these forces to figments of your imagination? You push the darkness underground, but you bury your sensations and your ability to feel joy along with it.

In “Banal Nightmare,” Halle Butler illustrates how trauma reshapes itself into exuberance, control, upbeat determination, and a compulsion to tell cheerful stories about your life even as your reality undermines those stories.

The first line of her novel sounds like a letter to Ask Polly:

“Margaret Anne ‘Moddie’ Yance had just returned to her native land in the Midwestern town of X, to mingle with the friends of her youth, to get back in touch with her roots, and to recover from a stressful decade of living in the city in a small apartment with a man she now believed to be a megalomaniac or perhaps a covert narcissist.”

Then it swerves into traumatic coping territory:

“She was trying not to think about it, trying to have a decent time in her new life, but invariably some bleak thought would draw her back and then the memories would start, vivid, cinematic, relentless, like a brainwashing clip reel for a cult with an unclear mission statement.”

We soon discover that Moddie is an outspoken misfit who’s struggling in the wake of a bad breakup. She’s an underdog in crisis, the easiest character to root for, but Butler dares to make her (and everyone else in her novel) aggressively unlikeable:

“The breakup had been precipitated by Moddie, who impulsively had sex three times with her coworker Toby. He was a colleague, not a superior, but treated Moddie like his underling. He was a foolish man. Toby was muscular and short with a vein that stood out on his forehead, and Moddie liked to publicly humiliate him with casual mockery. She knew no one liked him, and in the break room everyone said that he was “verbally abusive.” Moddie was in charge of sorting the mail and answering the phones, so she knew about his court-mandated anger management classes, which were on Thursdays.”

Moddie knows this guy is terrible. She wanted to take him down. Sometimes attraction takes this shape. “What’s wrong with you?” mutates into casual curiosity, which warps into impulsive choices. Against the boring, polite backdrop of the workplace — and the numbness of a bad relationship — someone awful can seem dynamic or even seductively repugnant.

“After she and Toby had sex for the third and final time, Moddie sat on a park bench to read Walt Whitman. Nick had been out of town on some kind of artistic retreat, but he would be waiting for her when she got home. As she pretended to read the poems, Moddie realized that she had been effectively dead, without a single emotional or spiritual or intellectual stirring in her adult life, until this tyrannical little idiot, a man she had no respect for or interest in, had harangued her into touching his dick in the supply closet.”

Okay, obviously “Banal Nightmare” is a comedic novel, but there’s so much truth embedded in Butler’s exaggerations. This is what provocative art does for us: We’re presented with farce, with revulsion, with “Oh god, get me away from these people!” But underneath that, we’re offered insights that wouldn’t feel nearly as electric in a softer, more gentle story. Likewise, even though Toby is disgusting to Moddie, he offers an escape from her numb state. (Toby also turns out to be an echo of previous trauma in Moddie’s life, but we don’t learn that until later.)

That escape trajectory continues when Moddie dumps her boyfriend Nick (“His brain was rotten, and all of his opinions were inherited, none of them spontaneous, completely rotten.”) and moves back to her hometown. She’s hoping that her childhood friends Nina and Pam will keep her afloat in her new life. Moddie reflects that Nina makes her feel young again:

“…as if she were thirteen and just discovering that it was in fact Nina who would provide her with the constant stream of admiration she needed in order to feel secure, just discovering that it was Nina who would go along with all of her whims and tirades, propping her up and making her feel an authoritative confidence, unlike Pam, who often bristled when Moddie flexed her opinions, and who often seemed — quite on purpose — to adopt the opposite opinion, as if friendship were a debate or a contest.”

I love how hopeful and defenseless Moddie is, lurching toward anyone who encourages her and recoiling in despair when she’s rejected.

In some ways, “Banal Nightmare” reminds me of a more volatile, exuberant version of “Normal People” (or “The Road” by Cormac McCarthy, lol). Where Sally Rooney approaches disconnection and bewilderment from a cold distance, Butler packs all of her vibrant, disastrously flawed characters into a clown car and then drives them off a tall cliff. As the book’s perspective moves from Moddie to her friends to their spouses and acquaintances, we witness how dramatically they misunderstand (and, at times, dislike and resent) each other, bouncing from one nightmare bubble to another.

No one is speaking honestly to anyone else. No one says what they want. (The one character who is direct writes hilariously aggressive emails to all of her friends instead of talking to them in person!) No one admits their weaknesses and vulnerabilities. And even though it’s easy to dislike every single character in the book, we slowly grow to love some of them, and we desperately want some comfort or companionship for Moddie — not because she’s the daring and profound heroine, but because she’s deeply flawed and confused and afraid of the truth, just like every other human alive. As we witness her crawling closer to the truth on her hands and knees, we recognize our own lifelong struggle to do the same.

That struggle returns, year in and year out, for most of us. Because as easy and simple as it sounds to live in reality and be more honest, trauma warps our perception. We’re seduced by arrogant manipulators and we’re fearful of open, trustworthy friends. Our world is deeply corrupt and it’s packed to the brim with fucked up, confused, lonely people whose trauma takes such different shapes from ours that we can’t see them clearly.

Obviously some Ask Polly subscribers will find “Banal Nightmare” too dark or brutal to enjoy. That said, I’d love for those of you who finished the book to tell me what you thought and how you felt as you were reading it. Instead of analyzing “Is this book good or bad?” — a common trap among book clubs, if you ask me! I mean how much do you really gain from a room full of people saying either “I hated it!” or “I loved this one!”?!! — I think it would be more interesting to focus on the psychological journey the book presents and how that relates to your own experiences.

This book club is an experiment! Who knows? But my hope is that we can create something a little richer and more personal than a typical book club. I want us to use each book as a framework for understanding our lives, ourselves, and each other better. It’s not really about saying “This character is bad and immoral” so much as “I have a strong reaction to this material, and this is what it tells me about where I am and what I’m doing right now.”

That’s ambitious! But let’s be ambitious together!

I also think that it’s important that THE PREREQUISITE for engaging in this very intimate conversation is reading the whole book. This will motivate you to read books you might not otherwise read, which is good for you, and it will push you to fight your way through to the end even when you feel resistance or impatience. But beyond that, this prerequisite will ensure that a small circle of subscribers are engaging deeply and daring to talk through some thorny and also inspiring thoughts and feelings together (even if there are only three of us!).

So if you read “Banal Nightmare,” jump right in and tell me your ideas and impressions now. If you didn’t read it, go read it and come back! Each book club discussion will remain active for one week. I plan to come back often to share my thoughts and more quotes from the book, and I want to encourage you to do the same.

Personal anecdotes and digressions are encouraged here. As the world speeds up and becomes increasingly alienating and robotic, we need to ramble and meander and show our human flaws to each other. If it helps, don’t imagine yourself with a glass of white wine in your hand at a party. Instead, imagine we’re having a picnic in an open field on a late August day, we just ate all the bread and prosciutto and green grapes and now we’re lying on our backs, staring at the sky, chatting aimlessly about trauma and bad boyfriends and books and art and life. Dare to get a little weird, and don’t take it personally if no one replies. Weirdness and exuberance are the whole point here.

BUT READ THE BOOK FIRST!

Okay, who wants to start?

Please share this post with anyone you want to join the Ask Polly Book Club with you. This post is free but most future Ask Polly Book Club posts will be paid-subscriber-only because I’d like to create a more intimate, running conversation between a smaller circle of readers. Feel free to suggest other weird, funny, smart books to me in the comments or via askpolly@protonmail.com. Thank you for your support!

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Many Have Lived (1939), Yves Tanguy

Dear Polly

I’m almost 30 and wow I am not feeling excited about the rest of my life. I know I don’t want children, I don’t desire a romantic relationship or partner and I’m not a particularly driven career-woman. Luckily I do have a stable job that is mainly remote which is rare these days. I have a nice place to live in an expensive East coast city and I feel no excitement or gratitude which makes me feel not right because I know many people would want this.

I spend most of my day reading the news at work between incoming requests that I take care of all on the computer. It feels empty. I’ve joined and left a few clubs. I’ve met a decent number of people who mostly didn’t stick around. I have this longing to belong because I’ve felt it so rarely in life. I wish for a direction to a place that I know I would belong.

While I’ve taken up yoga at the gym and am so grateful for it — really it is a small bright light — the gardening club, the little sports teams, the friendship apps, nothing else has gotten me where I’d hoped. Life still feels empty. I haven’t given up yet but man do I feel defeated pretty much most of the time. What do people like me try next? How do I find my place to belong and occasionally feel excited?

Signed,

Not Feeling Excited About Life

Dear NFEAL,

You’re very comfortable but you’re not being challenged enough. There’s no friction in your life. There are no awkward moments at the office to endure every morning. There are no confusingly intense friendships with roommates to navigate. Your life is smooth and simple and quiet and it’s making you depressed.

That feels absurd. You feel guilty. You feel ungrateful. You blame yourself for this terrible state you’re in. Don’t do that. Lots of people reading this understand completely. They also feel guilty and ungrateful and sad about the state of their lives at this moment. They are also confused about what they need to feel more excited and inspired and fully alive.

The key here is DESIRE. You can acknowledge that you have enough and you are enough and you can still make space for more passion and inspiration and connection in your life. Cultivating gratitude doesn’t mean snuffing out desire.

Real gratitude strengthens desire and passion.

You begin your letter by telling me what you don’t desire instead of telling me what you do desire. You say that you don’t want a romantic partner. You say that aren’t career-driven. You report that you work from home, presumably because you don’t want to deal with the hassles of an office job. You seem to live alone, possibly because you want to avoid the conflicts and inconveniences of roommates. You work on a computer all day and read the news online in between assignments, a daily routine that gives you the illusion of participation in real life without any of the chaos and joys and sensual experiences of moving through a real community inhabited by real people.

Your life is built on avoidance.

My guess is that you grew up in an environment that felt unpredictable and made you extremely anxious. As a result, the uncertainties and conflicts and challenges of life, the misunderstandings and bewilderment of relationships, the difficulties and disappointments of intimacy, all make you feel overwhelmed or even terrified.

You took control. You built a life that felt predictable and contained. But now it feels empty. You’re like an astronaut, venturing into outer space wearing a space suit and a glass screen over your face. You land on other planets but you don’t take off your space suit. Friendships don’t take root because there’s a glass shield in front of your eyes. No one can see you clearly. No one understands that underneath your suit, there is a passionate, sensitive, intense, vulnerable human with a huge heart who wants much more than she can stand.

It’s telling that the one thing you love is yoga. That’s the one place where you can get relaxed enough to surrender completely — in a room full of other people who are surrendering in sync. You crave surrender and real communion with others.

All of the things you don’t desire need to be reexamined. All of the safety and silence and smoothly functioning parts of your life need to reevaluated. I’m not suggesting that you desperately want a romantic partner or that you crave a hard-charging career. I’m suggesting that you don’t know what you truly want because you’ve built your entire life around avoiding DESIRE ITSELF.

It’s no coincidence that you used the words “I don’t desire” and not “I don’t want.” Your goal is to eliminate desire from your life. You grew up seeing desire as terrifying. You associate caring deeply with a total lack of control. Maybe you never had the experience of loving something or someone passionately without feeling like you were in extreme danger. Desire meant annihilation. Desire was your enemy.

I’m using dramatic words here that might feel stigmatizing to you, but trust me, I understand. It’s hard for people who don’t feel these battles under their skin to grasp how high the stakes are for those of us who try to construct a life that matches our notions of PEACE and SAFETY. So often, in our efforts to make life feel more calm and steady, we ignore our innate need for deep connection and big challenges worthy of our efforts. We are often very successful in our attempts to make life smoother and easier, but we fail to understand that the forces we fear the most are the ones that bring us to life and inspire us the most.

I think it’s very telling that your best moments of the day are spent stretching and then LYING DOWN ON THE FLOOR WITH YOUR EYES CLOSED while your yoga instructor reminds you of the radiant core of your body, which feels love for every living being. For the longest time, I had this fantasy that I could lie on a blanket in my yard with my closest friends and look up at the clouds with them and talk about our biggest dreams. The lying-down part was the MOST important part. The second most important part was not making small talk, not exchanging facts, but confessing our most imaginative and even delusional DESIRES to each other.

For years I’ve viewed the daily interactions and frictions and hassles of life as irritating obstacle courses that serve no purpose. All of that messiness just slows you down and prevents you from the good stuff, which is feeling calm and connected to the people you love the most.

But there’s a real cost to sweeping away all of those tiny conflicts and avoidable mistakes, missed connections and misunderstandings, awkward conversations and tentative clarifications. You need that stuff to remind you who you are and where you are. You understand yourself in relation to others. You distinguish your desires from a swirling storm of desires around you, and your passion grows from being in the midst of other forces and forms of passion — and yes, big egos and annoying personalities and difficult people.

Someone who says things like “I AM NOT AMBITIOUS” and “I DON’T CARE ABOUT STATUS” and “I DON’T WANT THAT MUCH” and “LOVE ISN’T MY THING” tends to be pointing a big red arrow at the things that they fear and envy and even care about the most.

Again, I’m not suggesting that you’re the exact opposite of who you think you are. I’m merely saying that you are determined to KNOW AS LITTLE AS POSSIBLE about your truest desires at any cost — even at the cost of passion itself. Because passion, to you, isn’t just humiliating, it’s horrifying. You don’t want to be a PASSIONATE PERSON because people like that are scary and gross and out of control.

