Seated female nude (1910), Pablo Picasso

Dear Polly,

These days I’ve been really struggling with the question “Why am I so afraid of being seen?” Actually, I should say that I’ve been struggling with this question all my life.

I’m definitely no stranger to having an audience. I started singing and playing the piano when I was around four years old. Over th…

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Woman Leaving the Bath (1901), Pablo Picasso

Hi Polly.

Excuse my brevity, I could write extensively about how much your writing has helped me over the years.

You talk a lot about forgiving yourself. I understand this in theory, but I’m having a hard time putting it into practice. I was a star student, went to an Ivy League school, then got into a top graduate program at a corporation that should have set me up for life. No one was worried about me. I can’t quite put a finger on where things went wrong, but they did. A combination of mental health struggles, housing instability and relationship issues compounded and I started messing up at work. A lot. I forgot that even if you don’t enjoy your work or convince yourself that it’s acceptable to tap out, it isn’t. People rely on you, things have consequences, your reputation will be affected.

Now I am out the other side. Somewhat. I can see on the one hand that my struggles were real. I was suicidal, I convinced myself trying hard at a job that gave nothing back was for losers. But of course this was a vicious cycle. And a small voice tells me I wasn’t really struggling, that I am lazy and incompetent and I blame other people for my own laziness and incompetence.

I am very fearful about my future, and I also feel it was all my fault, and I deserve to be unhappy. Other people go through much worse than I did and they get up and go in everyday, or they take the advice of their therapist and they stop working.

I can’t really tell what is real. I don’t know if I am an awful, lazy person who deserves nothing but failure, or if I am someone who struggled and handled it badly and deserves a second-chance and forgiveness. It’s hard when some people who’ve worked with you and know you think you are great, and others hate your guts. I’m not sure that is normal? So I must be a bad person. And how do I live knowing some people think badly of me?

The current situation is this: I’ve bombed down the ladder through a lot of jobs some people would kill for. I think I burned out, but is that just another excuse for being a lazy, entitled bitch? I have friends, a good relationship with my parents and partner. So I’m not a total psycho. But I fear that the good view they have of me is fake, and I am awful. I want redemption and the chance at a new career, one I think I’d be good at. But will I ever shake the guilt of the last few years? Or the reputational damage that I’m not even sure is real or just in my head... or it’s real for some people, but does that matter in the grand scheme? And is it deserved? I have no sense of reality, but maybe that’s a way of avoiding responsibility for the fact that I fucked up. But did I? Or was I struggling in a difficult job at a hard time without much support? And so it goes. I want another chance but I’m not sure I deserve it. The guilt and — more selfishly — the fear that it’s too late for redemption is heavy.

I know you can’t tell me if I deserve to fail or not. Maybe you can just help me figure it out? My therapist and friends tell me it’s not my fault, but they would say that. I have been lazy, entitled, and difficult. But I was struggling. I’m not sure that excuses anything. It’s probably just my personality. So I will learn my lessons and repent. But how do I get my head straight and believe I deserve another chance when other people just... don’t act like this?

Thank you, Polly.

The Worst

Dear The Worst,

People struggle and fall apart and fail for all kinds of reasons that have nothing to do with how lovable or hard working or ethical or reasonable they are. We all mess up things that we think we want regularly, simply because we’re conflicted or confused or overwhelmed. When you’ve been navigating educational settings for most of your life and suddenly you’re working in an office and you don’t understand how it works and you feel overwhelmed and anxious and depressed but everyone around you just keeps getting their jobs done? That’s not easy at all.

And let’s get real. You were suicidal. Take that seriously. Laziness has nothing to do with feeling suicidal. When you express that sentiment, what you tell me is that you blame yourself for everything you feel. EVERYTHING. All feelings.

I used to do that. It’s no way to live. You have to learn to feel emotions without blaming yourself for them. It will take time to get there, but you’ll get there eventually. Be patient. Just know that this is the most important part of your work. You have to grant yourself the RIGHT to feel what you feel, first and foremost.

To be clear, it’s absolutely normal to veer off your chosen path and question everything. We don’t have enough conversations about how normal that is. It’s normal to wonder why you work where you work, or wonder why you’re married, or wonder why you chose the life you did. It’s absolutely common to feel conflicted. We all get confused and restless and bored and depressed. We all second-guess the path we’re on. It’s natural.

When you HATE YOURSELF for feeling conflicted, that causes big problems in your life. You avoid work. You avoid other people. You trick yourself into thinking that you can hide from reality. These are common reactions. The solution is not to beat yourself for all of this. The solution is to admit the truth: You just aren’t sure what you want right now and you aren’t sure how to get through this bad time.

THAT IS NORMAL. Be patient and accept that you just don’t know. Sit with uncertainty and try to tolerate it.

Beating yourself up for being lazy or entitled doesn’t serve any function. We are all lazy and entitled about different things. You can be living in a van down by the river and still be lazy about some stuff and entitled about other stuff. People get used to certain kinds of safety and reassurances and then, when those things shift or disappear, they freak out. This is true for everyone alive. We all feel unexpectedly vulnerable, or reticent, or stubbornly unable to change, or full of anger, at different times in our lives. We all veer off the road for reasons we can’t understand.

I have surprised myself with my capacity to work hard at times in life, and I’ve also surprised myself with my petty resentments and rigid resolutions not to move an inch out of my way. I have been expansive and open for long stretches and then retreated into long periods of wanting to hunker down and eat grilled cheese sandwiches and talk shit about everything that’s fucked about the world. I have become flinty and negative for long stretches. I have felt alienated and despondent and unmotivated for months at a time.

One of the hardest things about being a human is that you always, always, always hope that you’ll simply land in a place where things are just EASY. One day, it will all be extremely relaxing and fun. You’ll set up smooth, relaxing circumstances for yourself and then life will be fucking awesome.

That’s not how it is.

I woke up this morning and I felt overwhelmed. Last week was so good. I wrote a lot and I also got out of the house and did a bunch of fun stuff. But this morning, all I could think about were hassles and inconveniences and all of this pain-in-the-ass work I have to get done. Everything on my immediate schedule sounded like an enormous fucking drag.

If I wrote down the things that sounded like a drag, you would very likely laugh in my face and call me lazy and entitled. You’d say to me, “These things sound fun and interesting. What the fuck is wrong with you?”

But if you wrote down the things you hated at your job, I might have the same reaction. I might say, “This is an ideal job for someone your age. Your boss sounds cool. Your work sounds exciting and fascinating. What the hell is going on with you?”

Only one person needs to enjoy your work: YOU. Only one person needs to feel like your life makes sense. Other people’s reactions and opinions are irrelevant. There is no objective view of what is lazy and entitled, no matter how many idiots on the internet want to yell this at other people. It can be very fucking difficult to have a gigantic trust fund. If you ever meet a very depressed person and they turn out to have a trust fund? Case in point. There are a lot of very sad rich people out there. Believe it. It’s time for everyone to calm the fuck down about how happy someone with advantages “SHOULD” be. The truth is that it can be exceedingly difficult to find your place in life, to feel comfortable, to enjoy what you do, to make your life rich and meaningful, and to build deep connections to others.

And even once you manage these things, guess what? The world changes. You change. You want something different out of the blue. You feel shitty out of the blue. You can’t handle ANYTHING suddenly!

Everyone would love it if we could all just find the stuff we love the most, set up a life doing that, find the people we love, build a happy habitat, and stay comfortably ensconced there until the end of time. But the truth is much thornier than that. Most of us manage to get a little bit of what we want and we also struggle in other areas. We have great kids but our marriages are tough. We have the best boyfriend alive but our job sucks. We are suffering from a chronic condition but our careers are taking off.

We just need this one thing to be happy! And then… it doesn’t make us happy, either.

So I’m here to tell you that no, you don’t deserve to fail or to suffer. You don’t deserve to feel like a complete lazy, entitled piece of shit. You’re just a human being who’s doing her best. Even back when you were avoiding everything and freaking out, that was you doing your best to SURVIVE, motherfucker! You were doing battle with the scariest feelings on Earth! You couldn’t face where you were. You couldn’t face anything!

Feel some compassion for that. If you can’t feel compassion for yourself, that’s a very concrete thing you need to work on. I also used to feel ZERO compassion for myself, so I get it. You have to cultivate it. You have to break out of this mode of “OH GOD, LOOK AT EVERYTHING I FUCKED UP!” and you have to say, over and over again, “Jesus, that was HARD.” And try to really feel it.

If you want to be less avoidant when things go wrong, you have to learn to be (paradoxically!) very, very good to yourself in spite of your big mistakes. You can start by trying to tell a much more gracious and kind story about what you’ve been through lately.

You say you don’t know what reality is. That’s mostly a sign that you’re feeling extremely neurotic and self-blaming and you can’t accept anyone’s soothing words. You’re currently dealing with a very bad cognitive habit where you ignore your body and reject other people’s soothing words and tell yourself that you’re a failure over and over again. Your mercilessness towards yourself makes you more and more neurotic.

MANY MANY MANY PEOPLE DO THIS UNDER STRESS. The best, most important thing you can do right now is to break this habit and start to make your body feel better — more loved, more cared for, more soothed. In other words, you have to get vulnerable and soft and allow EVEN MORE ROOM TO BE MISUNDERSTOOD AS LAZY AND ENTITLED!!!

Smart, complicated, thoughtful, ambitious women find themselves in this neurotic, guilty, self-hating conundrum often, trust me. And the only way through it is NOT by punishing yourself more, by pushing your body past its limits, by yelling at yourself, “Snap out of it, you worthless, lazy piece of shit! Look at everything you have!!! Show some fucking gratitude!!!”

Nope. That’s not it. That’s what worked in college and high school, maybe. But there’s a point in your life when the strategy of ignoring your body and your feelings breaks down. That’s when you have to learn how to take care of yourself and love yourself, flaws and mistakes and guilt and self-hatred and all.

Right now I’m reading Lena Dunham’s memoir, Famesick. I strongly recommend it. In spite of seeming like this bold, brash, reckless celebrity, Dunham reveals that she’s actually a very sensitive, intelligent person whose shame and guilt and confusion and avoidance led her down some extremely harrowing paths. And the one thing that Dunham takes pains to describe to us is HOW HARD IT BECAME TO SEE REALITY CLEARLY.

That’s how it is when you blame yourself for everything. And even when everyone you love keeps saying, “You need to be good to yourself,” it’s so easy to say, “They’re just saying that because they love me” or “They’re forgiving me for being worthless because they don’t want me to fall apart even more.”

I’m telling you, smart, sensitive women who are ruled by shame and self-hatred have it very, very bad. We struggle not to tell ourselves that we are the ones fucking everything up IN EVERY SITUATION. We soak up all the ambient shame in every room. And there’s ALWAYS someone out there who will tell an intelligent, capable, talented woman who knows her own mind and stands up for herself that there’s something ABSOLUTELY SICK AND WRONG about her.

Maybe you don’t like Dunham. Look, there are plenty of random writers and stars and public figures I dislike, for good reasons and also for very bad ones. That’s natural. These things are subjective. We trust people and love them or we don’t. I’ve always loved Lena Dunham. I love her shows, I love her confessional compulsions, I love her books, and I feel sure that I would love her as a human being, too. I feel protective of her. And I’m very tired of how our culture reacts to interesting, open, unique women with lots of talent.

As a result, I don’t want to read any reviews of her memoir. I don’t want to read reactions to the reactions to the reactions to the reviews. Leave me out of the so-called conversation, because I don’t want to know. I’m reading her book and loving it and I feel proud of her for having the courage to write it. I think her book is a real gift to smart, self-hating women who ignore their feelings and their bodies and the words of people who truly love them in favor of random people who tell them that they’re complete pieces of shit.

Everyone on the planet can hate her and it won’t change my mind. I’m tired of reading comments about books by people who haven’t read the books in question. I’m tired of book reviews that boil down to a moral verdict about the author’s character instead of an analysis of what’s on the page. I’m tired of podcast interviews where an author is asked by someone who hasn’t read their book to address the opinions of a bunch of other people who haven’t read their book. Can we all stop being loud, opinionated assholes and just do a little reading for a change? If we don’t want to read a thing, can we maybe shut the fuck up about it instead of telling as many people as possible why we’ll never fucking read it no matter what?

I just want to enjoy the book she wrote, because it’s great.

Similarly, I want you to let go of what random people at that job thought of you. I want you to understand that some people out there will always hate you for reasons beyond your control. It really pays to accept that as much as you can. It is crucial that you let go of the idea that your job is to keep everyone satisfied, or that there’s some objective reality where you’re determined to be GOOD or BAD.

You are doing fine. Forgive yourself now and tomorrow and the next day. Wake up and forgive yourself over and over again. The more you forgive yourself, the more you’ll offer love and support to others that they desperately need.

It’s okay to be misunderstood. It doesn’t fucking matter in the long run. Keep believing in your big heart above everything else, and let people remain confused about who you are.

Believing in your big heart means that you can feel it when the people you love say

DO NOT LISTEN TO THEM. LISTEN TO ME. I LOVE YOU. YOU DESERVE HAPPINESS.

That’s my message for you AND for Lena Dunham, too. You deserve pure joy. You deserve to fuck up and then forgive yourself for it. You deserve to make even more mistakes without feeling shame over it. You deserve to show your brilliant spirit to the world.

Listen to me closely: This world still needs sensitive, smart women to feel free enough to express themselves even when it’s embarrassing, even when it’s weird, even when you fucked up and you’re sorry and you don’t know what to do next. This world needs you to take care of your body and your mind so you can share yourself with others without fear. This world needs your honesty and your vulnerability.

It doesn’t matter who likes you and who doesn’t. It doesn’t matter. Be exactly who you already are.

I was born this way: full of doubt, full of confusion, trying to put it all into words, trying to find a friend in a sea of judgmental strangers, trying to build something more tender and strange and hopeful than what’s already here. When I’m trying to build, when I’m trying to share, I can’t hide my ugliness or my mistakes. Everything shows. When I’m reaching out for other people who feel the way I feel, I can’t pretend to be above it all, or pretend that I never get hurt, or pretend that I don’t feel anger or fear, or pretend that I’m better than I really am.