And yet, your moments of extreme peace and clarity come in the midst of SURRENDER. The surrender of yoga is inherently passionate. Allowing your body to take the lead is the definition of passion. Your favorite activity is all about desire, whether you know it or not.

You want to feel more.

It’s time to take off your space suit and feel the atmosphere of another planet, even when you’re afraid that you won’t be able to breathe there. It’s time to take some big risks and show your huge heart to other people in your life. It’s time to ask yourself what dream is big enough to feel worthy of your attention and focus.

These aren’t small things. I’m asking you to admit things that you’ve protected yourself from — to admit that you want much more than you can tolerate wanting. I’m asking you to look at what you distrust and dislike in others, what you fear and avoid the most, to see if there are threads of what you love hidden inside those things.

The stories that have protected you all your life are starting to choke the life out of you. It’s time to set them aside. But don’t start from a neurotic or fearful place where you try to think your way out of this puzzle. Instead, start from a state of surrender. Lie on the floor on your yoga mat and remind yourself, the way your yoga teacher does, that your body holds a higher wisdom that you need to listen to. Slow down your breathing and close your eyes and say to yourself,

You’re a survivor. Nothing you’ve built has been worthless. You needed safety and security to feel your way to this moment. You’ve set up a calm home and a steady routine that makes it possible for you to allow your desires and your passions to come alive again.

Your mind will say:

There is no desire or passion here.

Your body will say:

I feel nothing.

You are still protecting your heart and your body from the predatory world you fear. Don’t overthink it. Give your body love and acceptance. Proceed with your day. And when a desire comes up out of nowhere, write it down with a pen in a notebook. Record your desires, no matter how small they are. You probably already have three nice notebooks that you haven’t written a word in yet (or you scribbled a grocery list in the front of one and then considered it ruined). Make one of them your DESIRE NOTEBOOK.

If you don’t have a pen that you love, leave your apartment today and go to a stationery store. If you have to drive or take a train to the store, do that. Waste some time going to buy ONE nice pen to use with your desire notebook.

If anyone asks you what your notebook is, say “This is my DESIRE NOTEBOOK.” And then look them in the eyes and say nothing. Practice being illegible to others in real time without fear. Practice seeming strange without apology or explanation.

This is a way of standing up for your desires.

As your small desires accumulate in your notebook, you’re going to notice that you’re more irritated, more emotionally volatile, more anxious. Let yourself move through these states without judgment. This is passion returning to your body and your life.

Halfway through each work day, lie down on your yoga mat and repeat the exercise we did above. Say to yourself:

You’re a survivor. Everything you’ve built so far is worthy and beautiful. It’s a miracle to be here at all. What do you have to offer this world?

Your mind will say, I don’t know. Your body will say, I feel so grateful to be alive. Your body will say, I want to share this feeling somehow.

You’ll write some ideas down in your notebook. They’ll sound stupid to you the next day. They’ll sound scary and impossible. You’ll feel sad that you can never do the things you dream of.

And then you’ll question that new, defensive story, the way you’ve learned to question the stories you brought to me. You’ll learn to occupy a space of uncertainty and surrender the way you do in yoga. You’ll learn to associate calm surrender with desire and passion and excitement. You’ll learn to navigate the outside world without feeling besieged by fear and anxiety. You’ll learn to surrender to the world around you instead.

You’ll take off your space suit, and breathe deeply.

So much love is waiting for you on this wild and savage planet. So many impossible and brilliant hurdles are here for you to climb. There’s so much pain and so much joy ahead. Surrender to everything you don’t know yet. Surrender to what you never thought was possible for you. Surrender to how clueless you are, how small you are, on this crazy, colorful, harrowing new planet.

You will learn each morning that you’ve been dead wrong about everything, and you’ll continue to flounder and make mistakes and become confused and lose your way again and again. You will never find out all of the answers. You will never fix everything. Your life can never be perfect. Everything you’ve been waiting for is right here. Walk out to the sidewalk without knowing where you’re headed. Trust the wisdom inside your bones. Show your face to the world. This is where passion and desire and love come from. This is where your romantic, delicious life begins.

Polly

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Send your letters to askpolly@protonmail.com. Stay attuned to your confident core today so you can let more of the world into your heart. You have a lot to offer this planet. Don’t lose sight of that!

Light Loneliness (1940), Yves Tanguy

Dear Polly,

I am lost — on purpose! — and it’s freaking me out. Did I make a wrong turn? Should I have never left my cozy cocoon of reality to fuck around and find out? What exactly am I finding out, again? And how do I get back to the trail I was on before? Do I want to get back? Will it be less gorgeous than I rememb…

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Imaginary Number (1954), Yves Tanguy

This column, which originally ran on October 7, 2020, strikes me as a little strident now. Most of the friends the LW describes sound pretty toxic! I mean, how else do you sum up a friend who leans on you for 15 years then disappears the second you say, “Hey, wait, I need something from you”?!!?

That said, my advice here still stands: Boundaries aren’t a heartless excuse for saying no to someone who needs you. They’re a way of showing up and engaging and connecting without fear. Boundaries make it possible to love a wide range of people with all of your heart. A boundary says “I am human so I have flaws and limits. I work hard to accept your flaws and limits as long as you show an effort to do the same for me.”

Since I wrote this column six years ago, I’ve learned to ask for what I want from my friends more directly while trying to loosen my grip on set outcomes. Being a good friend means giving your friends space to be flawed — or distracted or half-assed at times, within reason. I’ve also moved across the country since then, so I’ve come through the struggle of finding new friends pretty recently, and I can tell you that you don’t need decades of experience with a friend just to understand and trust them! New friends are everywhere, and lots of people need more friends even when they don’t show it. It’s a good lifelong practice to stay open to discovering new people while continuing to gently assert your limits when needed. Shame, guilt, and fear will keep you lonely. In order to thrive and connect, you have to take risks, and that doesn’t change no matter how old you are.

Dear Polly,

I always feared not having enough friends, as I never had any friends as a child and was badly bullied. It got better during my adolescence and I was many people’s “best friend” up until a year ago, which now that I’m in my 30s sounds a bit ridiculous.

I started therapy two years ago and I’ve been doing so much better. I realize now that most of my friendships were very toxic, and my best friend of 20 years was a sociopath. My fiancé, friends, and family had warned me, but it only became obvious to me a few months into therapy (and his lying and stealing got completely out of control). When I told him I had been hurt by what he did and needed space, he didn’t apologize or even ask questions. He simply disappeared after 20 years of being in touch every single day. I haven’t seen him since, even though he lived a few blocks away from me. It was hard to swallow initially, but I felt much better as the months went by, and I never once regretted it.

But now I feel like I can’t “unsee” many toxic tendencies in other people. I lost a close friend because I felt my happiness always seemed to be hindering hers and I always felt bad after seeing her, even on my happiest days. When I told her this as kindly as I could, she didn’t take it well and she hasn’t wanted to speak to me since.

Another one of my closest friends is mentally ill and a drug addict. For years I have offered him my couch when he was homeless. I was always there for him when no one else was. We normally speak every day but when he’s on a bender, I don’t hear from him for weeks and I often don’t even know if he’s alive or dead. I have seen him in police stations and psychiatric hospitals way too many times. He has never once told me he wanted to get treatment or to get sober. He obviously has many wonderful qualities and is a great friend when he is stable. We’ve been friends for 15 years and he only has been acting this way in the past couple of years. I would miss him terribly if I decided to break this friendship up, but I cannot handle that state of constant anxiety anymore.

Another close friend is my business partner. We work well together but I’ve been feeling so suffocated by him on a personal level for almost a year. He’s very depressed and I have become his sole confidante during the pandemic and I just don’t feel strong enough to carry all that weight. Seeing his name pop up on my phone makes me feel so anxious, which makes it very hard to work together. I don’t even know how to explain that to him, as it would make him even more depressed.

Other friendships are breaking down, too. I have a couple of friends left in the city where I live, but many are moving abroad or aren’t “everyday” kinds of friendships.

It isn’t a coincidence that all of these bad friendships started years ago when I was very lost and vulnerable. On top of that, I was supposed to get married this past June but had to postpone because of the pandemic. There’s nothing like a wedding to make you reevaluate your friendships. The guest list I have in my head now looks nothing like the initial one. It makes me realize that I have very few friends left. I always prided myself on having such close, strong friendships (even if they were toxic) and now I feel so lonely.

I believe I’ve done the right thing by walking away, but I also feel so sad because I can’t re-create the intimacy of a 20-year friendship. I have a great fiancé, who has great friends of his own whom I like and we see a lot, but it’s not the same. I miss having lots of friends to talk to every day. I miss having friends who know me by heart, and at the same time, I know I couldn’t keep these relationships going. What do I do with the remaining dwindling friendships? How do I cope with the loss? How can I make new friends during a pandemic?

Happy But Lonely

Dear HBL,

What you’re describing isn’t just a lack of healthy friendships. It’s a lack of agency. You don’t know how to say no to people. As a result, every single relationship you’ve ever had has become overwhelming, because you feel you have so few choices along the way. You’re a cork on the high seas of your friends’ experiences and moods.

You believed for years that your job was to serve your friends at any cost: tolerate stealing, show up at the police station, listen to digressive complaints in the middle of a work meeting. If a friend wants something, you often feel guilty if you can’t give it to them. You’re always focused on whether or not you’re letting them down. Because you’re not in touch with your own needs and don’t feel right asking for what you want, you let your friends behave badly for a long time before you assert any boundaries. And once you do finally say something, it’s likely to come out all wrong, with a tone and force that feels off-putting to friends who always assumed you were fine with everything, since that’s how you acted.

I understand because I also used to wait way too long to speak up. Often, even if you’re calm and compassionate and set clear boundaries when you finally say something, your friend will recoil at the thought of you privately disliking their behavior for so long. That’s what happened with your friend who was lying and stealing. When you confronted him directly and told him his behavior needed to change, he took off. That’s how people who can’t tolerate conflict or intimacy behave. You show up, they disappear.

Many people have very little capacity for intimacy. I don’t want to call that toxic because it’s so common. What you’re describing are avoidant friends who are looking for an escape from their overwhelming emotions. But you’re also an avoidant or you wouldn’t be so attracted to these people or tolerate their neglect for so long. Taking too much and giving too much are both avoidant tendencies. They’re both ways of not showing up.

Based on your feelings about your business partner, I’m going to guess that you sometimes have trouble showing up emotionally when other people need you, even when those people aren’t lying and stealing and going on benders. I’m telling you this without the slightest hint of condemnation, because I’m the same way. When you’re avoidant, that makes it difficult to separate the truly abusive friendships from the merely taxing ones. No matter how difficult someone is, you behave the same way: You give too much, don’t ask for what you want, and never say no. This is the behavior of someone who’s struggling with intimacy. Showing up and voicing your needs is very difficult for you. The more you examine that, the happier you’ll be in your old and new friendships and in your marriage.

Your friendship with your business partner has started to feel like a duty to you. His calls make you anxious, yet you keep behaving as if you’ll drop everything to support him through thick and thin. You claim that if you speak up and assert a boundary, he’ll become “even more depressed.” But listen: This is your business partner! The stakes are too high not to address this. You can’t be his therapist or his mom. And you need to notice that you don’t enjoy playing those roles. It makes you anxious that he expects too much from you.

In order to move forward with more clarity, you need to pay close attention to what feels bad and what feels good to you. I know that sounds so basic, but avoidant people like us move away from intimacy and conflict and feelings. We don’t notice how we feel and don’t know how to stand up for ourselves. We only know how to appear to serve other people well, repeatedly disappearing into our friends’ drama so we don’t have to grapple with ourselves and our own needs.

I know that’s hard to do. I spent years telling myself that there was no way I could speak openly and directly to my difficult friends about my needs and preferences. I couldn’t imagine telling a friend what I needed emotionally, outside of the context of a big fight. I was used to feeling alienated and lonely in most friendships. I didn’t know how to say no to anything without feeling guilty about it.

I used to think it was odd that friends would talk about getting off the phone abruptly when one of their friends was going on and on about some drama. I thought asserting strong boundaries meant that you were cold and controlling. But now, I realize that, considering the kinds of people I love — talkative artists, obsessive writers, intense workaholics, anxious, idea-focused weirdos at large — I have to have strong boundaries. HEALTHY BOUNDARIES MAKE IT POSSIBLE TO HAVE INTERESTING FRIENDS. Saying no makes it possible to say yes to wild, difficult, fascinating people.

So, now that you’ve expunged your lying, stealing friend from your life, I want you to try to expunge the word “toxic” from your life, too. Are you friends with a lot of difficult people? Yes. Should you cut some of them out of your life? Maybe. I mean, I would probably meet someone at the police station once and then I’d be done. But you still need to recognize that taking too much and giving too much are both ways of not showing up. As long as you’re managing other people instead of being present and engaging honestly, you’re going to struggle to have healthy, intimate relationships with them.

I’m going to guess that, as a child, you were asked to cater to other people’s needs while muffling your own. When you grow up that way, you end up believing that what feels good to you is utterly and entirely beside the point. So when you finally do try to dig into your emotional needs, it’s going to kick up a lot of shame for you. That shame is liable to cloud your stories about some of your broken friendships.