So I have to let go of my shame. It’s a choice. It’s simple. I have a job to do that requires that I set my self-hating impulses and my guilt and my worry about other people’s opinions aside and I give ALL OF MYSELF anyway. It’s grueling to give so much, and it’s also bliss. It’s humiliating at some level, but it’s MY JOB.

In order to do MY JOB, I have to love myself as I am. I have to forgive myself for being this way. Other people don’t act like this, sure. But this is who I am.

How do you do that? you want to know.

Watch other people do it. Instead of feeling embarrassed for them, stand up for them. Say out loud: “I like that. I don’t care who doesn’t like it. That’s brave to me. I want to be more like her.”

Polly

Thanks for reading Ask Polly! I also wrote this post this week, which will be free for a few more days. It fucking sucks to be brave these days! Do it anyway. Someone out there needs to hear what you have to say. Someone needs to know that they’re not alone.

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Pique 1 (1959), Pablo Picasso

Dear Polly,

I feel a little pathetic even asking this question but I feel like if anyone in the universe is capable of holding this ache of mine tenderly while also holding me to account, it’s you.

I met Joe 14 years ago, when I was 21. I went on dates compulsively, almost every night. I had grown up feeling awkward and ugly then around the time I turned 21, I started feeling more confident in how I looked, I put effort into how I dressed and men noticeably reacted to me differently. It was like magic and I had a lot of fun and enjoyed the attention but it was also a way to avoid being alone with myself when the rest of my life was such a mess, when I felt so anxious and unsettled. I was failing most of my classes in undergrad due to a lot of perfectionism and undiagnosed ADHD. My teachers always told me I was smart but when it came time to actually finish and submit an essay, I kept stalling and procrastinating and often didn’t submit anything rather than submit something that didn’t live up to the imagined standards in my head. I was such a mess that I genuinely didn’t know if I would ever be able to hold a full-time job or graduate or do anything substantial with my life.

I had a new therapist around the time I met Joe. She gave me this helpful suggestion to try only saying yes to a date if I was actually attracted to the person asking (it truly blew my mind when she suggested this). I felt like I had to say yes to everyone then, like a dog who happened upon a huge bag of sugar unsupervised. Shortly after that, I met Joe. He was 24 at the time. He was so handsome, so tall, so quiet, so calm, so self-assured and funny and smart and we loved the same books and music and movies and shared the same values and both worked in the same idealistic field. We seemed aligned in values and aesthetic sensibility and love of emotional depth. We said “I love you” within a week of meeting each other. I broke off all my other situationships right away, convinced that I had met my soulmate. How could it get better than this? We talked about having kids. He said he had never felt like this about anyone else before. Before him, I had never wanted to have kids and yet with him, I was so sure that I wanted to have his baby, to have more of our love in the world.

Within a month, he started pulling away. He said he would always need alone time and space. I couldn’t handle it. I couldn’t understand why he didn’t want to spend every spare minute with me like I wanted to with him. He felt pressured by me and pulled away even more. I felt scared of him pulling away and tried to hold on even tighter, which made him want to pull away more. The vicious cycle continued until he broke it off two months later, saying that if anything were to come of us as a couple, he’d like it to come from a friendship first. He said we were both blinded in the beginning and saw things in each other that did not exist. I was devastated. I didn’t understand why he couldn’t see that we were meant to be.

We didn’t speak for three months then I reached out again and we tried dating again. The same problems came back almost right away. I thought we were right on track then he’d stop responding to my texts for days or cancel plans at the last minute. This only made me more anxious and I would text even more. He eventually snapped at me and broke things off again, frustrated that “we were back at the phone thing again” and that I was expecting way more than he could give. It feels like such a cliché to write all this out to you but through all this, I still thought he was my one true love.

We got back together one more time a few months later. We went for coffee and then went for a walk. He called himself a coward and told me that he’s not a good partner for me and that he can’t give me what I need. I cried because I understood and I agreed yet I still couldn’t let go. We decided to date again. Another few months pass by and I make plans to move to another city because I wanted a fresh start. I was still hoping he’d beg me to stay but instead, he said he was happy for me and he said a lot of people will be lucky to have me in their lives.

Except for the very beginning, he was always consistent in saying that he didn’t want to be more available, he didn’t want to be instantly connected, he didn’t want to spend a lot of time with me, he wanted to be able to cancel plans as he saw fit. He said he was too selfish to compromise at that point in his life. I kept saying okay to the crumbs, as long as it kept him around. I thought it was worth it because we were meant to end up together if only I could be patient enough, understanding enough, and less needy. If I’m being honest, I also wanted him to choose me so I could keep using him as the direction in my life. I would just follow him wherever he went and organize around him when I didn’t know what I wanted or who I was. He mentioned that he didn’t want anyone’s happiness to depend on him and he didn’t want attachment in relationships.

He broke up with me before I moved to the new city, saying that he’s not a good partner for me and he didn’t want to be so toxic for me anymore.

Now it’s 13 years later and Joe’s been on my mind a lot lately. I’m going through some huge shifts in my life right now. I’m now 35. I’m quitting my job soon. I’ve worked for 10 years in a high-prestige and legible field that others admire but that slowly made me feel dead inside, completely out of sync with my moral values. I’m married to my husband who I’ve been with for 12 years, who has always made me feel loved and accepted for who I am right from the beginning, someone who has gone to therapy himself to work on his emotional issues, someone who has endless patience to work things out with me when we disagree or fight, someone who takes care of me when I’m sick, someone who makes me laugh and understands my exact humor, someone who I feel safe and calm with. We are talking about starting a family and yet I’m not sure if I want to. I can’t tell if I don’t want to have kids in general or if I don’t want to have kids with my husband. I love him but I sometimes wonder if he really understands me and all my emotions.

I can’t tell if I’m just grieving the passage of time, how I’ll never be 21 again, or if I really miss Joe himself. Even though I was such a mess then, I felt all my feelings and tried to embrace being a radish (I was an avid Ask Polly reader even then). I did a lot of things to try to be impressive to Joe but I also gained a lot of confidence through those things. I learned how to ride a bike safely on the streets (because Joe was into biking). I learned how to run a 5k (because Joe loved to go running). I went dancing with my friends to try to distract myself with other boys and forget Joe. I tried to become a vegan. I read loads of books about love and philosophy to try to crack the code of how to be happy enough on my own so that I could withstand the amount of space and distance Joe seemed to need so he’d love me again. My future seemed full of possibilities then. I felt free (in both an empowering and terrifying way). I’m proud of everything I accomplished since then and all that I carried myself through over the past 13 years. Not only have I been able to hold a full-time job and graduate, I’ve excelled (even if it was in a field that didn’t feel aligned with my values). I’ve travelled a ton. I’ve done things that I was too scared to even dream of when I was with Joe. My anxiety and ADHD and depression were so overwhelming that I didn’t think any of what I have now was possible. I’m so proud of myself for what I’ve been able to do.

Another trigger from the past few months: I saw a picture of Joe’s baby with his partner on Instagram (his partner and I have a few mutual friends and her profile popped up). It was such a gut punch to see his daughter’s face. She looks just like him. For a second, my brain malfunctioned and didn’t understand why/how that wasn’t my baby. He’s also been with his partner for 12 years. It seems like we both met our long-term partners within a year of breaking up. I’ve been crying on and off whenever I think of him for the past five months.

I don’t know if I miss him, if I miss being 21, if I’m inconsolable over not ever being able to go back to the past when my future was so free and possible, or what. Seeing his daughter’s face finally closed a door that I didn’t even know I had left ajar. Somewhere deep inside me, without me ever acknowledging it, a part of me had always thought that we would find our way back to each other, once I’m independent enough, evolved enough, calm enough, chill enough, etc. Now that possibility is gone forever and I realized that I’ve been using our memories and this fantasy as an emotional refuge whenever things got tough. I held so much hope there. It’s like I’ve been living my life as a placeholder for when he finally wakes up and realizes I was the one who got away.

I feel so stupid and delusional when I write this all out and yet I can’t help that I feel this way. The tears are still coming whenever he pops up in my mind or a familiar song from that time comes up.

Am I just going through a midlife crisis and he’s a convenient focal point to project all my lost hopes onto? I feel like such an ungrateful asshole to my loving and kind husband who has been there for me, who has shown up, exactly as he is, fully human and present and willing to be real and vulnerable with me versus Joe, an avoidant guy who by the end didn’t even seem that into me and who’s always made me feel like something was wrong with me for having some basic emotional needs like wanting her partner to text back within a week and to keep plans for Thanksgiving dinner.

Maybe Joe is just a refuge for how dead I’ve been feeling. Our best memories were so heightened, those heady early days when we spent all our time together and things felt so ecstatic and wonderful. How could ordinary life compare to those? I’ve been feeling dead with a meaningless job. My life with my husband and our dog is lovely and calm, to the point where it feels a bit flat. I’m looking at my future and terrified that a baby would just lock in all the monotony that I can’t stand anymore. I want to feel alive. I want to have an unknowable future. I still want serendipity and beauty and wonder and the potential to be surprised and learn many new things.

How do I finally let Joe go? Is any of this even really about Joe? How do I finally face my life as it is now? How do I show up for my husband without killing the messiest and most alive parts of me that are dying to be seen? How do I figure out if I really want a baby or not without tangling Joe into it? I’m so confused and sad and honestly a little hopeless. Please help.

Sincerely,

Longing To Change

Dear LTC,

The problem you have has nothing to do with youth or sex or age or your current life circumstances, even. It’s a problem that’s embedded in your language and in our culture’s language about what it means to feel good, comfortable, settled, and secure. We confuse security with boredom and mistake insecurity, longing, anxiety, and dissatisfaction with romance and adventure.

Our bodies collude in this bewilderment. We feel electric when we’re in a state of wanting more and feel half-asleep or half-there when we’re comfortable. In some ways, we enjoy longing more than being satiated. We crave more desire, and translate total relaxation and lack of drive as a state of decline or death. We fear permanence because it means we’ll be trapped in a flat-lining state forever. We want suspense, even if it means being kept in the dark about what will happen next week or next month or next year.

But instead of taking on the kinds of life choices that build suspense and bring us energy, we use other people as a shortcut to that excitement. We ask other people to deliver to us all of the romance and excitement and desire and adventure that we refuse to slow down and find on our own.

Collectively, we associate uncertainty and anxiety with seduction and romance. We watch stories about people who are running for their lives or destroying their marriages out of boredom or smashing things apart for the sake of justice. We love comedies about sloppy freaks who screw everything up repeatedly. And don’t get me started about true crime fixations!

So we’re fed these sad myths about love: Romance is for the young, for the daring. Sexy times are only sexy when it’s the first or second or fifteenth time and after that it’s like playing the same song over and over again for no good reason. Stable, secure, loving people are boring. What you can’t have is far more attractive than what’s right in front of your face.

You can add the myths about having kids in there, if you want to: Babies ruin your life and your body and your marriage. Kids are a nonstop hassle and people often regret the choice to have them.

I know these are all common beliefs now, but I don’t share them. I don’t personally believe that the ideal way to live is a nonstop sexy adventure. I’ve never managed to go on a short sexy adventure, even, without my thirst for true companionship and security popping up along the way. Having kids was incredibly inconvenient over and over again, but the pure volume of madness and fun and joy that sprang forth from that time in my life was immeasurable. I was much more productive and adventurous, by the way, when I had constant kid-related tasks to complete. I am much more of a slug now that my kids are pretty independent.

My personal belief is that we all need A LOT OF THINGS to be happy. We require a lot of security and a lot of adventure. We demand a lot of stability and satisfaction but we also want intrigue and longing in the mix. We want to be who we were at 21 and 31 and 41 but we also want to feel as settled and established and respected as a 65 year-old.

I wrote a whole book about marriage and the scary and fun things about it. You can buy it and read it if you want to know more. My personal take on husbands is that the very, very good ones — the ones you can rely on, who take on half of the work of running the household, who enjoy following your trains of thought wherever they go (at least some of the time!), who have smart things to say, who keep their jobs (generally) and take their responsibilities seriously — are also sometimes UNNERVINGLY PREDICTABLE in their behavior and speech.

But look, everyone who’s been with anyone more than a few years has a handful of complaints. That is inescapable. I don’t know anyone with a husband who hasn’t complained about their husband in the exact way that you complain about your husband in your letter. I don’t have a single friend who’s been with the same person for two years or more who hasn’t said, “My god, THIS AGAIN,” to me. Joe’s wife does this, too. It’s what married people do, and all it means is that we have been hanging around the same person a long time.

I went through a stage where I was pretty sure that the source of my restlessness was BEING MARRIED. I kept trying to trick myself into believing that I had a bad marriage or that I had picked the wrong person. But that wasn’t possible because it wasn’t true. Even so, I longed to have a disastrous affair with someone I didn’t know at all. I wanted something crazy and romantic and unpredictable to happen for a change.

That would make me feel like I was 21 again, or 28 again, or 32 again. That would make me feel like my life was a big question mark and anything could happen. I wanted to be seen through fresh eyes, and told that I was irresistible. (Ha ha that sounds fantastical to me now, which is a little sad, but IRRESISTIBLE? COME ON, WOMAN.)

Making an either/or equation out of love is pretty stupid in general. You assign the familiar partner a bunch of arbitrary traits (“dull” “repetitive” “doesn’t challenge me enough”) simply because they’re a known quantity. You assign the less familiar or more idealized person (“yum” “what was that?” “what did he even mean?”) magical powers. The magical unavailable figure owns all music, controls all sexual responses, paints gorgeous sunsets across the sky. All weird or daring thoughts belong to this person. All communing is deeper and more poetic. Time spent together is imagined to be weightless, sparkling, sensual, unearthly.

Real humans don’t look that romantic in the long term when you allow yourself to believe the myths that our culture feeds us. One of the most destructive myths of all is that when you’re married to someone who’s great, your whole life is like a happy sweet song by Faith Hill or John Legend. Another destructive myth is that marriage is a big drag and everyone who’s married wishes they could fuck anyone and do anything but they’re trapped. Another shitty myth is that feeling unmoored and afraid like you do when you’re 21 is the absolute peak of human experience, the most romantic and special way to feel. Another bad myth is that as you grow older, you become increasingly boring and rigid and disgusting and unattractive and your life sucks in quiet, terrifying ways that you can’t mention to anyone because you still want them to see you as special and vital.

Our myths make us dissatisfied and evasive. We turn on the people, places, and things we love in favor of the myths we’ve built that echo the shitty myths we were raised on. Our bodies change and shift every single day and we build reductive stories about what it means to feel the sensations we feel. We don’t understand ourselves as complex and ever-shifting organisms. We want to fit ourselves into a Faith Hill lyric instead.

Joe was a symbol of your youth and a symbol of true love that you held very close to your heart. There was never anything wrong with that. You feel pain now because you have to let that myth go. We’re all forced to let go of myths repeatedly in this life. We don’t realize what kinds of fantasies are working on us until we’re forced to live without them.

Fixating on what you can’t have is almost always a way of avoiding the present moment, and avoiding the hard work it takes to face your own path forward in the world. We’re all afraid at some level and we don’t want to compromise for any reason, about anything.

When I had a few crushes in a row, I was afraid of getting old and afraid of death. Once I faced those fears, the crushes faded out of sight. I had to struggle through the darkness of my fears in order to feel the ground under my feet again. I had to let go of my fantasies and delusions about myself, too, in order to reconnect with my real life. It was upsetting and sad and hard, but I came out on the other side with a lot of clarity about what I love and who I love.

If you want to understand this fixation, you really have to look closely at your fears. My guess is that you’re very afraid of the big responsibility of having kids. You’re afraid of doing anything that feels permanent. Maybe you’re commitmentphobic at a deep level that you haven’t faced before. But as long as fear is in control, you’re not going to be able to ground yourself in the life you’ve built or the marriage you’ve built. You need some time to feel your way back to your life. Be patient!

But building a life with one person is always a compromise. You’re choosing one person and not fifty. The idea that Joe would still be challenging you to be better in ways that your husband doesn’t is certainly seductive, but the truth is that you’d be a basket case if you had to stay with Joe for more than a year. He told you in no uncertain terms that he couldn’t give you, specifically you, everything that you needed. You wisely moved on and found someone who could. Most of the people I’ve had crushes on are also people who absolutely could not give me all of the things I require to feel loved and safe. As a child, my parents absolutely could not give me what I needed to feel loved and safe. My husband does this for me. It’s a change and sometimes it feels less romantic than starving out in the cold, wanting more. That’s absolutely natural and common, that desire to suffer for love. But it’s not good for you over the long haul. You have to question it and you have to find other ways to feel more alive.

If what you want is MORE — whether it’s more desire, more longing, more adventure, more change OR more of an ability to accept what you already love and what’s already making you happy — then you have to push yourself. You can’t rely on someone else to make your life more interesting. You have to take responsibility for locating your desires and feeding your spirit and having the adventures that you crave.

If you pretend that these adventures can only unfold in your life if you’re with someone who’s half-there, withholding, or imbued with the magic of your fantasies, then the likelihood is that you’ll end up feeling both dissatisfied / bored AND insecure / unstable. You’ll get sick of a person who can’t give you what you need the same way you’ve gotten sick of someone who can. And if you really want to know how much of what you feel is a fantasy? Stay close friends with someone you once had a crush on, and familiarize yourself with how they talk from day to day. Get to know the mundane side of a person that you tricked yourself into believing was magical.

The ridiculous prank on us all is that no one is magical. That said, we are all magical deep inside, in ways that only WE can access. When you fall madly in love with someone, most of the magic and romance is coming from inside the house. The trick to continuing to grow and wander and feel alive is committing to that magic inside you. You have to keep pushing yourself to do hard things, do new things, do interesting things that kick up more romance inside your bloodstream. You have to put yourself in new environments and endure new people. You have to take on difficult tasks. You have to step outside of your comfort zone and soak in new habitats.

Maybe you’re truly dissatisfied with your life and you want more. Maybe you need to try a new job, a new form of exercise, a new hobby, and make some new friends. Maybe you never wanted kids in the first place. I don’t know everything that’s going on with you. But I would resist doing the easiest, most reductive thing and questioning your relationship simply because you happened to put this one person who never loved you completely on a pedestal. This is a Go Back to Therapy moment, not a Change Your Whole Life Now moment.

No human can serve a platter of fun and excitement and eternal youth to you over the stretch of your entire life. It wouldn’t be sustainable for you to be married to someone who was constantly dissatisfied with or overwhelmed by you. You’d constantly have to work your ass off to be more like him, take on his pursuits and hobbies, work out the way he does, and he’d still be lukewarm about you. That doesn’t mean Joe is extra special. It means he’s not your guy.

The most interesting aspect of this picture is the woman who really, really loves to work hard and try new things. That’s the magic here: You, a person who is hungry for a big challenge, who wants to break past her fears and do more with herself. Let me be clear here: You can do more and also have a baby. You can do more and stay married. You need to understand what kinds of MORE might bring you energy and lust for life over the long haul.

You need to take responsibility for the fact that you’re not giving yourself enough new challenges right now. You need to wake up and see that you want much, much more from your life and it’s up to you alone to give yourself more to do, to place yourself in new environments, to build new skills, to discover new talents and passions. It’s a slow process.

Once I finally saw that it was up to me to make my life romantic, I started living in full color again, this time without relying on fixations or fantasies or escapist urges to give me the energy I wanted. I let go of my imaginary worlds and I started to show up for reality. I began attuning myself to new friendships, new collaborations, new research projects, new ways of writing about life. I made it my goal to allow my interests to guide me forward. I resolved to support my own curiosity as much as possible, even when it led down narrow alleys to dead ends.

That’s an abstract way of saying that I committed to the romance that lives inside me. I committed to respecting that romance more than any of the fairy tales I’d been told since I was a kid. I committed to feeling how much love I have for the people who are in my life right now, and committed to showing up in the present and listening closely to what makes them excited and inspired.

When I had an anguished marriage crisis like yours, I committed to trying to see my husband more clearly by listening closely to him. It was hard, and my heart wasn’t in it at first. But I attuned myself to what was weird and alive and interesting about him. It’s hard to describe that process. It was slow. But it’s added a lot to my life, to slowly become someone who could get curious about another person who I know very well already.

I also got more curious about myself. Now every morning, I try to honor what my heart wants. That’s pretty hard to do in general, but I think it makes the world more colorful and it’s made me more creative and also more connected to other people.

The trick to getting out of the sad and wilty and fantasy-addicted state you’re in right now is redirecting your attention. It’s really that simple. Stop going back to the dopamine of believing these old myths. Kick that habit simply by looking at something else. Imagine a bright and vivid life ahead that has adventures you can’t see clearly from here. Open your heart to experiences and situations and feelings you don’t understand yet. Stop looking backwards and attune your fragile heart to the beauty of uncertainty in this moment.

Honor your pain and sadness, but keep your heart open and stay curious about what this pain is here to teach you.

Safety and security are not inherently dull. Go back to therapy and keep talking about what you want. Figure out what’s inside you. Whether or not you stay with your husband, I think the most important job right now is to figure out how to let the romance and energy and love inside you express itself. You need to honor the poetry that lives under your skin more.

No one is blocking you from being exactly who you want to be. No one is dampening your spirit. You are loved and embraced for who you are. You can grow anything you want from here. You can have all kinds of adventures. The hardest things are also the best things. Do all of the hardest things. Honor your drive to be challenged. Respect your longing to be placed outside of your comfort zone.

I know you feel sad and vulnerable. Take those feelings to your husband and talk about them. Lean into hard things but lean into your fragile heart, too. You can do both. You can do a lot more than you thought, in fact. Dare to honor the vast, expansive, intricate universe inside you.

Polly

Thanks for reading Ask Polly! Let’s talk about crushes and fixations and obsessions in the comments. What are these fantasies here to show us? Personally, I feel like I was never going to learn to be grounded in my real life until I figured out how to let go of some of my oldest (and most perfectionistic) fantasies about myself. That doesn’t sound that fun, being grounded! But it makes life so much richer and more satisfying when you’re not living inside your head all the time. If you read Ask Polly often but don’t pay for it and you can afford a subscription, please consider subscribing!

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Portrait of James Sabartes (1901), Pablo Picasso

The world is dark right now. This morning the front page of the New York Times published pictures of all of the Iranian elementary schools and universities that have been destroyed or damaged by US-Israeli strikes. On Tuesday, Trump posted the following words on Truth Social: “A whole civilization will die…

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House in the Garden (1908), Pablo Picasso

Dear Polly,

I’m a long-time reader and first-time writer. I love your funny and clear advice to people struggling to find their balance on this spinning marble. Maybe you could even help me make a big - HUGE - scary decision. One that I’ve been considering for about a year and a half. I feel like I’m so close to m…

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CALAMITY!!!

Please bookmark askpolly.substack.com right now.

My domain name ask-polly.com appears to have been hacked in spite of the fact that it’s been registered with Bluehost for years, and isn’t set to expire until 2030. Suddenly my domain is pointing to another IP in spite of the fact that no settings have been changed and I still own the domain, according to Bluehost.

Here’s what’s confusing, upsetting, infuriating: My domain points to another Polly-related business.

BLUEHOST is pointing to this business, in spite of my dashboard still showing that I own the domain name. (Is Bluehost the worst? Yes. Do I want to set all custom domains on fire and move on without them? Also yes.)

The big problem is, if you want to Google an article you remember, you will get this Polly woman’s site some of the time, and you’ll get my archive some of the time. This will make it very difficult for people to find my work.

To be clear, YOU WILL STILL RECEIVE COLUMNS THROUGH EMAIL NO MATTER WHAT. I was working on a new column this morning and had to abandon it to investigate this problem, but expect two new columns next week. Stay tuned, because one of them is pretty unforgettable!

The bottom line is: Please use askpolly.substack.com from now on and search for articles there. And feel free to write to me at askpolly@protonmail.com at any time to express your ideas, thoughts, feelings, and of course, to send me advice letters.

Thank you for your patience!

Polly

Seated Man (1915), Pablo Picasso

Dear Polly,

I hope this finds you well. I’m writing after coming back to your column recently. Your perspective is always delivered with candor and sincerity, and you talk a lot about the emotional side of the craft of writing, so I hope you might be able to offer some insight to what’s eating me.

I started writing stories …

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The Reservoir, Horta de Ebro (1909), Pablo Picasso

Dear Polly,

I moved to New York City seven months ago because I thought it was still a haven for weird artists and freaks with no money but instead it’s a capitalist nightmare and I feel more trapped than ever. I have never lived in a place where I have felt happy and free, and while I was living in Chicago I convinced myself that NYC was the place for me, because when I had traveled to NYC to work on projects (I am an early-career theatre director) everything had felt so right. Opportunity seemed to be everywhere, people were motivated to start projects with me, there was a play to see or an event at which to meet new people every single night, and I always thought, “This is what I’m missing in Chicago! I feel at home here. I feel limitless! I should move here.”

And then I moved here. And I’ve never been so miserable.

I work all the time at a horrendous coffee shop in NoHo. Half my paycheck goes to rent. I love my apartment, but come on. Nothing is worth that, right? All I think about is how to pay all my bills- rent, medical insurance, all that. My brain is unable to think of anything else. The limitless feeling I’d experienced here has vanished, replaced by a sense of the walls closing in around me at all times — this sense that I am not allowed to live here simply because I don’t make an insane amount of money, and I’m trying to make it on my own. And that’s the other thing! You wouldn’t believe how many people here are only making it because their parents send them a check every week. How naive of me to assume we were all playing life on hard mode, right? I serve assholes every day at my cafe who never had to work for any of the luxuries they have, and they have the audacity to act superior to me. I’m sorry for raging, but clearly I am in a tornado of rage and frustration that I can’t pull myself out of.

I need help. I don’t know how to relax here. I don’t know how to maintain my creative life while freaking out 24/7 about money. I don’t feel like myself. No one knows me or loves me here. Should I just leave? But where would I go? I’ve got it in my head that this is the only place to be if one wants to be an artist. I tried Chicago, but I didn’t feel as inspired there. The theatre scene felt stale and slow there, in comparison to here, where everything is lightning-fast and vibrant. I moved here, I guess, because the energy felt right. And it still does, at times, when I’m free from all my worries and woes. When I’m seeing an insane piece of theatre with my friend, or walking in one of our beautiful parks, or directing a friend’s play, or striking up a conversation with another weirdo at the bar after work. So much of NYC is unique unto itself. That’s why I love (most of) it.

Is it possible to live the wrong life? Is it possible to have made the wrong decision? Or am I exactly where I’m supposed to be on some “god has a plan for you” shit? I gave up a lot to come here. I left my best friend (the only peer I have who truly understands and loves me) and I left a sort-of-boyfriend I’d been dating for a year who made me feel so happy and secure. I guess we fell in love but I fucked that up by moving to New York Capitalist City for no reason I can presently articulate. I feel like a dumb idiot for thinking I could “leap, and the net would appear.” There’s no net. I’ve ruined everything.

So yeah, you may be thinking, “Why the hell did you move here in the first place?” I wish I could tell you. It was an impulse. I had the feeling something wonderful was waiting for me here. The first three months were great. I was high off the risk I took, and the novelty of everything. I’m on month seven and nothing wonderful has happened to me yet, so I’m losing hope. But I suppose that’s an entitled point of view. Maybe I should be more patient? Give it until 2030 and if my life still sucks and physically pains me then I’ll leave, I guess. But what if the pain doesn’t stop even if I move to another place? Even if I become less broke? How long does it take for life to click into place? When will I feel like I’ve done the right thing? I can’t take this pain for much longer.