It’s good for you to notice that you’re someone who’s attracted to people with addiction issues. You can resolve to be more self-protective and decide you’re way too sensitive and anxious to be thrown into volatile situations with people who are actively struggling with addiction. That’s pragmatic. That’s you setting boundaries and standing up for what’s best for you.

But when you’re tempted to lump together depressed guys and insecure women and friends who’ve grown distant under the same “toxic” label, that’s a sign that your shame and insecurities are telling an overly reductive story about reality. When you globalize, stigmatize, blame, conflate, and distance yourself from others, you have to notice that. That’s you being avoidant: embracing extreme definitions and writing other people off entirely in order to sidestep your most vulnerable feelings. Your shame about how broken you feel, underneath all of your defenses, is creating a reductive story about reality, one where everyone else is bad and you’re good.

I know it’s hard to look at that. Intimacy is hard in general! For almost everyone! It’s humbling to realize that your damage probably matches your friends’ damage on some level, it just manifests itself in different ways. This is a good moment for you to really humble yourself. You need to feel this lesson. You need to notice how hard it is for you to show up. You’re about to get married! This is a crucial moment for you to figure out how to stand up for your needs.

Luckily, the path forward is pretty simple. You need to recognize that you’re a fallible human being like any other. You need to resolve not to encounter the world through a fog of shame and defensiveness. That means learning to feel your feelings without shame. That means asking for what you want without shame. And that means letting other people show up and take up space with their flawed selves, knowing that when you can’t show up for them, you can say so without guilt.

Boundaries give you freedom, in other words. Feelings are your guide. You have rights now. It’s a whole new world. You’ll feel that once you start feeling more present and standing up for yourself. It feels like getting into really good shape and suddenly being able to do things you couldn’t do before. You’ll find yourself boldly striking up new friendships, too, because you’ll be less afraid of becoming a cork on the high seas again.

So don’t just write off all of your oldest friends and disappear into your new marriage. Examine each old friendship without conflating it with the others. Keep looking around and opening your heart to new people. The healthiest people I know are always open to new friendships, because they recognize how that new energy can bring fresh ideas and experiences and fun into their lives.

It’s normal to face a major friendship reckoning in your early 30s. Don’t hide from this. Embrace this humbling moment as much as you can. Just remember that giving endlessly isn’t actually generous. It’s a way of disappearing in plain sight. You want more than that now. So ask for it, from yourself and others.

Polly

Thanks for reading Ask Polly! Send your letters to askpolly@protonmail.com. The Ask Polly Book Club will discuss the sharp and pointy new/old friend/frenemy novel Banal Nightmare on 8/28. It’s subscriber-only so order a copy and subscribe now!

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Indefinite Divisibility (1942), Yves Tanguy

Dear Polly,

My dad died a few days ago, and I don’t understand why I’m not more devastated.

For years, I dreaded this. I remember dreading when I read about your father’s death. There was something about losing a parent that seemed like the edge of the world to me because I never experienced the death of a close …

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Deux Fois Du Noir (1941), Yves Tanguy

Dear Polly,

I have been reading your letters for the better part of 10 years now and I just wanted to say thank you for the work that you do. It’s really helped me at some very tough times in my life. I’m writing because right now it feels that everything I’ve been building up to is slowly crumbling, and I feel powerl…

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The Light of the Shadow (1939), Yves Tanguy

This message is simple, but you still need to hear it and feel it and live it every single day: These constant distractions are not good for you. These alerts, these texts, these blasts of media, these portholes into terrors unfolding far away, this gutless slop, this digital chaos, these soul-destroying AI summaries, these tiny hearts, these angry comments, these measurements, this indifferent, undiscerning, aggressively unfair madness.

These forces erode your sense of yourself and disrupt your understanding of reality. They sever your connection to the people around you and annihilate your ability to see the beauty of who you already are, what you already have. They obscure who can see you clearly, who is here, who loves you, who wants you to thrive. They destroy your memory and your confidence and your hope. They shred your connection to the natural world. They cloud your sight and block your view of your purpose under heaven. They prevent you from noticing the brilliant light of the vast, shifting sky above you and the brilliant light inside your vast, radiant heart.

When you wake up in the morning and scold yourself, when you allow your most neurotic and negative thoughts to take hold, when you fall prey to endless hassles and distractions, when you never look out the window at the sky, when you walk to the train without smelling the moisture in the air, when you forget to honor the natural world, which presses on your skin and asks gently that you feel what’s here, you refuse to honor your humanity, you reject yourself, you reduce your life to a series of trivial and arbitrary struggles that add up to nothing.

Honoring humanity sometimes involves disrespecting the structures and mazes and subhuman voices and technologies that pull and claw at your attention as you navigate your day. Respecting your own humanity sometimes includes blocking out the people and places and things that are out of alignment with your values, principles, and purpose under the luminous sky. Welcoming the humanity of those around you with an open heart and inviting the divine love that’s etched into their faces into your senses and allowing the pure intentions pulsing through their blood to ignite your spirit sometimes demands pushing away the bad habits and invasive digital blasts and clumsy interruptions that trick you into believing that everything outside of your skin belongs in the same junk heap.

Honoring humanity starts with honoring the natural world: how nature rustles up to you inside the faintest sounds and smells, how it alerts you to what matters and what doesn’t matter at all, how it lifts you out of despair even when you forgot that it had that power, how it pulls at your desires even when you thought they were dead and gone, how it plants you in this moment and keeps you grounded firmly here and whispers in your ear:

YOU ARE STILL ALIVE.

You’re still alive.

Honoring humanity naturally includes dishonoring the forces against humanity, against nature, against love, against pure hearts aligned with each other in spite of everything. Respecting humanity necessarily includes surrendering to the radiant light of the sublime around you, allowing that divine light into your senses, humbling yourself in the face of that brilliance.

Talent is the ability to let the divine into your pores, to yield your ego’s demands to the sublime majesty around you, to allow the radiance of this world to touch your weary soul, to give your body to your most sublime intuition and create light from the scrap heap of your broken, wayward, insecure, perfect life.

Confidence is the ability to let go of total control, to allow this chaotic world to float through you without trying to dominate it, to give your love to the people who have nothing but hate for you, to forgive and spread love and honor humanity, which means respecting nature — your nature and the natural world.

When you block your own senses with tiny screens and constant chaotic disruptions, you block your own glory. When you make yourself into an obstacle to the truth, when you deny the reality of your divinity, when you ignore the beauty of this crazy fish tank where you live, when you stray from the path of love, when you turn your face away from the love that offers itself to you without hesitation, you dishonor the natural world and disrespect your own humanity.

Put down your phone. Live your life in the open air. Honor humanity and leave these tiny windows onto the suffering of perfect control behind. Humanity is imperfect, nature is imperfect, you are imperfect, your truest loves are imperfect. Yield to the reality of the sublime around you, and leave these fantastical trivialities and obsessive illusions behind.

Thanks for reading Ask Polly! Humanity is on your side when you align with nature. Nature is on your side when you align with humanity. Let your magic and all of your talents take root by grounding yourself in this moment, respecting the vastness of your heart, and honoring the beautiful potential of everyone around you. Believe in what you are, and share your radiance with those who’ve lost track of theirs.

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Untitled (1926), Yves Tanguy

IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT: The Ask Polly Book Club is reading Banal Nightmare by Halle Butler this month. It’s a weird book! I want us to read smart, strange stuff with sharp and pointy characters, because these books instruct us on how to allow ourselves to be SHARP and POINTY in a world that wants to form us into wishy-washy, codependent addicts who can’t look big challenges straight in the eyes and say ‘I GOT THIS, MOTHERFUCKERS. WATCH AND LEARN!' This column is free because you need this one. If you agree with that assessment after reading, consider becoming a paid subscriber. Ask Polly is hitting a new high this year and you truly do not want to miss a single post. Oh, you doubt me? WATCH AND LEARN!

Dear Polly,

I am turning 23 in a few days, and I am terrified that my romantic life has already revealed something permanent about me.

Three times I have been involved with women who wanted my attention, affection, body, and emotional availability but did not want to call me their girlfriend. Each told me they were not ready for a relationship. Then, shortly after me, became ready... with someone else.

Suddenly there were labels, photographs, holidays, birthdays, and public affection: all the ordinary things I had been made to feel unreasonable for wanting. There is something so uniquely brutal about being hidden in the wings and then watching the next woman walk into the spotlight wearing the role you had been told did not exist.

It feels like proof that the relationship was possible. The door was real. It simply never opened for me.

The first time, I abandoned myself completely trying to be chosen. I made a religion out of her mixed signals and treated every small moment of tenderness like a life raft.

After that, I did all the right things. I went to therapy, read about attachment and codependency, and learned to recognize emotional unavailability.

The second time, I recognized the trap sooner but still stayed too long.

The third time, when she said she could not be my partner, I believed her and ended things. I did exactly what all the books and therapists had taught me to do. I chose myself before she could finish unchoosing me.

Within weeks, she was back with her ex-girlfriend.

I know leaving was progress. My behavior changed even though the ending did not. But it is difficult to feel proud of escaping the burning house when you are still outside in your nightclothes, watching someone else move into it after the smoke clears.

I do not think there is anything obviously wrong with me. I have close friends. People care about me. I do not believe I am unattractive or secretly unbearable.

That almost makes it worse. If there were a visible crack running through me, perhaps I could point to it, repair it and understand why everything keeps breaking in the same place. Instead, I am left with a pattern that has repeated enough times to feel less like coincidence and more like a prophecy, a curse even.

Almost all my friends are in relationships. They seem to meet someone, go on a few dates and simply become a couple.

Meanwhile, I crave things they barely think to be grateful for: holding hands in public, taking stupid pictures, traveling together, being introduced as somebody’s girlfriend. I want the soft, boring evidence of being chosen.

I am also a lesbian, and the pool of women who are queer, single, compatible, interested in me, and attractive to me feels impossibly small. When people tell me to “meet someone else,” I wonder where this endless city of available women is supposed to be hiding.

The worst part is not simply being single. It is watching everyone move forward while I remain stuck, still sweeping up glass from rooms other people barely remember entering.

How do you heal when you’ve already tried everything?

Never The Girlfriend

Dear NTG,

Stop trying anything. You’re tired of trying. You have much bigger fish to fry than finding the right girlfriend at this moment. Isn’t that true?

You’re a good writer, which tells me that you write in journals a lot, which tells me that you have a lot of strong emotions splashing around inside you at all times. These are all gifts, not deficits, and they will fill your life with endless new adventures and possibilities.

The key to enjoying who you are is also the key to finding love that works for you — and work that works for you, and a life that works for you. You must respect who you are. Your primary focus every morning needs to be this. Every morning you must ask yourself:

How will I honor and respect myself as I am today?

Sorry for shouting but I want every single person reading this to eat those words. In particular, I want you all to eat and digest the words as I am today.

Because every human changes all the time, and sometimes those changes are hard to detect. Sometimes we shift under the surface, invisibly, quietly, but we keep insisting on the employing the same structures and rules and stories and morals that applied last month or last year or five years ago. Sometimes the textures and sounds and nutrients that made sense five years ago are better replaced by the sensations and images and paradigms that brought us to life seven or fifteen or twenty years before that!

But we don’t pay close, emotional attention to where we are! We live inside our heads instead, and we stubbornly tell old stories about what we need! We insist on outdated schedules and demand expired attitudes from ourselves! We refuse to attune ourselves to who we are today. We fail to show respect to our bodies, hearts, minds, and spirits as they are in this moment.

So I want to ask you: Who are you today, and how can you respect that person?

This is what I’m noticing from your letter: You could hang with a lot of bad things before. You put up with bullshit. Then you decided to say no to that, but you also tried to be realistic in assessing that you should probably go with the flow even when you met someone who said they didn’t want a relationship right now.

Now your body and mind and heart and spirit are yelling “WE HATE THIS!” They don’t want you to date anyone unless that person is crystal clear that they want YOU.

Tell me if that’s true or not without telling me HOW IT WORKS OUT THERE. If it’s true that you don’t want to be involved in wishy-washy non-relationships where you stand in the shadows hoping that it will turn official someday, then SAY NO TO THAT.

I don’t give a fuck if that’s how everyone else does it. If you don’t want that, don’t do that. Because love comes and goes, but RESPECTING AND HONORING YOURSELF is a superpower that makes every single thing in your life better instantly.

I know you’ve been working hard and revising your story about yourself carefully. But the fact remains that your story about yourself is disrespectful to you.

Do you feel despair when you wake up in the morning? Is that before or after you start telling this possibly outdated story about how you’re just a set of training wheels on a bicycle that’s more agile and free without it? Moreover, are you feeding yourself plans and schedules that suit a version of yourself that existed last year instead of respecting your intelligence, curiosity, and deep need for novelty, which manifested itself at the age of 4?

I think you want more than this. You don’t even want love right now, even though your compulsive mind keeps returning to that puzzle. You want to love and honor and respect yourself enough to return to the smart, adventurous self you were as a kid. That kid wants to come out to play.

Lots of people want to fall in love at the age of 23. Many young humans find their perfect match at that age. Many others discover that their perfect match isn’t so perfect exactly two years later. While it’s challenging to witness all of these pairings and unpairings at close range, particularly when it involves your exes, particularly when you’re aching to find someone sweet and real and true who’ll hold your hand and travel with you and take pictures of you two together, you must resist the urge to stigmatize, panic, and discourage yourself simply because you’re in the company of people who are managing to pull off something you also want.