Here’s what I want: I want to be loved by a close group of friends and by a romantic partner who will never leave me and will never make me doubt them. I want to work consistently as a director and get out of the indie scene eventually so I can start making real money doing what I love and what I have a genuine talent for. That’s what I want to do here, what I want to attain here. And it’s not happening, and I don’t know how to make it happen. I feel like I’m not doing enough. Like I’m letting my terror around money and survival stop me from feeling confident enough to take risks and to believe that I deserve all the opportunities that I’d thought this city would promise me. I’m angry that my life right now is not at all the life I want to live forever. But I can’t picture any other way of living. How will I pay the bills without spending every waking minute serving yuppies at this NoHo cafe? And if there are always bills to pay, how will I ever quit my job and get out of this hellish cycle?

They say desire is the root of all suffering — all I do since I’ve moved here is desire, desire, desire. Desire love, sex, success, excitement, freedom, MONEY. It is a nightmare, but I do not know how to stop. It seems like everyone around me is caught in the same desire loop, too, and it feels unique to this city. It feels maddening to be just one of many, many lost lambs. Maybe I should move elsewhere for this very reason. Please tell me what to do.

Confused, Terrified, and Broke in NYC

Dear CTABINYC,

Every city has features you have to ignore in order to thrive. In San Francisco, the fog was romantic, the views were amazing, the food was delicious, the city streets were delectable, but it was always chilly, and there was a chill type of bro who just loved to chill out and do chill shit and work his bro job and then chill, dude, chill chill chill.

I hated the weather and I hated the bros. It was very hard to ignore these things. I was broke so I had to work as a temp downtown, surrounded by finance bros. I hated finance and I hated my shit heel of a boss and I hated my sad apartment in the chilly Marina with my increasingly distant bro boyfriend, who just wanted to chill and watch football with his bros.

I mean, come on. It was the wrong life. It was all a mistake. My boyfriend dumped me and I almost moved back home to North Carolina. Instead, I looked for a shared flat in the Upper Haight. I talked to four groups of roommates. I didn’t vibe with the first three groups, and then the fourth were my people, weird and interesting. They could be difficult — opinionated, bossy, loud — but they were fun and social and they were trying to do interesting things with their lives. I moved in and life changed and I stopped worrying about how chilly it was and how chill everyone was. I stopped freaking out about the big picture and I engaged in the everyday, mundane, difficult experiment of being 22 years old in the city, ambitious and ambivalent and alone and very afraid.

Having roommates completely changed my perspective. Being crowded, feeling aggravated, dealing with noise and mess and trouble of roommates: These things were very good for me at that moment of my life. I signed up for a year with them without knowing much. I committed to staying for another year. This was also good for me. It got me out of my head and into the reality of surviving and trying to feel happy.

I don’t think you should leave New York right now. I know exactly what you mean about visiting and feeling alive and then falling to pieces after moving there, because you suddenly know what it tastes like day after day, how cold it can be, and also how ambitious and desperate and pointlessly snobby everyone around you can be. Nothing you’ve described feels inaccurate to me at all, but it’s also the exact shit that you have to ignore or wave off or push out of your view or even ENJOY SEEING MORE CLOSELY if you’re going to thrive.

In other words, you can’t tell a simple story about where you live. You have to insist on a far more complex, rich, nuanced picture, one that has no clear moral, one that changes from light to dark, colorful to grayscale, sloppy to precise. You have to open your eyes wider and welcome the rich and frightening reality of the city into your cells.

You do that by getting out of your head as much as possible. Your money struggles are making you neurotic. You have to figure out a short-term solution, either a second job or a roommate situation or an obscenely strict budget or all of the above, that will keep you from flipping out around the clock about your money situation.

You also have to get out of your head about whether this choice was RIGHT or WRONG, and what to do next. Just put that question on hold, because it’s making you nuts. Forget the big picture for a while and instead, start getting very small and granular about your present moment. You need to start cobbling together a sustainable life among people who have a similar sensibility and drive, and similar resources (or lack thereof). I think what you need more than a boyfriend and an amazing group of friends is a COMMUNITY — or a few different communities, messy gaggles of humans that, LIKE ALL COMMUNITIES, will include a lot of differences and bewilderment and mediocrity and small annoyances.

You require FRICTION.

Friction is what you get when you walk out into the world and try something new among other people. They don’t agree with everything you’re up to. They push back. They are indifferent. They are not sidekicks or bit players in your fantastical vision of How Life in New York Should Be. They are real people with their own sometimes questionable agendas. Sometimes they get checks in the mail from their parents. Sometimes they’re trust fund kids. Sometimes they’re broke. Sometimes they have drinking problems. Take it all in without instantly reducing each human to a stereotype. You’re an artist. This is your work.

That said, pay attention when you meet people who prefer FICTION to FRICTION. When you meet someone who is heartbroken but has zero good friends and talks to every new friend like they’re auditioning a new therapist or someone who is kicking weed but has no interest in socializing without being high or someone who has a Big Dream but speaks mostly about how unfair the world where their Big Dream takes place is, you’re meeting people who are depressed, sure, but they’re also allergic to FRICTION. They want other people to speak to them like sidekick characters in a romantic story where the hero rises to the top WITHOUT HARDSHIP, STRUGGLE, OR CONFLICT. They want to hear that it will get easier and easier, and soon everything they’ve ever wished for WILL BE THEIRS.

What a boring, flat, pointless story! If you read a play like that, you’d throw it out the window immediately! That’s not how life feels, not how it works, not what it’s made of.

Life is cobbled together from mistakes. You don’t start living until you start making big mistakes and small mistakes and navigating through the reality of those mistakes. Pain enters and so does anger. You are not the lead character, ever, even when it feels like you are. You aren’t even the author some of the time. Sometimes it’s possible to feel like a bit part in a tragedy.

That’s where the FRICTION comes from. But when you finally put away your fantasy and lean into the friction of reality, you discover the raw ingredients of real, earned, in-the-moment happiness. Real happiness isn’t granted to you once you cross your fantasy finish lines. Real happiness is built in the present moment, from the materials you have on hand. It requires ALLOWING New York City to be exactly what it is right now, with all of the lost lambs and shitty rich people and ridiculous capitalist hogs and also the many, many, many people who are just living their lives in an ordinary and unassuming way, working very hard to feel good every day however they can.

For a while after I moved into my new shared flat in the Upper Haight, I felt excruciatingly lonely every night, particularly when I got home from going out with my roommates. I was used to having a boyfriend. I was addicted to the reassurance of having someone there, even when that person was mostly indifferent or conflicted or not that into me. So I would make a late-night improvised Shepherd’s Pie: ground beef, onions, peas, mashed potatoes. I mean, gross. And then I would smoke a tiny hit of pot and listen to Dr. Dre’s The Chronic on my headphones in my room, and I would eat the delicious mess of food and I would feel like: Okay. I can be alone without feeling desperate.

This is not a recipe for survival. I don’t recommend any part of that picture, not smoking pot and not listening to the words “Bitches ain’t shit but hos and tricks” over and over on a Saturday night. This anecdote is imperfect and full of FRICTION. I drank too much back then. I was so charming in some ways, but I was very dysfunctional and very insecure, too. I had a drab, low-paying job. Somehow that ritual of food and a tiny hit of pot and Dr. Dre felt like a way of supporting the supposedly-chill college kid with the stoner friends I’d been before.

When you’re fighting tooth and nail not to run away, you need more than a vision of a long-term climb to the top of your chosen field. You need more than an image of true love and amazing friends. You need more than weed and food and music, too, if I’m being honest. The weed and music and food weren’t the important part. What was important was that I was trying to build a new way of life. It was an experiment.

That ritual didn’t stick because I didn’t want to feel depressed and bloated every Sunday morning. The pot and the giant heap of food were both, arguably, mistakes. But thanks to those mistakes, I started thinking about how I DID want to feel, and I started running in the morning, on Sundays and then before work. And I started playing guitar late at night, quietly, and writing down lyrics. And I started talking to my roommates about writing and music, which I didn’t know some of them were into before that. One thing led to another, and I slowly started to redefine who I was and what I loved and what I wanted next.

I could tell you hundreds of stories of the mistakes I made that year, the next year, last year, this year. The one thing I need for you to understand is that you will only learn to be happy by ENJOYING your sweeping, angry stories and then also, letting them go whenever you can, pushing away the images of New Yorkers as either lost and desperate or rich and nasty, and doing some very frightening, slow excursions and experiments that involve joining communities, building communities, learning more, researching more, seeing more, and living slowly among other human beings who are doing the same exact thing.

The humanity of New York City loves humanity. That’s what I want you to feel under your skin every day you leave the house. New York sounds a little rough and wrong, it looks a little dismissive and snotty, but once you take your compulsion, your FANTASY, about being a lead character, out of the picture, what you’ll see is the gorgeous FRICTION of real human beings who appreciate humanity itself at the most granular level, in their most vulnerable moments AND their most dismissive moments.

Half of the people you see every single day are in New York for the exact same reasons you’re there. They have pure hearts and they want more life out of their lives. They want energy and purpose and drive to be bouncing and echoing around them. They have open hearts that need to be protected, yes, sometimes by dismissive or cold-seeming words and actions. But under the nastiness there is love and longing and a real, concrete, felt, and lived desire to be close to other humans and celebrate and support HUMANITY ITSELF.

That’s romantic. Sometimes it’s a dark gothic romance but look, without darkness, without tragedy, without longing, without suspense, without discomfort, there is no romance. We are not robots, we are imperfect, lost humans who are struggling, each day, in small ways, to find each other, to see each other clearly, to love each other in spite of everything.

You have my permission to move anywhere at any time. Don’t discount smaller cities and more podunk-seeming theater scenes. I love my smallish town so much! There are so many interesting, non-chilly, non-chill people here! But before you move anywhere else, I want you to embrace the friction of this one fact:

Your life right now is undeniably romantic. THAT is the big picture that should guide you through each day, even if you leave eventually.

Maybe you need to move in with some roommates, and maybe you don’t. Maybe you need to stuff a roommate into your apartment for a few minutes to see how that could feel. Maybe you need to join some clubs and groups. Maybe you need to eat cheaper green leafy bullshit for a few of your meals and then save up for more plays and experimental theater visits. All of these things will sometimes be dark and disappointing and even infuriating. That’s friction. That’s what you need.

Support your ability to see your life clearly by eating very carefully and working out every day and also stretching and meditating and reading a little. Pay attention to how your body feels when you’re starting to succumb to rage and despair. Be gentle with your body when it reaches that threshold, and keep the big, reductive stories that are echoing through your brain out of there. Notice the shame and insecurity in those stories, and think about how those feelings are tied to your childhood experiences. Find ways to use the friction of your current life as a form of art. Lean into the friction and write it down. Ask yourself what it will take for you to slowly nudge your brain out of dark places.

My guess is that exercise and leafy green stuff and nuts and seeds and more sleep and less storytelling ALONE will reset your brain a little.

Of course if you decide to leave eventually, that will be fine. Of course, of course. Keep talking to your good friends elsewhere but try to listen to them first and foremost and let your continuing story about BAD DUMB EVIL NYC change shape in each moment. Don’t stick to your theme when you talk to everyone you know. Let your body tell you what the theme is each day. Try to start with no theme. Notice how good it feels to have no story at all.

You can do whatever you need to do to feel good. But it’s friction, not rewards and dopamine hits and indulgences, that will save you.

Of course rewards are always a part of life. True love and amazing friends and delicious cocktails and achieving big career goals are all very good things. But the essence of happiness lies in the ways that you make meaning out of small, slow, solitary moments, the ways you start to identify as a capable, flexible, loving, open person even when life is fucking brutal and ridiculous. You go to your shitty job and you take in what’s there, the smallest beam of sunshine coming through the high window, beaming across the spider plant, glimmering in a puddle of water on the counter that needs to be wiped up. Some kid who looks like his Mommy sends him $3k a month is asking why his cold brew lacks cardamom-and-almond cold foam. Look into his eyes. His screenplay is stalled out and no one cares about movies anymore anyway. His boyfriend is acting distant ever since he moved to Bushwick to be closer to his superficial college friends, who only talk about art openings in the most pretentious, delusional language imaginable, but somehow because they went to RISD they know everything.

Everyone is improvising and experimenting in their own crude ways every day, even the old people who didn’t go to RISD. Everyone just wants to feel like they’re not actively making even bigger mistakes than the ones they made yesterday. All we have is this beam of sunshine. Forget the big picture. Live where you are. Do an experiment with this moment. What structure can today take so that your body can feel good, so that your mind can feel curious, so that you can feel deeply rooted in the present, in this day, in this hour?

Hand the sad man his Americano and say,

I hope you have a really great day today.

Say it and mean it. If there is absolutely no time to say all of those words and you don’t want to do that, then say it with your eyes alone. Say it with the shape of your face. See if it lands. When it doesn’t land, when he doesn’t give a fuck, savor the rush of rejection inside your body, notice how fragile you are right now. Feel that. Relish being fragile. Feel your sadness at how vulnerable you’ve been for weeks now. You are so alone and so at sea. It’s beautiful. Friction is romantic. Live here. Breathe it in. This is where everything good begins. Don’t run away.

Polly

Thanks for reading Ask Polly! In the comments, let’s talk about other pragmatic things that the LW can do to feel relaxed and clear-headed enough to make art again while staying in NYC! Let’s also talk about how you survive(d) in NYC and why you stayed or left and where you are now. Just remember that, no matter how old you are, how rich you are, and how much you’ve accomplished, the struggle returns over and over again and the struggle is real, motherfuckers. Real friction and real struggle (that you refuse to avoid through escapism, addiction, narcissism, fantasy, scrolling, sleepwalking, sadism, fascism — so many things to avoid!) add up to real joy. Be very gentle to your body, mind, and impatient, wild spirit, no matter what. I’m opening the comments to everyone because this LW needs input from ALLLLLLL of you today! Thank you for being here!