Wanting something that other people have doesn’t make you a broken thing that needs to be cleaned up. Failing at love never, ever, ever means that you’re permanently fucked. There is no crack, there is no “same exact thing.” Your skills of pattern recognition are playing tricks on you. Your brain is telling lies.

I want to move past this, but first I want to blow this “curse” theory out of the water. Many, many people are rendered jumpy and dissatisfied around human beings who are EXACTLY AS SENSITIVE AND INTELLIGENT AND LOVING as they themselves are. I’ve experiences it many times. I have met my match and lost that squirrelly motherfucker more than once. I have experienced rejection at the hands of men who seemed perfectly aligned with me in every way, only to discover that they married the next woman they dated.

Typically, the next woman was nothing like me at all. Many times, what I could see (from a great distance!) of the next woman was not exciting, impressive, or even that interesting to me (which is good because I love to get obsessed with my own perceived failures!). This was before the internet offered countless full-color sleuthing possibilities, but even if I had the internet’s help, I would’ve been underwhelmed with what I found. In a few cases, friends met the next woman and they reported back TOTAL CONFUSION AND BEWILDERMENT, like DUDE, HOW DOES THIS MAKE SENSE?

I offer you this incredibly egocentric worldview (the BRATTY impression that I WAS MORE SPECIAL THAN ALL OF THEM!) in order to demonstrate exactly how invested and upset and obnoxiously ego-driven my processing of these rejections could be. I’m showing you that embarrassing side of me because I want you to see that this kind of processing sprang forth from A RECURRING INABILITY TO HONOR AND RESPECT MYSELF AS I WAS BACK THEN.

Asking “Why don’t you love me the way you love her?” is absolutely understandable, but it’s also disrespectful to you as you are today — which naturally includes disrespecting who your ex is today and who your ex’s new love is today. Because you have turned yourself and them into a math problem. You’re pretending that you have a clear and obvious value to everyone that should stay constant. As long as you feel like you’re in love, the other person should also be in love or else… THERE’S PROBABLY SOMETHING FUCKED UP ABOUT YOU! OR THE UNIVERSE IS AGAINST YOU IN SOME WAY!

Even when you assure me that there is truly nothing terrible about you, you assert that there is a pattern here and it means that you’re cursed. You’re reducing the mysteries inside you and everyone else to simple math, and you’re saying that the math means you’re fucked.

I know all about that math. I know that despair, too. I know how hard it is. I know how much it hurts. I am holding your hand right now! I am! Truly! Feel it! I think you’re amazing and I love the way you are and I FEEL FOR YOU. I feel your heartbreak and I am here for it.

That’s why I want you to stop doing weird, random math that disrespects your body and spirit. When you use the word “curse” to describe where you are, you refuse to honor your heart, which will love what it loves no matter what you do to tame it. Feeling love is never a mistake. Let your heart be its powerful, savage self and honor it no matter what! Stop turning away from this pain and this love and the RAW POWER that lives inside your burning desires in order to “solve” a “puzzle” that is absolutely unsolvable, has no solution at all, and exists as a kind of ADDICTIVE WASTE OF TIME that only makes you increasingly neurotic and increasingly disrespectful to yourself.

Instead, get out of your head and live inside your heart. Honor your heart and be gentle to it. Show up for it. Let your vulnerability guide you, and leave all of these analytical acts of procrastination and entanglement behind.

What does your heart say?

My heart says “I want to show myself” and it also says “Protect me from people who don’t love me or don’t get it.”

Because I honor my heart, the only real curses in my life spring forth from NEUROTIC ENTANGLEMENT.

Neurotic entanglement is very, very common today, to the point where it’s practically inescapable for EVERY LAST ONE OF US! I mean, it’s a real motherfucker! These times are eating us alive, my girl! So it’s very VERY important that you see that side of your picture clearly. Our lives are currently structured to make us LOSE OUR MINDS.

If you want to be happy in this world, you have to fight tooth and nail against the addictive, corrosive, self-hatred-inducing structures and sensations of this world. You have to fight every day. You have to notice when you’re falling down a dark, neurotic rabbit hole — that’s absolutely natural and understandable because it’s a means of giving you the illusion of control!

Right now, your rabbit hole is this ANALYSIS OF YOUR SO-CALLED CURSE and also this compulsion you have to MATCH HOW OTHER PEOPLE DO THINGS. But there is no curse. Other people’s choices and behaviors can’t be your guide. So your constant analysis will only make you crazy, like stopping for a second to keep up your end of CROSSPLAY (“Used all my letters, yet again! HERO!) and then falling into an endless tunnel of playing against the fucking computer, which… WHY?!!!

Analyzing your curse (and analyzing how other people GET things) is disrespectful to your body, your heart, and most of all your spirit. Delineating what you did wrong and how you can fix it, how you can become more appealing to the next SOMEBODY SOMEWHERE disregards the mysterious and joyful forces moving within you.

Honor those forces instead by asking what you need today, what you’re craving this month, what you truly desire the most this year, and what purpose you are trying to serve on this planet without necessarily being fully aware of it. Ask yourself what structures and limits your body REQUIRES in order to feel good (including green leafy things, exercise, sleep, and honesty with others!). Ask yourself how you can physically or emotionally limit the hours you spend tumbling down rabbit holes, either alone or with other people.

When you feed yourself and your heart, when you respect your body, when you are gentle with your mind and your spirit, do you know what kinds of things you do? You do things like say “You don’t look ready to be involved, so I can’t get involved with you.” You protect yourself from wishy-washy people, and they move on, and you respect their paths even when they look MUCH less wishy-washy milliseconds later.

When you’re kind to your cells and you honor your desires, you remind yourself, “When someone comes to me wanting a relationship, I will listen. The rest is noise. I will not slow down for someone who appears uncertain.”

Saying no to rabbit holes changes the entire structure of your life. It rearranges your priorities.

In contrast, when you fall down rabbit holes a lot, whether that means staring at bullshit on your phone or going on a fourth date with someone who still seems like they might be on the fence about you, you naturally disrespect not just your own body but the bodies of people around you. When you obsess and problem-solve about what you’re like to other people, how you seem, why you don’t matter more, you naturally ignore or simplify or stigmatize other complex and mysterious human beings in your life and in the world.

The remedy is unlatching from this CURSE paradigm. You do that by saying to yourself, over and over:

SHOW SOME RESPECT FOR WHAT IS UNKNOWABLE.

When you respect the unknowable, you admit that you only have the tiniest pinhole view of the full, rich , delightful magnitude of all that you are and how you fit in the wide, volatile universe around you.

When you arrive in a physical place of understanding just how bright and brilliant and vast and mysterious you are, when you feel that under your skin, when you honor that by allowing a tidal wave of sadness and fear and love come rushing out of you as needed, something wild happens: You start to accept and love the fact that you’re so intense and wild that people have strong reactions to you even when you’re half fucking asleep.

It’s beautiful and scary and it deserves your respect.

You also start to accept and love the fact that you can’t know what’s happening beneath your ex’s skin, what mysteries and strange needs are bubbling away inside her heart. You don’t know what odd forces take hold of her in the company of her new girlfriend or in your company. The most important and vital undercurrents of your spirit might cause her heart to lock up in fear. This means being with her will slowly but surely erode your spirt AND hers! And over time, the softest and most delicate parts of you might dry up and float away when she’s around, and you might not notice until you feel less capable, less alive, less free.

Now that your body and mind and heart have moved into this new (temporary, for now!) position of respecting your exes, all of them, and all of their new partners, you can move your focus back to yourself, and ask yourself: What powerful surges and sensations and deep, abiding desires are swirling around inside you at this moment in ways that mean your needs are changing rapidly?

I think you’re rigidly attached to solving a false “curse” because there are so many big and overwhelming challenges in your life at this moment. And right now, your buried and muted spirit is trying to tell you that the same formulas and structures and sensations and stories that applied two years ago don’t apply anymore.

You need more. You need more room to breathe, more ways of feeling strong and resilient, more routes to self-expression and connection. At this moment, I don’t think maximal joy would come from unlocking the key to that secret city of lesbians even if it existed! My gut tells me that a city of beautiful, charming, sensitive lesbians would drag you into a dark and terrible cave right now, because your soul wants to be honored and respected by YOU first and foremost.

Your soul is saying: YOU KNOW THE WORK WE NEED TO DO. WHY CAN WE DO THIS WORK NOW THAT YOUR TIME AND ENERGY ARE FREED UP, WOMAN? LET’S GET ON THIS! I’M READY!

And just to be clear, your soul isn’t pointing you down a path to getting something concrete, proof that you matter, something that will also bring you love. Your soul doesn’t give a fuck about GETTING STUFF, crossing finish lines, conforming to the sounds and sights around you that are driving you half-mad.

Your soul just wants to honor YOU TODAY. Right here, right now. Your soul wants to feed you something rich and brilliant and vibrant and real enough that you can eat and feel satisfied by, in a way that makes this “curse” narrative seem hilarious and OUTDATED.

The good news is that you don’t have to solve the puzzle of what your soul wants. Souls don’t offer us puzzles. Souls merely ask that we respect what we are right now. Souls ask that we honor the mysteries under our skin and under other people’s skin, too.

Respect what is unknowable.

Welcome what is vulnerable.

Relish what is real and true, even when it feels sad or scary.

Honor who you are in this moment.

This is the moment in your life when you learn that welcoming a supposed curse with an open mind will bring you blessings that you never could’ve predicted. I don’t mean “oh hey, this heartbreak is such a great lesson for you!” What I mean is inherently more murky and delicious and mysterious and vague than that. What I mean is that by inviting your body and heart and mind to FEEL your most vulnerable sensations around this invented, arbitrary puzzle that you’ve labeled “curse,” what you’ll find is that the dark, sick, anxious feelings lift, and brand new possibilities flood in.

That’s how it works every single goddamn day. We resist the stupid fucking math that this corrupt and poisoned world blasts into our eyeballs, we say no to the addictive bullshit (phones, distractions, media, depressing news that makes us anxious, Instagram photos of your ex on vacation) that floods our senses when we don’t guard against it, and we resolutely commit to RESPECTING AND HONORING AND FEEDING who we are today.

You are underfed. I understand that. I have landed there so many times without realizing it until I did a lot of damage to myself, with bad stories, bad habits, anxious and avoidant compulsions, and addictive escapes. I will fall down another rabbit hole, and so will you. We are human.

But when it comes to what we truly need? It’s a little mysterious! Because it changes all the fucking time! That’s why, when we try to SOLVE IT LIKE A PUZZLE, we get anxious!

Instead, we need to treat our true needs with respect, which means respecting that our truest desires and our truest selves are both mysterious and shifting and brilliant and wild. The question becomes: What can I do to feed my savage spirit today? What can I do to nurture someone else who is lonely and needs me badly and might benefit from a simple check-in? What can I do to remain alert to my most vulnerable emotions, while also supporting and strengthening my body and mind? Where does my curiosity take me, once I’m out from underneath the grip of this illusion-fueled “curse” narrative?

How can I proceed through this day in a new way? How can I start to off-gas all of this obsessive, anxious energy and rapaciously eat something much more alive and new and weird that suits my formidable appetite?

You’re a lush garden. You know that already, right? You’re wise beyond your years and you have a more vivid imagination than most rooms full of humans combined. Do you really think finding true love is your most important challenge at this exact moment in your life?

If that’s what your spirit says with a firm and resounding YES, then I respect that, and you should, too! If the answer is yes, all the more reason to say no to sexual attention that doesn’t feel pure or real enough, no matter how good you might be at keeping someone around longer.

But something in your words suggests to me that you have some ENORMOUS and exciting challenges on the horizon that you’re avoiding with everything you’ve got. It’s time to show up and dive into these big, scary adventures you’re resisting.

You’re meant to give so much to this world. That will take respect for your limits as well as your boundless imagination. That will demand that you honor what you are.

That’s how you heal when you’ve tried everything. You stop trying. You stop working so hard to fix things. You stop talking about puzzles and stop asking people what’s wrong with you and stop analyzing what was broken. You wake up in the morning and you whisper to yourself:

YOU ARE A LUSH GARDEN. HONOR WHAT YOU ARE.

I know you’re about to burst into bloom, too. I know it. Trust it. Breathe it in. Believe it. I’m on your side. We’re all on your side. No more rabbit holes, no more dark tunnels, no more neurotic puzzles. Be where you are and relish every second of it.

Love to you!!!

Polly

Thanks for being here! Are you showing your body respect these days? Are you honoring your savage heart and bright mind? Or do you tell stories about what might be wrong with you, day after day? Today, take a long walk, buy this crazy book, and attune yourself to the sensual delights of being exactly who you are, flaws and neurotic sinkholes and all, in this fucked up, beautiful world. Give yourself the big challenges and delicious rest that you require and stop apologizing for wanting more than you can stand.

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Forward this column to a friend! Don’t let this shitty culture drag you under. Trust yourself and feed yourself. Send your letters to askpolly@protonmail.com. Sending you love love love love love love and MORE love. Real love, bitch. Feel it.

Time and Again (1942), Yves Tanguy

Dear Polly,

I’m struggling with a friendship-group conflict that has become much bigger than the original incident, and I’m no longer sure whether my reactions are reasonable boundaries, old wounds taking over, or some combination of both.

I’ve been with my partner for four years. He has a very close-knit friendship group…

Read more

Les Jeux Nouveaux (1940), Yves Tanguy

Dear Polly,

I made a huge life decision that I’m panicking about.

I’m a 26-year-old woman from a small Midwestern town and have lived in big East Coast cities since 2018. In those years I attended fancy schools and met all kinds of people and my world got massively bigger. I became way more confident, made amazing frie…

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Robert Plant, 1973. Photo credit: James Fortune

Hi Polly,

This is such a stupid and naive question, but I felt like writing to you.

Do a lot of people lie about their accomplishments and overall happiness? Are a lot of people manipulative or withholding? Having now entered the workforce, I have noticed many peculiar behaviors. People straight up lie on their resume to obtain lucrative positions. Moreover, when I email HR about other internal positions or promotions, they legitimately ignore my emails until I repeatedly nudge them. It’s like they don’t want anyone to get ahead. I think a lot of my coworkers also don’t want to help other people, or be generous with their time thinking they will be taken advantage of. The problem is that we are all working on the same project!!

I have also met other people outside of work recently who feel that admitting any sort of flaw is a sign of weakness or failure. They never want to admit that they are tired or overwhelmed with life. There is also so much weird jealousy over people who make more money, or have better cars. The jealousy thing makes me so uncomfortable. I think too much of it can turn into self-victimization.

I don’t know... I guess university was nothing like this. My classmates were all genuinely happy and supportive of each other. I’m not saying that I am a better person than everyone at work or anything. I also have my insecurities and shame that I have to work on. I also want to look put-together. I am just so tired of all these mind games and work politics. I find the coldness from others to be isolating and hurtful. I feel like life is so hard and confusing, and wish everyone would just admit it rather than trying to portray perfection. I don’t want to become hardened by the corporate world. I want to be kind and honest.

I don’t know, I’m just rambling.

Confused

Dear Confused,

Sometimes you need to ramble in order to find your footing. Cue “Ramble On” by Led Zeppelin: Perfect percussive guitar riff, perfect bass line, ethereal voice that goes from a whisper to a hoarse howl.

Ah, sometimes I grow so tired
But I know I’ve got one thing I got to do

RAMBLE ON.

How do you feel when you listen to this song? If you feel nothing, maybe you never associated Led Zeppelin with anything vibrant or odd or seductive. You saw “Almost Famous” and you thought that it was about Led Zeppelin but they seemed like dirt bags. You saw “Thor” so you’ve heard “Immigrant Song.” Your friend’s Instagram story featured the start of “That’s the Way.”

The way something enters your consciousness affects the depth and richness of your experience. On Instagram or in a Marvel movie, Led Zeppelin might feel like a boring Boomer artifact repurposed out of greed or an attempt to seem cool. My reference to “Ramble On” might strike you as myopic nostalgia.

Likewise, in the context of a corporate office, it’s very easy for other people to seem cold or unfeeling. The way communication is structured impedes deep connections and nuanced interactions. There are few opportunities to RAMBLE ON.

Transitioning from college to the corporate world is impossibly hard, a brutal shock to the system. Everything that’s celebrated and embraced in college is discouraged and rejected in the workplace. You feel like you have to power down everything fresh and vibrant and honest about yourself just to survive.

The people around you seem impatient.

Are you impatient, too?

Let’s test your patience by watching Robert Plant perform “Ramble On” on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert two months ago. Robert Plant is 77 years old.

It’s a dangerous thing, to witness someone whose music you love getting older and continuing to perform. But goddamn, the man still has some magic left in him. His voice isn’t thin and broken, it’s full and powerful. Who is this lady with the accordion and why isn’t she getting on my nerves?

If you don’t stop and watch the video, you might have a negative impression of an aging rock star belting out a tune from his glory days. The moral: Patiently watching changes everything.

At work, when you’re just trying to get through the day, you aren’t open to seeing tiny glimmers of kindness and honesty. Everyone looks manipulative, selfish, and disingenuous. Everyone seems to lie to get ahead. Even out of the office, people appear shallow, empty, and fickle.

Of couse you aren’t entirely wrong. The truth is that many people are not only self-involved and cold, but they’re also so fucking boring. They’re uninspired, they’re unoriginal, they’re undercooked, they’re underwhelming. They do what’s in front of them and that’s all. The motherfuckers never ramble on! They don’t show you who they are. They don’t listen. They don’t take time to reveal their layers.

But is that the whole pictture? Even though you might be 95% sure that you’re surrounded by materialistic strivers, you’re still about 5% uncertain. You don’t know them that well. So you should always return to that 5% inside your brain, that small corner of space that says that

I JUST DON’T KNOW.

and

THESE THINGS ARE UNKNOWABLE.

and

OTHER PEOPLE ARE SOMETIMES ILLEGIBLE.

For now, move into that loose, open pasture that represents the 5% of your brain that is uncertain, that can’t read these people, that isn’t sure that they’re ALL bad and jealous and shallow. Let them be whatever they are.

Accepting imperfect, incomplete, uncertain places in your mind and in your heart is very difficult. You want the kindness and community you felt in college but it feels like it’s long gone. You’re nostalgic for what you had before, and now you have to compromise and accept less. You have to work with what you have.

Here’s what that looks like: Led Zeppelin performing “Ramble On” in 2007.

Robert Plant is 59 years old. Jimmy Page is 63. They’re getting older and they’re probably a little hesitant to go on the road at all, because touring probably reminds them of how old they are. They’re painfully aware of everything that’s missing.

Sometimes what’s MISSING is more prominent than what’s actually there. That’s where you are, too. You’re in a state of mourning for the past. You’re wondering, IS THIS ALL I GET?

It’s a challenge to keep showing up when you feel that way. But let’s slow the fuck down and watch for a second. Do they seem unhappy?

No. They’re working with what they have.

If you watched that video and still felt nothing, though, we might need to travel back to 1995, when Robert Plant (46) and Jimmy Page (51) played “Ramble On” in Birmingham.

These motherfuckers are a lot younger, and they sound more like the Led Zeppelin you hear on Instagram today. That said, Robert Plant seems to be singing the wrong words. His hair looks frizzy. To be fair, we didn’t have good hair products in the 90s. Jimmy Page seems okay but… do these guys even get along? Is Robert Plant drunk?

Okay I did some research. Robert Plant quit drinking in the late 70s after the death of his son. Bassist John Paul Jones also quit around that time. Jimmy Page continued to drink and it sometimes caused trouble, but Plant said that the 1995 tour brought them closer together.

In other words, I was wrong. I filled in the parts of the story that I didn’t know, and my inventions were inaccurate.

I did this constantly when I was your age. So even though I’m tempted to say LEAVE THIS TERRIBLE JOB! FUCK THESE PEOPLE! FIND YOUR TRIBE! THEY DO EXIST! BE PATIENT AND KEEP LOOKING! I also want to take this opportunity to unclench your mind from these rigid, repeating stories about the people around you, because these stories aren’t serving you well. I want you to take the risk of paying MORE attention to what you don’t know than what you know. I want you to cultivate your curiosity.

Find someone at work who makes sense to you. Slow down and listen closely. Dare to make connections with someone who sounds more humane and idealistic than the others. That will take time. But you have time. Instead of focusing on what doesn’t work (unhelpful people in HR, superficial new friends), keep branching out.

Attune yourself to the mysteries behind the flat, boring, obvious story in front of you. Find the romance underneath your uninspired, ungenerous surroundings.

That’s how you resist the urge to become cold and selfish. That’s how you keep your kindness and your honesty. You keep asking good questions. You keep trying to accept what you don’t know and what’s UNKNOWABLE. You stop explaining and practice being ILLEGIBLE to others. You back away from fixations and obsessions and unsolvable problems that only keep you stuck, and you move forward with an open heart instead.

You say

Ah, sometimes I grow so tired

And then you remember to get up and get out into the world in spite of everything.

But I know I’ve got one thing I got to do

RAMBLE ON

You have so many emotions swirling around inside you that it’s easy to feel hurt and lost and lonely. It’s SO FUCKING EASY to feel that way, particularly right now, in your 20s, the most difficult time in your whole life.

But all of that turmoil includes passion and excitement. And it would be a huge shame not to relish that energy and even that uncertainty. As harrowing as your life is right now, it’s also so dramatic and so beautiful. Some part of you is aching to honor that.

In your letter, you apologize for rambling when you’ve barely said anything at all. Is that how you are? Do you need to give yourself more space to ramble? Do you need to express yourself more freely to people you trust? Do you need to show your true desires in honest and kind ways more often instead of protecting yourself? Do you assume you’ll get hurt if you open your mouth?

Should you say more? Should you show more? Can you remind yourself that rejection isn’t personal, that being ignored is a big part of being alive, that cold people and selfish people and shallow people are irrelevant, as long as you’re true to yourself, as long as you’re standing up for yourself, as long as you’re showing up, day after day, and saying

I WILL BE KIND NO MATTER WHAT.

I WILL EMBODY MY VALUES.

I WILL SHOW MY HEART.

What does that look like? In order to know, we need to watch Led Zeppelin perform “Over The Hills and Far Away” in 1973. They never performed “Ramble On” live back then, but this song is pretty amazing, too. Robert Plant is 24. Jimmy Page is 29.

Robert Plant is not wearing a shirt. He looks good, my friend, very very good. Dirty good, 1973 good. He says “This is a track about, uh… I suppose it’s about you and me and everybody. You’ve probably written one just the same.”

We are all the same. I’ll show my heart, and I’ll see yours.

And then they start the song. My god. Jimmy Page unleashes a symphony orchestra in one guitar. How long did it take, to learn to play that way? How much patience and practice was required, to become someone who could stand and deliver like that? Imagine having the discipline and the vision for that. Imagine how much belief in yourself that would require. What were the people around him saying about his guitar obsession when he was a kid? How many people called him a freak for caring so much about music before he landed on that stage?

To touch something divine in this life, you have to cultivate faith in yourself in spite of rejection, ignorance, indifference, jealousy, and greed. You have to tune out the noise and focus on what you believe in.

You’re young and sensitive and you’re learning what you care about, what you value, what you want from life. You’re overflowing with fears, hopes, strong opinions, and passion. Don’t shrink away from where you are, even when it disappoints you. Sway under the golden spotlights and believe for a moment that someone out there understands exactly what you’re trying to say. Show yourself in spite of the pain. Take risks in spite of the rejection. Keep it moving until you find what works for you.

The outside world doesn’t define you. You define yourself. Make sure your heart is showing.

Polly

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Finish What I Started (1927), Yves Tanguy

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Lena Dunham is very smart and painfully honest.

I know that’s obvious, but these two traits are vanishingly rare among big-time celebrities with careers to protect. So when I saw that Dunham was writing a book called FAMESICK, I thought, Finally, our spy will share the truth about how wretched and harrowing life can be as America’s twisted sweetheart!

Dunham describes her experiences with callous, fickle Hollywood in all of the delicious detail I’d hoped for, yet I still found myself wanting her to deliver a full autopsy report on fame and narcissism and attention-seeking in the age of social media. She has the smarts, the first-hand experience, and a great big bone to pick with the mercilessness of Hollywood and the unrelenting sexism of the internet. Swing that big bone and take ‘em out at the knees, woman!

Unfortunately, Dunham is far less petty than I am. She also had countless other challenges to address in her book, from chronic illness to devastating professional and romantic breakups. After decades of feeling envious of Dunham’s career (I wrote about “Girls” for the New York Times Magazine in 2012, reviewed “Not That Kind of Girl” for the LA Review of Books in 2014, and marveled at the charms of her Netflix comedy“Too Much” for several weeks last fall), I was surprised and even a little soothed to learn just how hard life had been in the midst of her most glorious public victories.

Glory doesn’t erase pain. Dunham knows that better than anyone, and — thankfully for us — she’s willing to say so, even when it costs her a lot. So after finishing “Famesick,” I wanted to ask Dunham more questions about the cursed blessings of fame and the courage it took to expose her biggest mistakes and lowest moments on the page.

The bravery it took to write this book astounds me. I know that’s not really a journalist’s hard-hitting question, but this is what I really want to know more about. How often, if ever, did you tell yourself, as you were writing, that you were making a big mistake? How did you manage to break past that feeling?

Firstly, thank you Heather! Your work has been an enormous comfort to me over the years, and it means the world to hear that the book resonated for you. I really never get over women I respect and admire offering me kind words.

So, to your question: There are a lot of things in life I find very challenging, where I really have to psych myself up, repeat a mantra, remind myself to breathe. These include, but are not limited to: interpersonal conflict, the drop off and pick up windows at the pharmacy, a lot of formal dining scenarios, and — on certain days —getting out of bed. Then there are some things that should be scary that I don’t find scary at all, like uncomfortable medical procedures or (back in the day) being naked in front of many, many colleagues! I think writing this book fell somewhere in the middle, because the process of actually writing — alone with the page or in a back and forth with my editor Andy Ward — I felt enormous comfort in it. I have some form of perverse nostalgia where uncomfortable experiences are actually more interesting and tempting for me to revisit than dreamy ones. I don’t often find myself in a dreamy haze thinking of warm summer days or really fun parties, and am much more likely to experience a curious and somewhat detached play-by-play of moments that, as they were happening, I assumed would go into the mental black box where we often store our pain.