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Guitar and Fruit Dish (1920), Pablo Picasso

Subject: I’m Almost Forty, AI Took My Career, and I Think I Was Supposed to Be a Writer

Dear Polly,

I’m sitting here as sunlight softened by the sheer drapes fills the room. I’ve watched the sunrise through these windows countless mornings since I’ve been laid off. It often proffers some kind of hope despite the …

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Photo c/o Megan Hellerer

For the past year, I’ve been struggling a lot with decision making. Even though I’ve taken on several new interests with enthusiasm, choosing my next big creative project has been difficult. I keep starting books and then stopping them. I keep choosing ambitious goals and then abandoning them. What’s going on with me?

Then one day I got a press release about a book with a very intriguing title: “Directional Living: A Transformational Guide to Fulfillment in Work and Life” by Megan Hellerer.

Normally I ignore these kinds of emails. Personally, I don’t love most self-help books. The ideas feel too simple, all sugary slogans with no nutrition. Or there are endless stats and real-life anecdotes but it all adds up to thoughts that could be summarized in one short essay. Or there’s a lot of empty positivity and not enough concrete guidance. I spend the whole book thinking, “GET TO THE POINT ALREADY!”

But not this time. Not only is Megan Hellerer’s writing sharp and succinct, but she dives straight into a problem that so many Ask Polly readers struggle with: How does an anxious former overachiever build a life that feels rich and relaxing instead of just crossing arbitrary items off an alienating to-do list? How do you make career decisions when every big goal starts to feel oppressive within a few days? What do you do when, after making all the “right” choices for years, you still feel unhappy with your life?

Hellerer’s approach seemed so practical, but I wanted to know more, so I talked to her on the phone and then emailed her some follow-up questions. Her insights have already helped me so much — more on that later! — so I’m very excited to share them with you!

Megan, in your book you describe how you always made the seemingly “correct” choices when you were younger: good grades, good scores, Stanford, then a job at Google. I think what people sometimes miss when they talk about the culture of overachievers is that there’s a kind of deeply internalized moralism to these selections, like only someone intent on betraying themselves and ignoring their gifts would choose a less ambitious path. How hard was it for you, when you were younger, to make choices that fell outside of what was seen as impressive?

I’ve been really puzzling over this question because I don’t think it even occurred to me that there was a choice in the matter. It’s not like I was deliberating between a more impressive and less impressive choice and couldn’t let myself choose the less impressive one. I truly didn’t conceive of anything else or any other way of being. And not all of my choices and actions were misaligned either.

Stanford is an interesting case because it was actually a “rebellious” choice for me, instead of an East coast Ivy League that was more expected, which is just ridiculous.

So, how hard was it? Close to impossible. I tried for at least six of my eight years to get myself to leave Google, coming very close a few times and then being unable to actually do it. I had to be so profoundly unwell that I essentially had no choice in the matter.

How long did it take for you to overcome that external ruler of achievement in order to follow your own map? Do you still hear echoes of that overachiever’s moral code inside your head today?

Dropping that underfulfilled overachiever mindset took a very long time. When I finally quit with no plan, I had what some people call, “the gift of desperation.” I was in so much pain that I truly did not care at all if my life was impressive, if it meant that I would be happy. I remember being jealous of a happy-seeming waitress at the corner cafe and truly wondering if that was the right path for me. If I thought it would lead to peace and ease, I would have done it. Not that there’s anything wrong with working in food service or hospitality, but it’s a far cry from what would be acceptable in my previous framework for life. I remember researching the cities with the lowest cost of living and really thinking about re-working my entire life — and as a born-and-raised New Yorker, that was a BIG deal to ponder.

Another answer to the “how long?” question is that it took about a year from when I left Google until I started my coaching practice, committed only to give it a try for six months and see what happened. But, even then, there was a lot of ego and fear saying things like “Who goes to Stanford and becomes a coach?” So even as I was starting this new path that was totally lighting me up and absolutely terrifying, I was still battling the underfulfilled overachiever in me. I think it was probably another year before I was fully confident in my path and felt proud of it and felt like this was my version of success and was just as worthy of a path as any other I might have chosen.

Publishing a book put me back into that position where there was ostensibly a way to measure success — akin to As in school —and comparative success at that. I thought I was cured, but suddenly, here was my old friend achievement wound showing up again, wanting to determine my worth by book sales, which, candidly, I did not expect! I probably should have, but I didn’t see it coming.

So, yes, while I wish I could say the exorcism was complete, I’m still working on it. The underfulfilled overachiever mindset pops up when I am doing something vulnerable and that I care about deeply, like publishing a book. In these moments, my brain believes that being measurably “the best” — straight As, high sales numbers — will keep me safe. On the flip side, anything less than “perfect” sales numbers — which, of course, doesn’t exist — means failure. So you can see how this all falls apart quickly and failure, in the framework, is pretty much guaranteed. (I see this all the time with clients, too.)

The difference is that now I can spot it a mile away and I can even feel it in my body when I’m coming from this place. And, I don’t buy into it, which doesn’t mean it’s comfortable or pleasant, but I don’t make decisions from here anymore and I have a lot of other saner, more accurate internal voices to counteract it.

You describe this feeling of deep despair that would overcome you in the bathroom at the Google offices. What was it about the practices or the setting or the tone of interactions in that world that dragged you down? I ask this as someone who was absolutely floored by how depressed and confused I felt at my first office job. Even when I was being offered a fast track to a high-level job, I felt ill over it.

I’m not sure that it was anything universally wrong with the culture, but it was certainly wrong for me. I often talk about how I think we get imposter syndrome wrong. I felt like an impostor at Google but it wasn’t because I thought I was secretly bad at my job. It was because I was being an impostor — I was performing being a “Googler” tech exec person when that is deeply not who I actually am. If we’re doing work, or being in relationships, or behaving in ways that are misaligned, we are going to feel like an imposter because we are faking it in our own lives.

I can point to the specifics that didn’t work for me, but I think the bigger point is just that it was just not the right fit for me, and that fact, and the fact that I ignored that and tried to convince myself otherwise for so long, was what was so debilitating.

Specifically, I’ve since learned that I love working for myself and do not like working for other people. I also am much more introverted than I understood at the time and working in an open office environment was pure hell for me and drained me of all of my life force. I also, frankly, did not care about the work we were doing and the impact we were having (with a few exceptions) so it always felt pretty pointless. That doesn’t necessarily mean it was pointless, but it felt that way to me.

Did you do summer internships at corporate offices and if so, did it give you any glimmer of what came next? What do you think might help college students attune themselves to their truest desires rather than using an external compass that tells them what they “should” do with their lives according to other (sometimes deeply dissatisfied) overachievers?

I did summer internships in journalism in college — working for NBC Nightly News and The Village Voice — since that’s what I thought I wanted to do, but that wasn’t feeling exactly right and as I got into my senior year I had no idea what I wanted to do. I got scared and felt like I suddenly need to grow up and get a serious job and also I needed to make money. Google was still pretty small but was growing a ton and in their prime “hire smart kids right out of college to do basic customer service work” era and I applied on a whim and got offered a job through a series of synchronicities. Google actually felt like the counter-cultural thing to do at the time (versus finance or management consulting).

The trouble wasn’t necessarily that I took that job — I learned a lot and it was a good career experiment. It was that I couldn’t make a change even when I knew it was wrong for me.

For college kids looking for jobs, I actually love internships, as they’re great low-stakes ways to experiment and test and learn. They help to take the pressure off. You don’t need to get the perfect internship that’s going to determine the rest of your career. It just needs to be directionally right. So, make sure you’re making these decisions, as always, according to what excites you and compels you, not what you feel you “should” do or what it will get you or where you think it will lead.

When you got into coaching and started to witness people learning to live directionally instead of destinationally, what did that look like? What were the markers and side effects of directional living in contrast to what they’d always known?

I often joke that Directional Living is the absolute best anti-anxiety drug around! Because the first thing that people report, and I observe, is less anxiety about the future and more ease in decision making, big and small. There’s less overthinking and rumination and more excitement about the future and what’s possible. There’s more general contentment and enjoyment of life. They’re more present and more at home in themselves. They feel free. They’re empowered.

Stage 2 is more authenticity, more self-expression, more creativity, and more inspiration, which are all side effects of beginning to in-source life decisions instead of outsourcing them. This leads to greater impact and contribution to the world around them.

Then, I start to see that show up in better and deeper relationships of all kinds — with more authenticity and self-trust comes more intimacy and connection.

And finally, the most incredible thing to see is it ripple out to people around them. Others start to become more free and more joyful and more inspired and more connected themselves.

When a huge, impressive opportunity presents itself to you and you have a gut feeling that it isn’t what you love but it fits neatly into your former overachiever’s value system, are you ever tempted to do it anyway? What have you witnessed happening to people when they fall prey to lucrative or high-status paths that they don’t necessarily love or want?

When people follow paths that they don’t love or want for any reason, they end up with “The Fulfillment Ache,” an existential and psychic pain that shows up when there’s distance between who you actually are and how you’re showing in the world. It typically doesn’t go away on its own. It only gets worse. It’s not there to be an asshole and to make you suffer for no reason. It’s there for the specific purpose

It shows up for different people differently, but some common places it leads are mental health struggles — anxiety, depression — chronic illness, and addictions of all kinds.

I know what this feels like and how painful it can be. I’ve made a serious commitment to living in alignment for all the incredible benefits that it brings, of course, but also because I want to do anything and everything I can to never be in that kind of avoidable pain again.

So, for me, if I’m ever tempted to override a knowing that something isn’t right for me, I remind myself of the cost of that decision and I ask myself if it’s worth the risk of that kind of pain and consequences, and the decision becomes obvious.

I have, for example, said no to media opportunities that didn’t feel aligned.

The first time that I started exploring writing a book, working with an agent and writing a book proposal, I was so excited and eager to get started. I had my “Directional Living” framework and I felt really clear that I wanted to write a book. And yet, it felt all wrong. It felt so forced and I felt like I was banging my head against a wall. So, I trusted that, even though I didn’t totally understand why and I was disappointed that it wasn’t feeling more “light and right,” and I put it down. A few years later, with some more public traction on my work, an agent who is an incredible fit for me found me and the proposal process flowed much more easily.

I’ve also left opportunities that I thought were aligned and turned out to not be. I was one of the original coaches for a well-known elite women’s executive professional membership community. It looked great on paper and paid well, but after a few months I realized that it just wasn’t aligned for me for a variety of reasons — mostly that we had completely different philosophies when it came to coaching, So, at the earliest responsible moment, I left.

The other thing I would add is that it’s usually not so black-and-white where it’s a lucrative and impressive opportunity and everything in you is screaming “no.” If you’re not sure, it’s usually because you need more information. So, ask more questions. Try to determine what would make it a definitive “yes” or a definitive “no.”

Lastly, nothing is permanent. Another strategy if it’s something that has a lot of upside but something in you is saying no, is to try it out. While this isn’t always possible, if you can do a trial period of sorts, which is usually the best way to get clear if something is aligned for you or not.

There’s also a funny (and wonderful) thing that happens: The more aligned you become, the more aligned the opportunities that come to you become. So, if you’re early in this journey, I think it’s helpful to know that it gets easier and simpler!

In contrast, how can you tell when a person is aligned with their curiosity?

I always say that being an underfulfilled overachiever can only be self-diagnosed. You can’t reliably tell from the outside how aligned something is for someone. For example, working at Google was decidedly not aligned for me; however, I have clients for whom it was deeply aligned. For me, writing a book was very aligned and felt like writing this particular book was something I couldn’t not do, but I know people for whom it was a very big “should” and a miserable process every step of the way.

So, you really can’t tell if something is aligned, unless you have access to someone’s inner world, which I am privileged to with my private clients. So, in that context, the energy is what I describe as “light and right” instead of “hard and heavy.” When I get to know someone, I can tell from their voice, their mannerisms and expressions, and just their overall energy when something is “warmer” and moving in the direction of becoming more themselves instead of “colder” and moving away from who they really are.

There’s an aliveness that comes with curiosity and alignment that once you see it, you can’t unsee it!

Why do you think the instruction to “follow your passion” sometimes leads people astray?

It’s a lot of pressure to feel like you have to find your one deep passion that you can devote yourself to for the rest of your life. And pressure tends to keep us stuck, not inspired. If I ask someone who’s trying to figure out WTF they want to do with their lives, “Well, what’s your passion?” they’ll typically blow a fuse, short-circuit and go into freeze. This is obviously not helpful. Furthermore, we tend to think this is something that we can figure out if we just think harder and longer about it. But clarity comes in motion, not from sitting still and thinking more. So, we want to get into action and I’ve found that “follow your passion” tends to do the opposite.

Second, if you do find something you’re passionate about, we tend to think it’s a permanent destination where we arrive once and for all - somewhere you’ve landed for good and then you “set it and forget it” and forget to keep evolving. And we end up stuck, again.

Passion feels so grand and intense and it often isn’t like that in practice. Most people don’t have the skies part and their passion announced to them from on high. We often imagine that we’ll be struck by lightning with passion one day and we sit around waiting for that fateful day to happen, when instead it starts with a tickle of curiosity. Curiosity and joy are our best proxies for purpose, and we often miss that looking for capital-P Passion.

I love how you compare directional living to driving a car in the dark and only being able to see a few feet ahead of you. You explain that no one knows what a grand destination will feel like, they only know what lights them up and makes them more interested, more engaged, more curious. So the best bet is to keep creeping forward, following those headlights, noticing how you feel and what you want next. Why does this work so much better than big schemes and plans?

Big schemes and long-range plans assume a level of certainty about ourselves and the world around us that just isn’t real — see AI, COVID, the US government, the economy etc. They ask us to predict who we’ll be, what we’ll value, and what will fulfill us years down the line, before we’ve actually lived the experiences that shape those answers. Directional Living works better because it reflects how humans actually evolve. You don’t need to know where you’re going — which is impossible even in more predictable times — in order to begin. And you can make the whole trip that way.