But once that writing process is coming to a close — in this case, after more than eight years — I start to feel a mounting “Why am I doing this? No one is making me do this!” With that, my face reddens as I consider everything that I was not compelled legally to share and yet am sharing anyway. I was explaining this sensation to my very brilliant friend Michael Lewis, wondering why I couldn’t practice more foresight about what is and isn’t going to make me feel like I’m being plucked like a chicken and I’m the butcher, and he paraphrased what I believe is a Kingsley Amis quote (though the world wide web seems not to know it!) that has now become my favorite motto.

A journalist asked Amis some version of “You seem like a nice enough guy, why do you write this stuff?” And he said “Something comes over me when I see a blank page.”

If this is not in fact Kingsley Amis, it remains my motto anyway.

Relatable! I would imagine that a lot of what you wrote about with your continuing sickness felt grueling to put into words. How did you push through on the days when you felt overwhelmed or even just bored with your own experiences?

Writing about illness was a unique challenge, because of the fact that, as a chronically sick person, you become very used to minimizing your own experiences. Sometimes it’s to make the people around you feel better. They’re worried about you, or you can feel them growing tired of a certain kind of monotony. Maybe you just think you feel them growing tired! Sometimes it’s because you have to appear better than you are in order to participate in society. And sometimes it’s just to convince yourself, a fake it ‘til you make it. But that level of subterfuge becomes very habitual, and it takes some real unlearning to offer an honest account of what prolonged illness and chronic pain actually feel like. In terms of what was scary to write, it was certainly the illness chapters, both because looking at it all laid out in a linear fashion is very different than living it, which involves a vague amnesia in order to continue to wake up with something resembling a smile. And there was also the dueling fears: of sounding whiny and of sounding unemployable.

Ultimately, I had to go balls to the wall and conclude that perhaps being whiny isn’t the biggest crime, and that, pound for pound, in terms of sheer grit and hard headedness, no one is more employable than a determined sick girl.

How many rounds of revisions did you go through in writing this book? I ask because the book feels very complete and not at all random or half-finished, which honestly is rare with memoirs these days.

Thank you, and I really have to give flowers to my editor Andy Ward. There are many editors and publishers who, if they have even a drip of gossip and a book that may move some copies based on public interest in juicy tidbits, will rush a book right along and send it into the world practically still bearing its typos. Andy was clear from the beginning that he didn’t want to publish until the book had more than just some stories to tell, but some perspective. Not just a perspective, which is a term that seems to be used to casually mean “has an opinion” or “sees life in a sassy little way!” but perspective in the figurative context, as in seeing events in the proper scale and with a sense of how we relate to those around us.

So the answer to how many drafts is many. I think I stopped counting after overhaul number five. But I feel extremely lucky to have such a diligent coach.

I have to admit that, based on the title, I was hoping that you’d share even more of your ideas about why and how being famous can make a person sick. Having lived in LA for decades and witnessing the weird waiting-to-win-the-lottery mentality that’s common there, I felt strongly throughout the book that you probably have a very coherent and interesting angle on fame and its poisons and ego-inflating, reality-warping dangers. I also think that people don’t talk enough about how confusing an excess of public attention can be when you’re a sensitive person who, like so many artists, is a people-pleaser and grew up craving attention. It’s like what you long for the most actually ends up crushing you.

I am in Los Angeles as I type this, a place I used to come a lot and rarely do these days, and have been sort of re-dazzled by the degree to which fame and its pursuit shape an entire city. Of course not everyone in Los Angeles wants to be famous, but so many of the dominant local industries, even outside of film and TV — beauty, fitness and wellness, medicine, even real estate — seem catered to the idea that celebrities have a different set of needs, standards, and desires (which many of them do!) and that even the people who aren’t famous want to experience life like they do. The word “concierge” is certainly in a lot of business names on these streets!

I have a lot of thoughts on how and why fame has become such a dominant and corrosive force, not just for the people experiencing it but for the people consuming it. There’s that saying “patriarchy hurts everyone, even men” and I believe that celebrity hurts everyone, not just celebrities. The reason I was shy about perhaps stating that stuff more baldly was two-fold: I’m a memoirist and not a cultural critic, and I worry that really laying into society en masse can feel like the medicine going down with very little sugar. And I also love my job and my life as it exists today, and to have that life I still participate (if to a lesser degree) in the machinery of celebrity. So it would be a bit like a current Meta employee warning you about the dangers of your social media use.

I will probably spend the rest of my years trying to understand and reconcile the instincts of an artist and some of what’s involved with maintaining a life as one. I try to find what’s interesting about that tension, or at least what’s interesting to me, and to engage in a way that doesn’t create a schism between what I believe and how I behave, which we all know is a schism that can really swallow a person up.

Do you have any dread that wells up around attention in general, like “Oh no, they all seem to like me now, this can only go downhill from here”?

Yes! It seems very silly to say I’m shy, considering my track record, but a lot of performers are actually introverts. As someone who spends more time behind the camera now than I do in front, I see this a lot — that performing is actually a way to escape an overwhelming sense of introversion, to take a vacation from self. Writing is very similar, a way to connect while also being, essentially, alone. So, even if I had not experienced the shifting tides of public opinion, the experience of sustained attention, no matter how warm, always comes with a bit of a hangover.

And of course I am also much more aware at forty, both because of what I’ve witnessed and what I’ve felt — even what I’ve felt as a “fan” — of how fickle a mistress good buzz is. The thing about getting older is you can wear it all much more lightly. You don’t have to live or die by whether your shares are up or down, and there is an understanding that both experiences are equally fleeting. It’s possible, with some practice, to be very grateful for a positive connection with an audience or reader, while also knowing it’s not the defining metric of one’s life.

So true. Unfortunately, I think I wear some things more lightly for a while and then surprise myself with my bratty attitude all over again! Which is related to my next question: As someone who probably has had regrets about sharing vulnerably and at times guilelessly with complete strangers, how do you figure out how vulnerable you want to be and how much you want to share from day to day? Have you landed on a philosophy of vulnerability and honesty and sharing that feels right and comfortable?

I ask because a few weeks ago I answered a letter about this, and my perspective was: EVERYTHING IS ALWAYS FUCKING CHANGING, SO FORGET DECIDING ONCE AND FOREVER ABOUT ANYTHING! You can say “Share everything! Be honest!” one year and then feel like living in a cave underneath the sea the next year.

On the other hand, I repeatedly discover that as a writer and as a person, the more vulnerable I can be, the more honest I can be, the happier I am. And nothing I make is fully alive and dynamic if I’m not a tiny bit uncomfortable, underneath it all, with how much I’m sharing. The discomfort contains a kind of energy and magic that attracts more energy and more magic. Wow, this is not actually a question!

I agree with absolutely everything you just stated!

The things I’m embarrassed about aren’t really in my art, because I do believe art is a document of who we are at the specific moment we make it, and it’s a lovely thing to have a record of all of that change. It’s the same reason I haven’t had any of my tattoos removed, because the girl who wanted an Eloise at the Plaza tramp stamp is just as real as the young woman who got a hairless cat’s head tattooed on her left shoulder and they are both still in conversation with the slightly-too-old-to-have-done-it chick who tattooed a rosary with pills on her foot.

I am much more embarrassed by the record left by social media, which captures moments where I thought I had it all figured out and really didn’t, or when I glibly portended my own doom. And I think it should literally be illegal to Instagram any lover unless you’ve been partnered for more than five years OR you’re modeling some sort of radical transience!

You have many talents and opportunities and seem to be surrounded by great people who love you. Sometimes that embarrassment of riches must feel like a form of pressure and cause a little guilt over how best to spend your time. How do you decide where to place your focus, and how to prioritize competing projects/ places/ people?

One thing that my periods of more severe ill health have taught me — and this sounds like a bad meme affirmation, but it’s true — is to deeply appreciate periods of stability and abundance. I had a few moments where, when faced with a medical crisis that would not seem to resolve, I looked back at how little attention I had paid to how good my life was, how deeply I had focused on my own shortcomings or aesthetic failures or any number of woes based in a sense of lack, and I thought “If I’m ever lucky enough to get out of here, I will be thankful for everything I was too myopic to be thankful for.” Of course, there are some days where that takes more work than others, but it’s become a pretty natural practice: to feel lucky for the basics, and dazzled by any extras.

That being said, I do still have to work hard at being decisive about how, where, and with whom I spend my time. Despite my knowledge that our days on this planet are, in fact, limited (and my energy is also limited, even when I’m stable, just by virtue of my health picture) I still find it very hard to say no to an opportunity or an experience if it’s offered. Sometimes it’s because it seems right on paper. Sometimes it’s because I think I should be the kind of person who wants to (or can) do it, and the dutiful little soldier in me is activated. Sometimes it’s because I get back into a cycle of guilty “supposed to’s” and sometimes it’s because I am a curious little fucker who wants to gobble up experiences like all the sides at a Vegas buffet.

My body’s sensitivity can be frustrating, but it’s also an excellent thermometer. Because if a situation or project or relationship is not right for me, and I’m burying that in my subconscious and going in circles making internal justifications, my body does not let me off the hook. It will always come to the surface somehow, and often a strong physical response is my first clue. So I’m really trying to do the work of being honest with myself before I have to, say, break out in hives or go down with a dazzling migraine. That’s a strategy we develop early, our mind-body trying to protect us in ingenious and maddening ways, and it takes a long time to unlearn.

What I value most in projects is: learning, being amused, and collaborators with whom I have a mutual respect and understanding. What I value most in people is openness, loyalty, the ability to change and let others do the same, and a sense of the absurd. And what I value most in places is being cozy and delighted. We can’t have all of that all of the time, but I try to assess based on my values and not the common value the world places on a job, relationship, or experience.

And of course, sometimes something or someone unexpected just lights you up and you have to say fuck it and dive in.

I would characterize a lot of my struggles over the course of my life as an uncanny and difficult-to-describe battle against self-hatred and shame. I recognize hints of that in both of your books, and I wonder if you could describe to Ask Polly readers the shape that shame took when you were younger and how you got a handle on it over time. How often do you feel a bad sensation these days and say “Oh that’s shame, let’s toss that shit so we can see things more clearly!”?

Love your use of the word uncanny here! Defined as “strangely mysterious, eerie, beyond what is normal or expected.” That’s such a great way to describe shame, an emotion that, for many of us, feels a bit like a ghost twin we were born back to back with but cannot see. It’s a fact in my life, in so many lives, and yet it’s invisible, amorphous. And the deeper we dig to look for its roots, the deeper they seem to grow. My father used to say “Shame is such a waste of time!” as if the feeling could be tossed into the washing machine like a dirty sock. But an understanding that shame is not serving us and an ability to dismiss it are two very, very different things, and, unlike trauma or anger or heartbreak, I have not found that talking about the feeling has really gotten me any closer to freedom.

I remember the feeling of doing something “bad” as a kid and walking around with a mounting dread, until it became absolutely untenable and I’d blurt whatever had happened or whatever “bad thought” I’d had to my mother. And nine times out of ten, her look of concern would break into suppressed laughter, as she tried to take me seriously and explained that I had not, in fact, committed a mortal sin. That’s why I know shame is often deeper than our circumstances: because my parents never, ever made me feel that I had anything to be ashamed of, and yet, from the moment I was conscious, there it was.

I do, however, find that the great antidote to shame is honesty. Because hiding is one thing I can say for certain begets more shame. It’s one of the reasons I have gotten so much from your columns. Your answers lay bare your own complex and knotty emotions, which is of great comfort to your readers and to the person seeking advice, but it also seems that the very act of asking the question, of writing in to Polly, is a sort of shame release valve. What a beautiful thing!

Oh man, that’s so nice to hear. And it’s true, honesty does heal shame like nothing else can. But it’s counterintuitive and it takes a lot of courage to keep showing up for it.

Do you know what your next book might be? Anything else that you’re currently working on? Any skills or hobbies that you want to pick up along the way?

I have been kicking around a novel — an epic romance for people who find romance gross! I feel it following me around and nibbling at the edges of my attention. And, like the early days of an intriguing flirtation, that’s always an exciting space to be in.

We all have an area of our life that tends to command the most focus, and if I don’t keep it in check that’s work for me. Ever since I was a little kid, I was obsessed with having an occupation. I didn’t just go to musical theater class, but read 1000 unauthorized Barbra Streisand bios at the same time. I took a sewing course and then spent nights and weekends cutting pictures out of old issues of Vogue. And when we got our first desktop computer, I sat down at it as if I were in the Times newsroom on deadline. Maybe that came from growing up with my parents working at home, and seeing the way their social and professional lives were intertwined. When they weren’t making art, we were going to galleries and museums and studios. Supposedly, as a toddler, I interrupted a dinner party they were having to shout “Art! art! art! All you talk about is art!”

This is all to say, I may have come by it naturally but I have to remind myself that there’s a big wide world out there, beyond either my bed-office or a movie set. I recently made a list of 40 things I want to do after 40, and it was such a cool exercise. It was honestly pretty hard for me to even come up with twenty things that were not professional goals, and it was a chance to ask myself “What gives me pleasure, what inspires me, what do I think is important and how do I define myself outside of my professional aspirations?” The answer cannot just be bidding on vintage clothes online and kissing the cheeks of fat animals, although it’s largely that.

What do you love about being where you are now — the age you are, the perspective you have, the milestones you’ve experienced? What feels challenging or emotionally perilous about where you are?