When you pay attention to what gives you energy, curiosity, or a sense of aliveness now, you get real-time feedback. That feedback is far more accurate than any abstract five-year plan made from your head instead of your lived experience. It allows you to be responsive to the changing environment inside, and outside, ourselves. Creeping forward lets you course-correct as you go. It keeps you in motion without locking you into a version of success that might look good on paper but feel deadening in real life. Over time, those small, responsive steps don’t lead to randomness. They add up to a life that actually fits you, because it was built in conversation with who you were becoming, not who you thought you were supposed to be.

Counterintuitively, it’s actually so much more effective and efficient than the linear, long-term guaranteed plan approach we’ve been taught to follow.

I know you’ve probably worked with a lot of productivity-obsessed current or former overachievers like myself who start to feel anxious when they don’t have a big-picture plan. What do you do to keep your coaching clients calm and focused on the present? How do you explain to them that this practice isn’t just about finding the best path to success, it’s actually something that will teach them how to bring joy into their lives right now?

I actually don’t explain to them! I let them find that out through living it. Once they start living this way and experience how much more ease, peace, joy, lightness and presence they experience as a result, they won’t want to go back.

There’s an expression in recovery groups that says, “We can always refund your misery.” I often suggest to clients to try this approach as an experiment. Give me three to six months to start, and you can always go back to what you were doing before, if you want! (You won’t want to.)

But, this is also the magic of focusing on the single next directionally right step. It forces you into the present — no meditation required.

How can you tell when a client is suffering for “good” reasons, i.e. they’re grappling with the difficulties and even anxieties of a truly worthy, life-altering challenge?

I love this question and this distinction because so many of us were raised with the idea that the harder it is, the more worthy or impressive it is. I have so many people come to me and say things like, “I chose my major because it was the hardest thing I could think of.” And that’s not the vibe. We don’t want hard for the sake of hard. There are no bonus gold stars for “hard.”

So, how do you know? The magic questions are: Where is the freedom and where is the relief? If it’s an aligned, truly worthy life-altering challenge, you’ll feel freedom thinking about taking it on, no matter how difficult. You will *not* feel relief when you think about refusing the challenge. If it’s not aligned and hard for the sake of hard, you’ll feel freedom and relief from not taking it on.

There’s an expression: “Choose your hard.” There are two different kinds of hard. There’s the existential hard of turning away from your true self, and there’s the hard work of creation and of building something that matters to you. For me, Google was the existential “bad” hard and my work now is “good” hard —the challenge of writing a book, or building your own business from scratch.

I also have a test for that! There are four tells of “bad” suffering or unworthy, misaligned challenges. I call them the 4 Omens: Obligation (Shoulds), Objectivity, Optics, and Outcomes. If any of these 4 things are part of your decision to take on a challenge, then that’s very likely not the hard you want to choose.

· Obligation: Doing something because you “should.”

· Objectivity: Relying on “smart” or “logical” generic moves rather than personal resonance.

· Optics: Prioritizing how a decision will be perceived by others.

· Outcomes: Focusing exclusively on what a step will “get” you in the future.

Does your directional focus eradicate your envy of those who stayed on overachieving paths — if you have any, that is? How do you soothe those people who are addicted to overachieving, addicted to the “fix” of having a grand strategy for worldwide domination, into noticing how much they long for a deeper connection to their present lives? I’ve often noticed that I’m the most fixated on big, productive, overachieving plans when I am the most in need of soulful connections and grounding experiences.

I know it sounds so cliché, but I’ve found that when we’re truly aligned, we don’t compare because we know we’re on our right path and we feel content where we are. It feels easy to access that truth that everyone is on their own path and timeline.

So, similarly to you, if ever I’m noticing some of that “compare and despair” trap in myself or others, I see that as a signal that there’s something out of alignment or there’s something more that I’m longing for.

What I do when this comes up for people is an exercise I call “Jealousy Juicing.” It allows us to flip envy on its head, snap us back into our own lives and leverage it instead of demonizing it.

The idea is that whenever we feel jealousy, that’s a clue for us about something that we want in our own life and there’s an opportunity there for us to gather information. So, we want to get clear on what it is that we’re envious of, as precisely as possible, and then make it actionable by thinking of a step we could take to get more of that in our own lives. Exploring your particular brand of envy of world domination can tell us a lot about your right direction. Looking at envy like this makes it empowering instead of discouraging.

Candidly, I have pretty much zero envy of anyone on a traditional overachieving path. I’m clear that there’s nothing for me there. I used to have so much intense and immovable envy of people who were working for themselves, carving their own path, creating and sharing new ideas, and building something that was inspired and fulfilling and clearly their work in the world. It was the clues in that envy that led me to start down the path I’m on today. I haven’t experienced anything even close to that level of envy I used to feel for a very long time.

I still have envy because there are still things that I want to do and ways I want to evolve and now I see that as part of being alive and growing. It’s not consuming or painful in the way that it used to be and I try to always get curious about it.

Does anyone ever say to you, “Okay I’m happy now but I’ve lost all ambition. Is this really a good thing?” Can you relate to that at all? What do you think is the right middle ground for most people between meandering curiously and storming ahead while despairing?

I have heard this before and I think it comes down to a misunderstanding of ambition. We’ve been offered a very narrow vision of what is worthy of ambition, as well as a very limited perspective of what the pursuit of ambition looks like.

To me, ambition is simply a desire for more life, a desire to have an impact. Ambition just means that you care about something and you want to put time and attention and energy towards it. Usually you haven’t lost all ambition, you’ve lost the form of ambition you’ve always known. I rarely find that people describe themselves as “happy” while not giving a damn about anything.

I call this aligned ambition — sustainable ambition that’s authentic and meaningful to you — instead of the old blind ambition — self-sacrificial ambition that’s dictated by external expectations.

So, the first question I ask is, “How are you defining ambition?” Usually people mean that they’ve lost the desire to hustle and grind, or the motivation to sprint up the ladder to the corner office at all costs. They don’t mean that they’re happy because they don’t care about anything or anyone.

The second set of questions I would ask is, “What is it that’s making you so happy? What are you cultivating or practicing? What do you want more of? What do you care about?” THAT is what you’re actually ambitious for. Maybe it’s a feeling — joy, presence, creativity, spaciousness, playfulness, connection, self-expression. Maybe it’s having a family or enjoying quality time with family or friends. Maybe you care about having a thriving garden, or a killer tennis game, or a fiction reading habit, or hosting events, or gaining more physical strength. Maybe you’re ambitious to live in a country where school shootings aren’t the norm, or where there isn’t such a massive wealth gap.

The other thing that people often mean when they say they’ve “lost their ambition” is they’ve lost the motivation to will themselves to operate permanently at an as-fast-as-possible pace. And, yes, I do believe that this is a good thing. I think we’re all seeing the limitations of “move fast and break things.” I’ve found that there is such a thing as right pace and right timing. “Slow down to speed up” is often an even better strategy.

It’s important to remember that ambition is cyclical, not linear. Sometimes we’re in what I refer to as an incubation period — it looks like nothing is happening, but in reality, a lot is happening below the surface that we just can’t see yet.

What’s hard about this is that it takes trust and requires that we let go of the belief that we have the ultimate control over outcomes.

When I left Google, it looked like I was doing absolutely nothing and I felt like I’d lost all motivation and drive. In hindsight, I was deeply ambitious about my own rest and recovery and the absolute most effective and efficient way for me to get to the next stage of my work in the world was to take a year sabbatical where I didn’t try to “produce” anything. Unbeknownst to me at the time, the entire foundation for Directional Living and everything I’ve been doing for the 12 years since was being created.

I have had many people who come to me and say, “all I want to do is read fiction, and lie on the beach, and take naps and I don’t care about having impact on anything whatsoever.” They thought it might be permanent, but in all cases, that has felt good for 6 months or a year but at some point, they found a desire to learn or to be of service or contribute in some way.

So, if you’re in the “I just want to drink margaritas on the beach” phase, go for it to whatever extent your circumstances will allow. I can pretty much guarantee it will shift.

And, lastly, if the word ambition no longer resonates for you for whatever reason, then let it go! I don’t think we have a moral obligation to be ambitious. I’ve rarely, if ever, seen someone be truly happy without caring about or for something or someone, and in my view, that’s authentic ambition.

You met and coached Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez before she ran for Congress. How did you guide her in a way that clarified her path, and what’s the big lesson offered by her example?

What’s important to understand is that I didn’t guide her by mapping out some strategic political trajectory or encouraging her to run for office. We didn’t talk about linear career paths, logical next steps, or ten-year plans. Instead, we focused on living Directionally rather than Destinationally. The work was about clarifying her Big Direction — a high-level sense of where she wanted her life to move, not a specific role or outcome — and then identifying the single next step that felt most aligned with that direction.

Rather than trying to pin down her “purpose,” we paid close attention to her curiosity and energy: what lit her up, what she couldn’t stop thinking about, even when it didn’t make conventional career sense. One of those directionally right steps was a road trip to the protests in Flint, Michigan and Standing Rock. On paper, it wasn’t strategic at all. It didn’t advance a résumé or fit neatly into a plan. It just felt aligned and directionally right. And it was on her way home from that trip that she received the first call about potentially running as a candidate herself.

Her eventual decision to run for Congress wasn’t based on thinking she’d win — by any rational measure, it was a near impossibility. She did it because it felt directionally right. She didn’t need to know the destination in order to take the step. As she’s said herself, things began to unlock when she stopped trying to have a plan and started following her curiosity, prioritizing building an overall good life instead of hitting certain titles by certain ages.

Even now, she isn’t operating from some grand plan to “ascend.” She’s only asking: Is this directionally right? You don’t need to know where you’re going in order to begin. The direction is enough. Clarity doesn’t come from guarantees or perfect planning. It comes through action. Curiosity and joy are the building blocks of fulfillment.

Self-trust and uncertainty tolerance are the most important — and often most atrophied — skills we need in order to build a life we love living.

Thanks for reading Ask Polly! You can buy Megan Hellerer’s book “Directional Living” here. She does one-on-one coaching through her website which is here. I’ve been breaking my own big goals down into smaller experiments and I feel much more relaxed and inspired. Among many other things, I’ve started to realize that I only want to accomplish a big creative goal if I can truly relish the process along the way. That’s what I want my life to be about: RELISHING the present as much as possible. Join me in the comments for more discussion of Hellerer’s excellent insights. I’m hoping to do more interviews like this one this year, so:

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Le Gourmet (1901), Pablo Picasso

Dear Polly,

I have written you two letters over the last ten years, and every time the act alone gave me some peace of mind. I am, too, a helpless cliché, but since you embrace us, I’m writing again.

Five years ago, I met my now ex-partner. I was five years into living in a new country, and had gone through a lot of growth. I had ended a long-term relationship I felt constricted in, moved in with friends and had the time of my life, had a major friend break-up just when the pandemic started, realized the career I was in didn’t work for me, and got way too invested in a series of situationships while pretending not to want anything serious. I had such highs, but also such lows. I realized that I was very codependent and anxious, and I did a lot of work to love myself better and feel comfortable alone.

I was ready to get started with life and own my desires. I made a few bold choices: move to a different living arrangement, get back to university to start a new career, and date in a new, regulated way. I quickly met a new romantic partner, and did all the things I’d never done before: spaced out our first dates to not get too invested too quickly, communicated early and clearly what I wanted from a relationship, told him when I was frustrated by his behavior, gave him time to show me what kind of person he was in ambiguous situations. I felt safe, loved, and cared for, and started believing again that a long-term relationship could be fun and sustainable.

But he is struggling with severe depression, and three years into our relationship he began gradually pulling away from everyone in his life. He was incapable of imagining a future for himself, let alone with me, and became more and more avoidant. The dynamic between us veered increasingly codependent. He was very good at being there for me from a distance, texted me every day, was always available for a phone call, but didn’t show up for dates we had planned because he had fallen asleep, told me often he was spending time with me to please me, because he almost always wanted to be alone, and even then, was often self-absorbed and miserable. I was careful not to show too much frustration or hurt, afraid that he would clam up and that would ruin the few moments we spent together, and aware that I couldn’t understand the pain he was going through. From time to time, he would feel better and I could see a glimpse of the man and the relationship I had fallen in love with.

A few months ago, he pushed me to the edge and I broke up on a whim, after two years of hoping he would get better and things would not only return to normal but keep progressing. It is definitely the right decision, but God, is it painful. I miss him a lot, even though I’m hopeful we can, one day, be friends. He is a great person.

Mostly I miss the hope, the safety, and the excitement that this relationship used to give me, which I believed could return. I felt such intense relief that I had met him, that I was finally in a safe, loving, exciting partnership. The way it crashed down and caused my old codependent patterns to flare up really frightens me. I am scared I’ll never manage to be in a healthy, committed relationship, and the world feels so lonely and unsafe since the break-up.

This didn’t happen in a vacuum: My new career is at a standstill. I’m still working in the same old job I tried to put behind me. I know I’ve learned, grown, and made progress in the last five years, but here I am, older, single, still working a job I don’t want to work. It’s hard not to feel like I’m unable to get where I want to go. It’s also become crystal clear that I was investing so much energy taking care of him and trying to salvage this relationship that I let myself down. I’ve got friends, hobbies, projects, but nothing feels exciting without this relationship in the picture, and I don’t know how to start feeling whole again, at ease in a life that feels big and secure and beautiful, and where I am my own center of gravity.

I guess what I am asking is, how do I find myself again when I am so vulnerable and life feels so grim? How can I build up faith that a loving and committed partnership is possible for me, after seeing how this beautiful relationship turned sour after a few years and how quickly I can lose myself?