I turned forty a few weeks ago, and cannot seem to stop announcing it to people. There’s something about the number, especially as a woman, that is just so cool, chic even. It signals experience, self-knowledge, and having survived. Usually a birthday feels like an arbitrary celebration, like I’m getting gifts and cake for the simple fact of my parents having procreated — if anything, we should be giving my mother gifts for the c-section and postpartum depression she white knuckled through. But this one actually feels like an accomplishment! Four decades of bobbing and weaving, and somehow forty feels like standing with both feet firmly planted. I’m very proud to be here, and I love talking to other women about what being forty represents to them.

I also have enough experience to know that life just keeps on life-ing, as the kids say, and that stability is a pretty illusory thing. When you’re young, you just don’t know enough to understand how much is coming for you. At forty, it’s impossible to deny that life can be terribly unfair and that change is the only constant. It’s impossible to be blithe about how brutal the world is, or to look the other way. There are days — if I haven’t slept properly, if I’m having a health flare up, if the news of the world has been especially dark and daunting, often all three — where the sheer endlessness of it all feels very hard to face. And you can’t really talk yourself out of it, only move through it with some measure of sincerity and grace.

The only thing I miss about being young is the naiveté and obliviousness. But I had a pretty good run with both of those. I was lucky to get any time with them at all!

Oh, and not having to wear a bra. Older women told me that it wouldn’t last forever, and I didn’t believe them. If I ever get too big for my britches, I need only remind myself of being measured for my first real bra at thirty nine and I’m put right back in my place.

What kind of wisdom or insight might you have to share with younger people who are besieged by longing and creative impulses and a driving desire to be loved for exactly who they are?

One of the hallmarks of being young, at least for me, is an enormous amount of desire without a vessel to pour it into. I was sloshing desire all over the place, and often in the wrong directions. I was lucky — and so much of it really is luck — to find my means of creative expression fairly early and to get an actual shot at doing it. But all the rest — friendships, romantic love, finding some semblance of self-respect — was messy and painful and endless.

If I could go back and tell that person one thing — and I’m not sure she would have listened, since she thought that having read Joan Didion’s essay on self-respect and enjoying Joni Mitchell’s less popular albums and carrying around a dog eared copy of Nikki Giovanni’s Love Poems meant that she had it all figured out — it would be to have some patience. The desire to be loved for exactly who she was made her twist herself into shapes that didn’t resemble her at all. The need to be understood made her say things that she didn’t mean. She wanted it all and she wanted it right then, and it often meant pretending that she had found it already.

Everything is a journey. We arrive at the destination on our itinerary, only to learn that there may be a better view ten miles ahead. Getting comfortable with being in transition, in progress and unfinished is the work of a lifetime, but it’s never bad to get a head start.

Getting comfortable with being unfinished is the work of a lifetime! Write it down and tape it to your foreheads, kissable animal buddies! Lena Dunham has a new newsletter here and you can buy her memoir Famesick here. I also recommend her Netflix limited series “Too Much.” And if you haven’t watched “Girls,” my god, get on that!

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Might I gently recommend the audiobook of Foreverland, which I read to you personally? And as always, one-year paid subscriptions to Ask Polly are available for those who are struggling financially. Send your requests and advice letters to askpolly@protonmail.com.

There, Motion Has Not Yet Ceased (1945), Yves Tanguy

Being a thoughtful, sensitive human in a callous, chaotic world isn’t easy. Even if you grew up in pastoral wonderland and were raised by nurturing, attentive bunny rabbits, the hyper-competitive capitalist dystopia outside your front door is bound to erode your inner peace sooner or later. And one of the most challenging and insecurity-inducing dimensions of entering the so-called real world is learning to read social cues.

Social cues are surprisingly difficult for every single one of us. For some of us, social cues are absolutely illegible. We grew up on another planet and we have no idea what the fuck is going on with other people. For others, social cues are far too legible. We can tell from the slightest twinge at the corner of someone’s mouth that they dislike us on sight. Our childhoods with difficult or narcissistic or controlling or abusive parents rendered us hyper-aware of the moods and attitudes of others. We had to carefully read social cues and calibrate our own behaviors and demeanors in order to survive.

If you were traumatized by an intimidating, intense, or manipulative parent or sibling or friend or lover at some point in your life, your nervous system may have adaptively transformed into a delicate seismograph of other people’s thoughts and feelings. Social cues might make you so anxious and over-accommodating that you eventually need to block them out in order to just relax and live your life. But by powering down your seismograph in order to block out incoming data, you may eventually damage your ability to connect with others.

Here’s what’s crazy: Many of us work hard to shut out social cues without even noticing that’s what we’re doing. And when we live that way for long enough, we wake up one day and think:

SOMETHING IS WRONG HERE. I’m not doing this right anymore. I am out of sync with the people around me. Something isn’t working.

I’m probably an extreme case. As the youngest girl in a brutal family system, I was hyper-attuned to my parents’ needs and their ever-shifting moods, and I took it as my personal duty to entertain and charm everyone in my family in order to defuse the explosive atmosphere. When I forged out on my own, I could make people laugh but I didn’t always understand how conversations among adults typically unfold. I was hypersensitive and anxious but rendered myself cavalier and avoidant in order to proceed with bluster. I made and lost friends easily. I drank too much. I told persuasive stories for years about how I was always right and other people were always wrong.

You require a lot of defensive mechanisms as a soft little bunny rabbit raised by wolves. You tend to grow into a quivering, dramatic cartoon bunny with a vest full of hand grenades strapped to your chest. As a young adult, you get hurt and feel angry and cause trouble everywhere you go. You’re more powerful than you understand and this does damage to others without you knowing it. You’re more sensitive than you understand so life hurts you deeply. And even when you work hard using your usual bag of tricks, sometimes you just can’t get the balance right. It feels like you’re constantly fucking up — which makes you self-involved, because, of course! You’re just trying to fix this mess, but you’re making more messes instead!

IT IS NOT EASY. Even if you’re just a regular, healthy human, there are so many social cues in this fucked up world that you might not want to be aware of. The vicious and unkind prejudices many people hold, the stupid attitudes and aggressive behaviors they indulge, make it tempting for many of us to turn down the volume on social feedback as low as it will go.

***

Now let’s take a deep breath and show some respect for our wide and diverse range of experiences. Many of us are confused by others. Many of us are traumatized. Many of us have been trying and failing to get this shit right for decades now. Many of us are bogged down by so many protective, defensive stories — forged from truly terrible experiences! — that we can’t imagine going out into the world again looking for connection. We can’t picture finding NEW companions and friends and lovers and soulmates and buddies. We just can’t fathom intimacy or closeness without misunderstandings and pain.

From this bewildering mire, I want to offer this gentle suggestion:

Attuning yourself to social cues, particularly when you’ve worked hard to block them out or discount them for years, can be extremely empowering. Because, even though you might believe that most people just HATE YOUR PERSONALITY (you have proof!), the truth might be much simpler than that. A lot of people might love you but dislike the way you move through social situations. Many people might dearly want to signal to you to just TONE IT DOWN A TINY BIT or LISTEN MORE CLOSELY or BE MORE RECIPROCAL but they don’t feel they can because your defenses are always up. You make it clear that you don’t want to know.

You might not know this precisely because you really don’t want to know this! Your shame is too big to try this idea on for size!

But you stand to gain a lot from opening your mind to the possibility that you aren’t unlovable or annoying — you’ve merely been ignoring social cues for too long without realizing it. You can change that. The key is to pay more attention to social dynamics without OVERTHINKING and OVERANALYZING and INTERNALIZING what you observe. The key is to simply say to yourself, “This might not be to my liking, but I’m going to take it into account so that I can better honor my unique spirit and my whimsical soul, even under duress.”

Here’s an example from my own recent experience:

I discovered a few years ago that I had a weird habit of shutting out feedback when I socialized in big groups. I will admit that this behavior was aided by some light recreational pouring of hard alcohol down my throat. I was not the heaviest drinker at the time, but the buzz had a hand in how I steered my ship. And the sad truth was that I was steering my ship onto the jagged rocks REGULARLY.

I was in a defensive crouch and I didn’t even know it. I was broadcasting the way I used to when I was very young. Suddenly, my job was to charm the whole room, and my attitude was that if someone couldn’t be charmed, there was something dull or overly polite about them.

Now, this sounds extreme, and I think my friends would protest and say, “WHATEVER, YOU ARE LOVABLE AND NORMAL, YOUR VIEW IS WARPED.” But my friends like pushy weirdos like me. I mean, look, that’s important, too! The goal is not to calibrate the FUN and BOLDNESS out of your whole damn personality!

The point is, for a while there I was misaligned with my values. I didn’t want to know if people liked me or not. I was rendered anxious by social feedback. I grew jittery in the company of other people without really realizing it. So my goal at that time (SUBCONSCIOUSLY!) was to block out social norms completely.

I didn’t follow the flow of conversation. I talked too much. I interrupted a little too much. I also pushed my own agenda conversationally. I felt like it was my job to make every conversation MORE INTENSE and MORE INTERESTING. This is not often something that works. And it can feel very obnoxious when you’re just trying to fucking connect with other people, and one person is acting like some kind of CONDUCTOR or HERDING DOG. (I am such a herding dog!)

When I first realized that I behaved this way, I was knocked over by a giant wave of shame. I felt defensive and upset. I was anxious and sad.

Then I started to observe myself, while reassuring myself that it was okay, I should learn and grow from these observations instead of getting depressed about them. I started to slow my roll and listen much more. I started to see how careful other skilled socializers were at smoothly asking questions and staying present to the energy in the room. It wasn’t a performance, either — they were doing their best to support the group! I started to differentiate between anxious broadcasters and patient, attentive, charismatic presences.

Patiently observing changed everything, and the benefits are too countless to list: My social anxiety decreased and then pretty much disappeared. I improved my existing friendships and cultivated new ones without fear. I became more patient and attuned to others. I enjoyed moving through public spaces much, much more.

But beyond than that, I started to understand the world around me much better. Instead of living inside very old, deeply buried stories about how people would never understand or accept me (which were ruling my life more than I realized), I was living in the present, where I am actually pretty easy to understand and accept. I suddenly found it so much easier to understand and accept others, too. I could still recognize incompatibilities and areas of conflict but these things didn’t frustrate me as much because I didn’t feel as DEEPLY REJECTED by difference itself. I didn’t take the world as personally. I didn’t navigate through a jittery haze. I allowed the truth to reach me, even when it hurt a little.

When you’ve built up a willful or subconscious resistance to social cues (or you just have trouble reading them), it’s easy for socializing to feel nerve-wracking and shame-inducing. It’s natural to become allergic to stepping into environments that are bewildering and exhausting. It’s normal to not want to notice what’s happening around you socially when your nervous system is an oversensitive ALARM SYSTEM that tells you your job is to FIX something, CHANGE something, PLEASE people more, KEEP them interested. After a lifetime of misreading or blocking out social cues, you might feel like paying any attention at all is destined to make you feel worse.

So there’s a lot of fear in the mix. The most important first step, particularly for a hypersensitive people pleaser, is to notice that you can UNDERPERFORM, DO LESS, SAY LESS, FIX NOTHING, SURRENDER, RECEDE, GO LIMP, and it’s perfectly fine. No one minds.

Those of us who do way too much, say way too much, and take personal responsibility for other people’s fun are almost always a million times more relaxed when we resolve to do much less. Sometimes on the way to a party, I’ll say to my husband (who has a habit of flipping into Storytelling Party Robot mode after one glass of wine), “When in doubt, do less.” In other words, if you’re feeling jittery or you have a buzz or the mood in the room seems uncertain? If your shame just kicked in or you’re trying a little too hard or you’re hyperaware of someone’s bad attitude about you? It’s time to relax and observe. Watch what everyone else is doing, how they handle the turns in the conversation. Calm down and get quiet. Breathe and learn something new.

Naturally, there are downsides to attuning yourself to the room and to any particular person’s social cues. You notice when people interrupt you, or when they aren’t super interested in what you have to say. You can see the differences between you and others more clearly than you did back when you chose booze over clarity, broadcasting over conversing. You notice when someone else is the life of the party. You recognize when you are truly just another body in the room. As a grown adult, it is easy to feel shame over what you observe, and easy to wonder why it took so goddamn long for you to land here.

But in time, you accept this and forgive yourself. You realize that everyone has their challenges and obstacles. Slowly, your social role shifts and your enjoyment increases. You can ride in the backseat and enjoy the view more. You don’t have to work as hard, and you can take much more delight in the weirdness and eccentricities of others. More than anything else, when you don’t take PERSONAL responsibility for keeping other people happy, you take everything less PERSONALLY.

BECAUSE YOU KNOW WHERE YOU ARE! YOU ARE NOT CONFUSED! That feels good, even when you’re not that special or sparkly. It feels good to be just another body in the room, actually.

That’s the strange thing about attuning yourself to social cues: You’d think it would make you more reactive and jittery, but it’s actually relaxing in the long run. You’re living in reality, attuned to the present moment without fear. You’re one fish in a small pond full of fish and you really can swim along without getting eaten alive. You can notice without overreacting or overthinking. You can observe without trying to change what’s going on. You can watch and listen and go with the flow without fear.

Attuning yourself to social cues is a confidence booster and a form of soothing meditation wrapped into one. It’s a way of learning to relax and savor being with other people instead of allowing your overactive, sensitive, bossy brain and jumpy, jittery nervous system trick you into thinking that THERE IS ALWAYS SOMETHING WRONG AND IT’S UP TO YOU TO FIX IT. When you pay close attention to the flow of conversation between others and you support that flow instead of disrupting it, you better understand your place in each social picture. When you talk, you don’t feel unwelcome. When you’re quiet, you don’t feel irrelevant. You are an important part of the big picture.

And quite honestly, people end up liking you more.

I think a lot of us struggle with the question of WHY other people don’t seem to like us as much as we like ourselves! And a lot of times, people just don’t feel safe or comfortable around a person who’s made it a lifelong habit of doing things their own way at any cost. Even though we all celebrate this way of life around here — embracing exactly what makes you unique and weird and stubbornly distinct from others! — it’s much easier to recognize HOW MANY people love you for who you are when you’re flexible and open and amenable to feedback.

***

No one is saying it’s easy or simple or it works every time. Taking in feedback is so hard for people with trauma, who’ve withstood neglect, abuse, and repeated rejections. It’s so hard not to be deathly afraid that the slightest whiff of criticism will lead to isolation and helplessness, the way it always did in the past. But I’ve witnessed over and over how being a little brave and letting in new information can transform your whole life.

It’s very hard to admit that the way you move in the world might be fucking with other people at levels you don’t recognize. What could make a sensitive, kind person feel more ashamed than that? But that’s exactly why we avoid feedback. We can’t stand to learn that we might be screwing something up without knowing it. We don’t want to know!

To grow in this life, you have to know things you don’t want to know.

You have to learn things you don’t want to learn.

You have to open your eyes to your greatest fears and your deepest wells of sadness. This is where maturity comes from! You blossom into a full, balanced, happy adult when you dare to reckon with yourself as an organism among other organisms, and you dare to attune yourself to how you feel inside and how the world feels around you.

It feels surprisingly great to be a small fish in a school of fish. It feels great to share what you have without sharing too much. It’s a superpower to know where the gas and the brakes are, socially! It’s a superpower to take off your vest full of grenades and hop out into the world as the soft, loving bunny rabbit you are!

Some days, it’s very scary. But many days, the world becomes a pastoral wonderland, bursting with rainbows and hearts and sparkly unicorns. It’s fucked up, frankly, how good life gets when you don’t mind learning brand new, terrible things about your bad personality and your bad habits!

We are all fucked up freaks to the core, once you strip away our normie disguises, and we all screw up absolutely everything with clock-like regularity. The only option is to open our eyes and learn. We can celebrate our original, bizarre selves and ALSO learn. We are that good.

Send this column to everyone you know immediately, and let’s all grow the fuck up and get out of our overactive heads so we can spread more love and compassion through the world. I know it’s hard. Keep the faith, motherfuckers! Life gets better when you dare to believe in your ability to grow and feel joy even when everything is falling apart. Ask Polly is allllll about joy in the face of outrageous pain and I am here for you and you and you and you and every goddamn last one of you. xoxox

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Le lourd palais (1935), Yves Tanguy

Dear Polly,

I am starving. I am fucking famished. My stomach is growling because I have so much desire.

I am very fucking hungry, and life is giving me crumbs.

I am not hungry just to be hungry, I am hungry because I have been fucking working. I’ve gone above and beyond for my master’s program, taking part in prestigious …

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The Fortune (1901), Pablo Picasso

Hi Polly,

I’m having a hard time. I’ve mostly been single for my adult life but have endured a handful of short, extremely powerful yet tumultuous, 6-month long relationships scattered here and there. Most recently, I dated a very close friend who turned out to be extremely avoidant and hurt me deeply. I am sure I have so…

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Le Prince carnaval (1966), Pablo Picasso

Dear Polly,

Longgg time reader, first time writer. I’ve drafted letters to you in my head for years, and even used you in a therapeutic exercise where we were tasked with writing to ourselves in the voice of a “wise & compassionate person in our lives.” In my darkest periods, Ask Polly has shined a light into the g…

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Drunk Woman Is Tired (1902), Pablo Picasso

I’ve spent my whole life expecting myself to feel optimistic, ambitious, serene, and grateful without offering my body what it needs to function correctly. Day after day, I ate haphazardly, slept badly, indulged in a beer here or a cocktail there, exercised too little (or way too much!), and still encountered my moods, fixations, insecurities, and sullen spells as moral failures. Week after week, I would trudge around feeling weary or dehydrated or undernourished or faintly hungover and then blame myself for not writing well enough, for not being up for anything, for not want to explore the world and try new things. Year after year, I would shy away from big commitments because it meant consistently sticking with work that I might find dispiriting or alienating or pointless when I was in the wrong mood.

Even when I was relishing my intense, sensitive, opinionated nature, even when I was trying to honor my feelings and respect my body, even when I was attuned to the glory of the universe of cells under my skin, I still refused to consistently and thoughtfully give my body the care and attention it required to feel good. I didn’t want to be that woman who said no to things, who ate a tiny slice of pie or none at all, who waved off a daytime glass of wine, who ordered leafy salads and fish and remarked on how hydrated she was, who noticed how well or how badly she slept and adjusted her schedule accordingly. And to be honest, I STILL DON’T WANT TO BE HER!

But I realize now that most of my emotional struggles have begun with physical neglect or at least passivity. It’s not enough to simply reassure yourself to feel everything, to let your sadness in, to make room for your fears and vulnerabilities so they can be addressed and validated. It’s not enough to notice that certain kinds of people and misunderstandings and rejections and societal norms can make you anxious and angry. It’s not even enough to drop your oldest stories about how you are and how other people are and try to just be present and enjoy what’s here instead.

Your mind IS your body. And when your body is undernourished and dehydrated and weak and overworked or underworked, your mind is also suffering. When your mind is blunt and slow and resistant and dragging, something if off. You need more fuel, more rest, more water, more compassion for how your microbiome thrives and when it stalls out.

Lately, I’m not spending as much of my time and energy analyzing what’s going wrong with me emotionally or attitudinally. My emotional goals are very simple lately: to stay present and listen to others without busting in and speaking as much. (I still fail at this regularly; blabbing too much is my big weakness, not surprisingly!) I can suddenly see how my complicated stories about what I require to feel close to other people sometimes backfire, preventing me from noticing the wide range of possibilities presented by the wide range of humans in the world.

But even more revolutionary than keeping my emotional goals simple is recognizing that, no matter how things play out around me, my optimism and gratitude are PHYSICAL. Eating what fuels my body and mind, treating sleep hours with respect, recognizing how I feel from day to day, giving myself adequate down time, letting myself exercise very hard (which I do love!) but also rest a lot (and relish the rest, and treat it as essential) — these are the primary drivers of my overall mood. Whatever stories I’ve told myself over the years — my writing isn’t going well, no one loves me enough, I’m doing it all wrong again — there is almost always something physical going on underneath it.

Over the past 14 years of writing Ask Polly, I’ve repeatedly advocated exercise as a means of feeling more hopeful, grateful, energetic, and expansive. I’ve promoted compassion and forgiveness towards the self, even (or especially!) when it looks lazy or selfish or absurd to other people. But through it all, I’ve often driven myself too hard while dismissing my body’s real needs as the realm of health freaks and softies. And I’ve sometimes, unknowingly perpetuated the notion that emotional struggles are a matter of FIGURING OUT THE CORRECT ANSWER.

And that’s got to be okay, because fuck, this IS an advice column after all!!!!

That said, I want to indulge in a BIG record scratch here. Because the people who are the most attracted to this column — the intense, sensitive, thoughtful, brainy people out there who sometimes FEEL THE STRONGEST EMOTIONS after reading 3k words about them! — are the exact ones who need to dial into their bodies the most. I see this over and over in your letters. People like us want to THINK OUR WAY FORWARD even when our engines are stalling. We want to kick the tires when we should be changing them. We want to announce what’s wrong instead of giving ourselves what we know will feed and nurture us — not just right now, but next week and next month and next year, too.

Intensely emotional, intelligent people (this includes you if you’re here, trust me on this, I’ve been doing this for a long time now, so I know!) have a terrible habit of believing that THEY SHOULD BE ABLE TO THRIVE NO MATTER WHAT. We are people who say to ourselves, day after day, no matter how hard we’re already working to feel good, “GODDAMN IT! GET WITH THE PROGRAM, ALREADY! STOP FUCKING AROUND AND FEEL MORE GRATEFUL, YOU SOGGY DRAG-ASS CHUMP! WELCOME THE MOTHERFUCKING JOY INTO YOUR LIFE ALREADY!”

We grow and we learn, of course. But even our INTEREST in improving ourselves sometimes reflects the fact that we’ve always been neurotic drill sergeants at heart, always at war with ourselves because at some level, we only know war. We’re used to being on the battlefield and we just can’t stop mapping out lines of attack, even when our C rations are in short supply and our jeeps are stuck in the mud and our canteens are empty.

When you eat shit too consistently — whether emotional shit or shitty food — you feel like shit. When you don’t move, you feel sullen. When you exercise way too much every day, you feel depleted. When you work too hard, you feel exhausted. When you don’t sleep enough or drink a little too often (no matter how little you drink!), you disrupt your mind and body. (I love a good drink, but it’s so important for me to at least notice the drag it places on my spirit after the fact.) These factors don’t just affect your mood, they often determine your mood. They can’t be seen as merely INFLUENCING your happiness, because your joy depends on and is shaped by thoughtful and careful you are in feeding and resting your body.

Ask anyone struggling with a chronic condition. When you’re physically taxed, you can’t expect yourself to be magically upbeat or ambitious or expansive. You have to work with where you are and do your best to address your body’s needs, every day.

YOU HAVE TO PAY ATTENTION TO YOUR BODY. For many of us, that’s the absolute hardest thing to do. We just don’t want to do it. We refuse! Refusing to notice our bodies is our way of life!

But that way of life is punitive. We think of it as indulgent and luxurious to do whatever we like, but it’s the opposite. When we ignore outcomes, we ignore our own hearts and minds. We treat our precious spirits like trash.

Moreover, we can’t keep blaming ourselves when we feel negative or sad or lazy simply because our bodies are starving or dehydrated or overfed or bogged down in toxins. We have to address the real problem without avoidance, shame, or anxiety about what it means to commit to living sensibly. We have to be realistic and pragmatic about what a big difference it makes to care for our bodies first and foremost.

I’ve been writing about emotional health and exercise for years. I’ve worked out consistently and had a therapist for a long time. But I still LOVE to ignore my body and my feelings. I am very good at both. What I realize now is that I have to pay MUCH better attention to how I feel physically if I want to feel good emotionally. I have to notice what works and what doesn’t.

When I do what works for my body — sleeping extra hours, working out, not drinking much, avoiding sugar and flour (I HATE THAT ONE!!!!), eating very healthily — it’s not that hard to feel optimistic or ambitious or grateful. It’s also easy to prioritize the things I love the most. It’s easy to make clear, thoughtful choices about how I want to live. Life looks pretty simple and not that confusing. I’m here to be close to the people I love. I’m here to support the physical and philosophical and emotional growth of everyone who reads this column. I want to keep doing a good job here, because I believe that we are all precious and brilliant and full of enormous potential.

To that end, I’m going to mention things that work for me physically more often. I might even offer good, healthy recipes here and there. I’m not trying to be a fucking foodie or chef or lifestyle motherfucker of any stripe. I have zero sponsors outside of you, my readers, and that won’t change because I hate that shit, personally. But I do want to share anything that works. On that note, here’s my favorite Ottolenghi recipe ever, which I make with ground turkey. (It seems high maintenance at first, but once you make it a few times it becomes a delicious, healthy staple.)

Supporting yourself and believing in your dreams requires SO MUCH EFFORT, motherfuckers. In fact, having dreams at all is such a motherfucker! You have to rework and realign and rethink and redesign your dreams all the fucking time, because the world keeps changing and YOU keep changing along with them. So it’s crucial to do everything you can to support your body, first and foremost.

So today, respect your physical needs first. Be soft and kind to yourself. Get some fresh air, move a little, and also rest and eat something fresh and delicious and green. Notice how well it works to just make sensual, attuned choices about how healthy food tastes and how taking a long break to read a good book can recharge your body and change your outlook. Notice how respecting your body makes you feel more alive and loving toward the people around you.

When you neglect your physical needs, you punish yourself. I think I’ve been subconsciously punishing myself — setting myself up to have to dig out of a deep hole, physically, over and over again — for years now. I deserve better. So do you.

We can feel luminous and alive, every day. We don’t always think it’s possible, but it is. You are a sparkling light in the world, underneath your pain and angst. Treat yourself like you’re precious, because you are.

Thanks for reading! I am so grateful to you for being here and supporting my work. I love writing this column and you make it possible for me to keep doing it. THANK YOU SINCERELY!!!!!

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Send your letters to askpolly@protonmail.com. Remember that we all fail and flail over and over out there. No matter how ridiculous and pathetic you feel, remember that you are never EVER alone. We have ALL been there, over and over, because life is a motherfucker sometimes. Be good to yourself and give yourself the self-compassion you require to feel okay. FORGIVE YOURSELF AND START OVER. Sending you love!!

Fernande’s Head (1906), Pablo Picasso

Dear Polly,

I know a lot of people are camera shy, but for me, it’s extreme. I’m middle-aged and have struggled with this my entire life. Seeing a photo of myself can send me spiraling into depression for days. Being asked to pose for a photo is deeply uncomfortable.

I’m okay with mirrors. I don’t love the way I look, …

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