Way Off-Center

Dear WOC,

Getting lost by surrendering to fantasies about our brighter, better futures is a constant temptation for all of us these days. If you’ve ever cared too much about someone who was half-absent, if you’ve ever committed to an impressive job that you should’ve run away from, if you’ve ever been addicted or obsessed or fixated or filled with escapist longing — and who hasn’t? — there is always a chance, no matter how beautiful your life is, that you’ll trip and fall back into a delusional hole or get swept up by a self-deceptive tornado or leap into a seductive but ultimately imaginary abyss. When you want a LOT out of this life, and you tell very good stories about how you’re improving and things are getting better and everything is about to be amazing, you are going to LOSE YOURSELF over and over again.

But being lost is actually the good part. Because when you wake up and stop following random trails of breadcrumbs and you notice that you’re somewhere new and scary that you’ve never been before? And reality was different than you imagined? And now you’re on your own and the woods are getting darker and darker and you blame yourself for this and you want someone to come and save you from it?

That’s when you learn a lot very quickly. The most important thing you learn is HOW TO TOLERATE THIS MOMENT. Yes, this one. How to breathe and open your eyes and exist without piping despairing stories into your head. How to feel your sadness. How to step outside and look at the trees and feel flat and empty and uncertain.

But let’s go back to everything that went wrong for you, because right now you’re tempted to feel ashamed and sick and embarrassed about how you landed here yet again, and that’s making your storytelling mind buzz and whir and grind its gears: Did you notice how I blended up all of the obvious mistakes (codependence, fantasy, delusion) with a lot of things that are supposed to be good for you (self-improvement, optimism, building your own bulletproof religion, self-trust)? I did that because that’s how it feels to be a sensitive, thoughtful person who cares a lot about building a great life — and is willing to say so and make big moves and change bad habits. You’re so intense about what you want that you work very, very hard around the clock to FIX what feels a little off, what doesn’t quite fit, what isn’t quite right yet.

That constant, slightly neurotic, slightly anxious FIXING — fixing not just your own problems but also trying to fix everyone else’s — is what makes a codependent. It’s what makes a person prone to fantasy and obsession. But it also makes a person ambitious and successful. It’s what makes a human active and charming and socially adept and assertive and rapacious.

The problem with constant fixing and striving and polishing your behavior and telling newer, better, more optimistic stories about where you’re headed — all seemingly healthy things! — is that you often start to confuse the difficult, exhausting work you’re doing with healthy, fulfilling work. You also start to confuse your anxious stories that focus on set outcomes (“My partner will feel better and learn to have fun with me and commit to building a future together!”) with not just hope, but present happiness.

For a long time there, you were engaged in a battle that was entirely focused on an imaginary fixed point when all of the suspense of the present would be resolved. Your story about that future — a set outcome that was so compelling that you were willing to ignore your emotions and your body and the drab realities of your day-to-day life in pursuit of it — was keeping you going. You were running on empty but your head was filled with fantasies. You were falling to pieces but your stories were still shiny and soothing.

In other words, you were an addict.

All of this will feel like overstating the facts, and that is EXACTLY what I’m doing, in order to demonstrate to you that your reality has actually improved even though it feels much, much worse. You’re kicking a drug right now and that sucks. But objectively, your life is better than ever, because that guy didn’t make you feel good in the present at all. He was exhausting you and you just kept working harder and harder to fix that, and your relationship, and him, and everything else.

The working harder and harder part felt good to you, because working hard often feels good to hard workers. Working hard on doomed things can even feel good, when you’re a person who doesn’t know how to enjoy the present. The telling-stories-about-the-shining-future part feels very good, too – that was what you did to keep working so hard, to keep tolerating the blah and lonely present realities of a boyfriend who couldn’t show up emotionally, had nothing to say, and preferred to be left alone. Instead of saying “What the fuck, man? Bring something to the picnic or take a hike!” you were gentle and patient and tried not to pull him into reality, because that would force YOU to enter reality, TOO.

I know your intentions were good and you love him and he’s a great person — he can still be a great person, don’t worry, but that doesn’t mean you have to look forward to being his friend some day. (Imagine for a second NOT befriending him, and unexpectedly loving that journey for you.) The point is, you’re someone who loves to work so hard on something doomed (and therefore very romantic!) that you ignore your feelings and your body.

That’s part of the reason why suffering worked for you. But receiving upbeat, bullshit texts from your boyfriend also felt great: That was how he kept you addicted to hope, and maybe even kept himself addicted, in spite of the fact that before and after he tapped out those texts he felt not so great or was looking at porn online or was sinking into some other flavor of digital and biochemical abyss.

None of us are above this! Let me be crystal clear: This scenario isn’t some rarefied, exotic, dysfunctional realm that only you and your partner inhabit. MOST HUMANS LIVE THIS WAY NOW.

Likewise, your reaction to your situation — working harder and harder, telling bigger and brighter stories about how everything was about to change, offering more and more support and love and help to your partner as he slowly demonstrated that he no longer had the desire to work hard at anything, including your relationship — can be recast very easily as functional, healthy behavior in our world. We’re all such out-of-body, distracted, confused addicts with so much angst and longing and anxiety swirling around inside our cells, and our culture is so good at tricking us into believing that we need to do absolutely arbitrary, worthless, ridiculous, and also deeply addictive things to stay ‘sane,’ that it’s very difficult to separate grounded, healthy actions from delusional actions. We can’t tell our good stories from our bad stories. We don’t know if we’re working too hard or not working hard enough.

We — not you, but all of us! — are deeply confused. We’re confused because the stories that we’re told, and therefore the stories that we tell ourselves, are getting slicker and brighter and shinier and more addictive to believe.

Complicated, slow ways of getting to know someone and understanding them and spending time with them, and trusting our bodies when things start to feel wrong, have been replaced by instant dates with impatient and mostly virtual humans who can stoke the fires of our affection very quickly from a great distance, cheered on by a chorus of facile self-help gurus who can swiftly opine “more open communication” and “more supportive talk” and “give him enough space to breathe” and “buy yourself a boba and take a deep breath, it’ll all be fine, queen!”

Yes, that’s right, I’m the real villain of this story! But to be fair, my columns take ten hours to read. So, I mean, there’s a LITTLE bit of nutritious nuance in there, at least?

That said, I’m dedicated to offering slightly shorter responses lately, because the important thing in most cases — in all cases? — is that we stop mystifying the paths we’re on and why we’re there and start using simple words to describe reality instead.

Here’s what’s simple about your situation: You felt like shit with this man. You didn’t know it because he slowly became a project. You feel great when you have a big project to work on, particularly when you can tell a very seductive story about everything that’s going to change once that project is completed.

I want you to understand that you’re not just getting over a big heartbreak, you’re also fighting an existential battle right now. You’re struggling to live in the moment, to appreciate the small wonders of each day (ugh, yuck, who fucking cares?), to do hard stuff that doesn’t have to lead anywhere specific or glorious or fantastical, to do things you love that are still sometimes taxing or don’t bring you much, things that don’t necessarily add up to any big-picture dream. You’re not just being forced to give up on this fantasy of turning your half-there boyfriend into a secure, loving, happy partner, you’re also being forced to give up all of your fantasies and dreams and set outcomes and finish lines at once.

When you tell me “nothing feels exciting without this relationship in the picture,” what you’re saying is that you were lifting and boosting and glamorizing everything you did with your romantic story about your romantic partner. We all do that, of course. I mean, for years, my advice was “Tell a better story about your reality.” It’s not like that’s the worst thing in the world for us to do when we’re suffering! I’m all about storytelling if it can pull a human being out of a deep, dark well.

But when you tell stories that keep you alienated from reality, that aren’t aligned with how your body feels when your boyfriend shows up and says “I don’t want to be here”? You aren’t living in meatspace at all. You’re living inside your head. You’re building fantasies every day instead of living in the uncertain present.

You’ve demonstrated over and over again that you have a habit of living inside your head. People who do that are the most susceptible to the bad design of our modern world. We treat texts like song lyrics. We treat imaginary scenarios like real things that happened. And we treat set outcomes and big goals — dreams, fantasies, and also our real-life ambitions — like they have the power to change us into beings that are more vivacious and joyful and at peace than we ourselves have ever been, outside of a hot tub after three whiskey sours.

Don’t get in a hot tub alone after three whiskey sours, by the way. Let’s live in reality, motherfuckers! Because you CAN feel vivacious and joyful and at peace right now. I’m not kidding and I’m not exaggerating. You just have to take in the reality of where you are and how your body feels without allowing your head to bust in and start telling an addict’s stories about how hopeless and fucked everything is and how you need to take fifteen million important immediate steps to climb back into the delusional funhouse you were living in before.

You are lost right now, you say. My advice to you is: Stay lost. Look around. What’s here?

You are alive. You are not about to die. (My apologies to those who are about to die — you’re here, too, you’re alive, too, and it’s not over until it’s over, bitch!) You have friends and hobbies and a job, and not all of these things will feel pointless forever.

For now, ask yourself what it will take to pick up “lost” and “empty” and “pointless” and hold them like they’re important, like they matter, like they’re here to show you something TODAY. By “show you something” I don’t mean “teach you a lesson that will lead to another bright future.” I mean show you how to be here right now. I mean, the word “empty” will make you feel empty. And you will just show up for empty for a minute and the meaning of EMPTY will shift.

What if you treated “FUCK THIS SHIT FOREVER” like a little note inside a fortune cookie, and you put it in your pocket and relished it and feared it and cried over it and also enjoyed it.

What if you respected fuck this shit forever for the moment. Not forever. What is forever? What does it mean to respect your anger? Can you feel despair and feel respect for that despair at the same time?

How might it feel to have no stories about what this random, arbitrary, slowly sinking man signified? What if you acknowledge all of your love without wishing not to feel it anymore, or hoping to get over it quickly, or wanting to shut it all off? What if you show respect for those feelings without treating them as PART OF A LARGER PROBLEM or PIECE OF A DAMNING DIAGNOSIS? What if you refuse to pathologize where you are, and instead you say to yourself:

WE ARE ALL ADDICTS. WE ARE ALL LOST.

Feel those words and keep them in your pocket, like a fortune from a cookie, like a little secret, like a big dream you ripped out of the future and started living right now.

Everyone you know right now is working towards a future that won’t fix them or make them happy, because achieving big goals and dreams alone doesn’t make anyone happy. And nothing can make you happy when you can’t remember how to enjoy your own mind without someone with mythical importance and weight in the room, bearing witness to the thoughts coming out of your mouth. Nothing makes you happy when your days are just a series of fixes to buzz or numb you out of reality.

There are untold stores of joy inside your body but you’ll never feel them as long as you have absolutely no idea how to put down your phone and have an awkward conversation in real time with a complete stranger and — crucially — to see and feel and taste the value of doing that. Even though that stranger doesn’t matter that much, even though you’re not on your way to something better, even though you’re not sure what’s worthwhile and what’s pointless, suddenly you feel brighter and you don’t know why.

Meaningful lives are built from tiny moments like this, in the present. Happiness lies in the small, clumsy mistakes that make up a life.

When you learn to feel at peace in the present, in reality, that’s when you start to understand that joy only exists right now. It doesn’t loom in front of us. Our stories about joy being just around the corner block the joy that’s here right now. And there’s no rule that says you will only find joy if you find true love first.

Don’t waste this moment fixating on true love (or great jobs or perfect friends or more meaningful hobbies) as a pathway to joy. Instead, simply ask yourself, “What do I like to do? When does my body feel good? How can I try that right now?”

Do small experiments and see what happens and see how you feel. That’s where you need to live and breathe. No big, sweeping stories about what’s next will help you more than being right here and figuring out how to stay here. Nothing will feel better than retiring all of your old stories and learning to live without them permanently.

Joy isn’t about solving puzzles or fixing things. Joy is about breathing and not knowing. Joy says

You are lost.

And joy means that as a compliment.

Polly

You’re lost, too, bitch, and don’t you forget it! I know I said I’d get to the point quickly. I ALMOST managed that! It was fun trying and failing, motherfuckers! I also said I was going to make less Ask Pollys free, but this one needs to be dispensed like floating seeds on the wind in the springtime, and so does my interview with Megan Hellerer that’s running this Friday, so stay tuned. After that, you will MISS ME! So sweet lord almighty, even if you’ve never subscribed before…

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Why should you subscribe now? Because my job is to remind you that you don’t need more addictive bullshit in your life to feel good. You just need to slow down and recognize the romance of your life at this moment. Yes, it’s romantic already. I’m here to point that out to you, once or twice a week, every single week until the stars fall from the sky.

Don’t forget to share the romance with someone you love:

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Send letters to askpolly@protonmail.com. I love doing this job and I never want to stop doing it, so I appreciate your support a lot.

The Poet (1911), Pablo Picasso

Do you take big, courageous risks every single day, but subconsciously shame or mock or denigrate yourself when you don’t get the results you want?

Do you allow other people’s reactions and opinions to make you feel shitty about yourself, even when you recognize that they’re not interested or invested enough to see you clear…

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Woman with Chignon (1901), Pablo Picasso

Dear Polly,

I don’t typically write in to things like this but I’ve been following your column for ages and I wanted to say that there should be a different perspective on this one.

I’m a single mother by choice. I made that choice at 37 and had my baby 6 months ago at 38. Like the letter writer, I did everything p…

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Girl Before a Mirror (1932), Pablo Picasso

Dear Polly,

As soon as I read your reassurance this morning that you like responding to rambling cliché letters from embarrassing stereotype readers, I started composing this letter in my head. Because I am a rambling cliché and an embarrassing stereotype. I am a single 33-year old woman, I have my shit together in pretty much every way, and I desperately want to fall in love.

I have a newish job that I’m good at, that feels meaningful, and I mostly enjoy, without it being my whole life (major progress!). I have deep, meaningful friendships that enrich my life and that I tend to with care. I have a sunny, cheerful apartment filled with treasured things and my beloved black cat. I like my own company. I work out and I sleep 8 hours a night and write in my journal and make pottery on Wednesday evenings. I share all this as evidence that I have CHECKED THE BOXES. I have done the work.

Dating and romance have always been the part that feels hard. I am an only child and my parents divorced when I was a baby, and both remain single today. My dad had a lot of girlfriends that created chaos, and my mom made it very clear that men are only good at making women messy. Growing up I was rewarded for being smart and funny, but I was a chubby kid and didn’t feel attractive. I’m still chubby and still have some body stuff, but I’m also the most confident and the cutest I’ve ever been, and I know intellectually that plenty of men are attracted to me. I’ve had short and longish relationships and situationships and flings and one night stands. It never felt quite right.

I want so badly to be in love. I want to be treasured. I want to wake up next to someone and be glad he’s there. I want commitment, even if it scares me, and most of all, I want kids. I want to have a baby, probably two, and I want them NOW. Or soon, at least. It’s an ache.

I am obsessively aware of the age at which people have met their partner. I have passed my therapist’s reassurance that she met her husband at 31, the friend who made out with someone at a party at 32 and married him at 36. I know that you met your husband at 34 and then had two kids and I can’t tell you how tightly I hold on to the 18-month runway that implies for me. Tick tock!

I am tempted to opt out of the whole thing, to say I’m over dating and to pursue parenthood on my own. I have the resources and community and honestly, the personality, to be a single mom by choice, it’s something I’ve thought about and talked about for years. But deep down, I don’t want to! I want my kids to have a dad as funny and loving and involved as mine was, and I want to be in love with him and raise them together. It feels increasingly like this is too much to ask for.

Last summer, I’d quit my job and planned to take a couple months off, and I sat next to my best friend at the pool on a Sunday afternoon and told her I wanted a summer fling. I had a lot of free time, my life felt a little up in the air, it was hot and sticky, and I wanted to make out with someone. I went home and downloaded an app known for these sorts of matches and there he was, a man who was also not working for the summer and was moving to a different city in the fall and was looking for “nothing serious, unless we click” (ha!).

Obviously, I fell for him. It wasn’t just that the sex was really fun (it was) and he was funny and kind and steady and easy to be around (he was) and that the built-in end date kept me from nitpicking about all the boxes he didn’t check (it did). It was that finally, FINALLY, I had someone I could see in my Real Life. My friends would love this guy. My MOM would love this guy. We had all these weird overlaps that tied us together, so many moments in the past we could have met. The same politics and vision for our lives and sleep schedule. Sure, he didn’t want to talk about his feelings and sure, he didn’t want me to meet his friends or to meet mine, and sure, he probably just liked sleeping with me and having someone to ask how his day was, but isn’t that what a relationship is, really, asking about each other’s days?

Well, no. Because the truth is, this guy was extremely clear he really was just looking for something casual. Even when he talked to me for an hour on the phone at night, even when he was supportive from afar when my mom got sick while she and I were on a trip together, even when he PICKED ME UP AT THE FUCKING AIRPORT, he was going to move away and we were not going to be together.

I wanted to ask him to try dating long distance. I didn’t. I ended things early, a week before he left, telling him how much I’d let myself fall for him and how the experience of being with him made me realize what I really want is something committed and real, leaving PLENTY of room for him to say, “me too,” which he did not. And since then, I’ve gotten a job and figured out what’s going on with my mom and cut back on the booze and started working out and going to bed early again. It has been six months, and I still think about him every day.

I think about running into him at an airport or on the street. I fantasized about him calling on my birthday, then on his birthday (which would make no sense?), then on New Years, then on Valentine’s day. I think about us figuring out how to deal with the distance, how I’d take the train on a Thursday afternoon and let myself into his apartment and have dinner on the stove when he got home from work. I think about how we’d decide which furniture to keep when we move in together. I think about telling him I’m pregnant with our baby, the two of us telling our families.

I know this is fucking nuts. I know it’s not really about him at all, that I’ve scotch taped his face onto the familiar fantasy of the guy who wants to be with me. We’ve texted a couple times and he’s been friendly and a little flirty and has given zero indication he wants to see me again. My brain knows he didn’t want a relationship with me and that once somebody doesn’t love me, who the fuck cares? (a favorite essay of yours).

Apparently I still fucking care!!!!!!!!

I am doing the things I am supposed to do to find my person. I’m refreshing my profile on Hinge, I’m walking around without headphones and smiling at men in coffee shops, I’m telling people I want to be set up. A couple months ago I went to a SPORTS BAR on a Sunday afternoon to casually meet a single guy that my friend’s husband watches football with (insane!), and wouldn’t you know it, he had just gotten back together with his ex that morning. I mean, what the fuck?!!!!

And of course, the mom and dad stuff is at play here. My mom is sick, but they assure us she will get better. I look at her life — alone in a beautiful sunny house with a flourishing garden, driving herself to doctor’s appointments, refusing to rely on anyone (except me) — and I feel sad. She has started to soften, and she asked me the other night on the phone if I’d ever been in love. “I thought you didn’t believe in that!” I wanted to shout. But I asked her back and she said, “only your dad.” My dad, who she suddenly doesn’t hate after three decades of resentment, who offers to go with her to chemo, who crosses state lines in his beat-up old pickup truck to meet up with women he’s matched with on Bumble, ever hopeful.

I have so many paragraphs of your letters screenshotted on my phone, about sharp knives that cut and being a salty anchovy when someone expects something sweet, about rich fucking tapestries. I feel like I’ve mostly metabolized your advice. I think I’m flawed and also pretty great. I really do like my life. I can be honest and intense and vulnerable and risk being unlikeable (can I?). I know that I tend to conflate sex and love, to sleep with people too quickly, and that much of that is rooted in not feeling good in my body or attractive to men for many years. I am aware of my pattern of falling for guys who aren’t actually available because they are literally or metaphorically about to leave.

I just don’t know what to do with all of it. Where do I put all this wanting? How do I let go of the fantasy of this guy? Where do I find the right one? How do I stay hopeful? Why is this part so hard for me?

XOXO

It Is A Truth Universally Acknowledged, That A Single Woman In Possession of Good Fortune, Must Be In Want of a Man (Ugh!!!)

Dear IIATUATASWIPOGFMBIWOAM(U!!!),

The pseudonym you’ve given yourself is very long. I’ve never had to write such a long acronym before. Here are the first words I wrote to you without thinking: “Your name is too long. I’ve decided recently that my columns are too long, too.”

Both of these sentiments are true and accurate. But it’s also accurate to say that some of the best Ask Pollys are extra long, and it takes a very special Ask Polly letter writer to ignore 14 years of short pseudonyms in order to quote the opening line of Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice.” You also state, “I am a rambling cliché and an embarrassing stereotype.” And let’s not mince words here, quoting Jane Austen amplifies these vibes to the point of BRIDGERTON CLOWNISHNESS.

Honesty is risky. When you dare to show yourself, you run the risk of looking like a cliché. But when you’re honest and daring and cliché out in the open? Ironically, that makes you SPECIAL! After all, there are easily 1,000 published Ask Polly columns out there, and you’re the only person with the nerve to use a very long Jane Austen quote as your pseudonym. The GALL!!! That’s not just clownishness. What you’ve got are haughty queen clown master and commander vibes.

You’re a nice person, that’s obvious. You’re grounded and loyal and thoughtful and productive. You’re a good friend, a good daughter, a good neighbor. But you’re also an imperious aristocrat swathed in coral velvet and polished bright green stones, riding in a glorious wooden sled pulled by ferocious Mongolian attack-rabbits the size of small wolves. These are simply the facts.

You’re ready to compromise on the man front because you’re reasonable. You can shrink to fit, accommodate, get practical for the sake of having a baby. But deep inside, your irrepressible spirit is shouting obscene proclamations (“My god, most poetry is so boring! This town needs more raspberry soft serve! Someone book me a massage therapist for Friday evening after my dance party!”) while gliding effortlessly through the world behind your gargantuan sleigh-pulling rabbits, sipping almond-and-cardamom matcha with mango cream on top, rereading “The Great Gatsby” on the way to your friend’s two-martini dinner party just to savor the freakishly delirious verbiage Fitzgerald dedicates to longing.

Like every great artist and true romantic, you love longing. That’s normal and natural. But you’re also a CPA of longing. You have memorized all of the crucial statistics that will tell you if you’re going to succeed or fail. You are stable and steady and lovable but like all brilliant, unique queen clown master and commanders, you believe that you will either ride to glory or be a humiliating defeated failure forever and ever and ever. The numbers you memorize form a paint-by-numbers picture that’s half “Cinderella,” half “Game of Thrones.” That’s romantic and gothic and deliriously engaging, but it still doesn’t capture everything you are.

I know you feel reasonably confident and cute, but I sense in your letter a tendency to believe that you can’t possibly be loved for exactly who you are, and a fear that you’ll be abandoned if you show your full fucking self to others. So I want to start our JOURNEY (oof, I’m sorry!) together by telling you this: People in general and straight men in particular love women who are exactly like you. I’m not saying ALL MEN. Oh my god, who could ever care about taking an average of the bad taste of all men and navigating based on that absolutely dreary data? What I’m saying is that I can personally guarantee you that a literal fuck ton of men love you already. You say three words and they know they love you, boom, it’s done, no more negotiating, they’re in.

I want you to eat that fact. Swallow it without chewing and let it live inside your body from now on. This is an edible, nutritive knowledge.

You don’t need to persuade anyone of anything, or behave strategically. You can state your desires plainly. This is the most confident move, actually. Good men are soothed by direct talk and confidence.

But also? Many secure men will seem less interesting to you because they are so visible, and so steady, and they see you clearly, too. You might think you’re not attracted to them simply because they might not have your bluster or swagger. Or maybe they aren’t about to disappear, like your summer fling promised he would, and like your dad did. Your dad had girlfriends who “created chaos” possibly because your dad is sweet and romantic but not good at real, sustained intimacy. Your mom seems lonely to you not because she’s actually unhappy (doesn’t sound like it!) possibly because she’s a little rigid and not good at real, sustained intimacy. These are guesses, but this feels like an underlying theme of your letter.

Are you good at intimacy? Being good at it sometimes includes getting to know people whether or not you can guarantee that they “check all the boxes.” Real intimacy requires some leaps of faith. You slowly observe and learn and see how you feel without making declarations. You don’t let people into your bedroom quickly and you don’t write them off quickly, either. You tolerate the discomfort and vulnerability of SEEING and BEING SEEN. You stay present in this moment of intense uncertainty.

That part was very hard for me when I was 34. I loved my husband but I hated being seen. I wanted him to be running away from me, which I equated with true romance. I was bad at intimacy. I was an attack rabbit. He loved what I was, and that felt weird. He was nothing like my parents, both of whom were very, very, very afraid of making themselves vulnerable to anyone or anything.

My guess is that you’re very afraid and you’re hiding in schemes and fantasies instead of allowing some space to be soft and present and sometimes openly hurt. I worry about your choice to not ask for what you wanted this summer when you realized you wanted it. Instead you cut your time together short and hoped that he’d make a grand gesture. I want you to reorient yourself towards asking for exactly what you want in real time, among real people — making yourself vulnerable in the moment — with friends and romantic interests alike. Dare to show exactly who you are.

When anxious attachment meets an enormous imagination, you live inside your head too much and you emboss your obsession with rare gems and precious stones and then you can’t put it down because it gets brighter and more colorful than your actual life. You get tricked into thinking your life is drab and your longing is magnificent.

And when you do that, you reduce the whole vivid, bursting, ebullient universe down to a keyhole. When you imagine your summer fling saying the exact right things to you, your glorious wooden sled turns into a pumpkin and your coral velvet becomes rags and your huge Mongolian attack-rabbits become mice. That’s NOT REALITY. Reality is attack rabbits! Mice are an illusion!

The more you train your body to get turned on by pumpkins and rags and mice, the less possible it is to see that the reality of how irresistible and divine you are right now, at this exact minute.

You’re pragmatic and lovable and loyal, which is amazing. That’s such a gift, for an arrogant, brilliant, imaginative, bizarro queen like yourself. So few royals are also grounded. See, that’s part of why so many men are dying — literally dying — just to snuffle your perfect neck or press their palms into the soles of your bare feet. “IF ONLY!” they are growling to their friends, as we speak. “IF ONLY QUEEN CLOWN MASTER AND COMMANDER WOULD LET ME AN INCH NEARER TO HER SWEET SCENT OF MAGNOLIA AND OAK, I WOULD SNUFFLE IT UP ALL DAY LONG FOREVER AND EVER AND EVER, AMEN!”

Related: Are my columns really too long? Or do I stubbornly insist on giving my ebullient spirit adequate space and time to be EXCESSIVELY EXPANSIVE AND EXTRA EXUBERANT?

I do want to make things very simple and short sometimes. I want to honor that, too, the way you honor your reasonable, steady, numbers-and-measurements-loving self. We have to respect our multitude of selves, don’t we? We have to honor opposing forces within our ridiculous, absurd EXTRA CLOWNISH microbiomes!

When we relish what we are — all of it shifting, changing, unpredictable! — we remember that we are well-nigh irresistible to most. We are lusty and lusted after, because we are BIG, motherfucker. And when we deny that a woman has a right to be so big, you know what happens? We imagine that clocks are ticking down. We equate humility and pragmatism with compromise, smallness, and surrendering to the agony of defeat. We feel prematurely old. We avoid looking like a cliché. We hide.

Notice how you were moved to write to me once I said I LOVE A STEREOTYPE. You blossom when you’re given permission to be everything you are, including the embarrassing things, out in the open.

I’m like that, too. I’ve been subconsciously trying to be more normal lately, and it’s dragging me down. I’ve been trying to think like a regular human being with bills to pay. I’ve been seeing myself as a little bit of an old fuck-up with nothing to add, nothing to share, not much to say. And bitch, THAT IS AN ILLUSION. That’s not me. I mean, I am a little bit of a fuck up and I do have bills to pay and I do have a numerical age. But NORMAL? My god. Have you met me?

I can’t fucking hide, is the bottom line, and neither can you. When you hide, no one can see how uniquely delectable and sublime you are.

So don’t hide. You know you can have a baby on your own. I agree that this is an absolutely solid and smart back-up plan for you. I think knowing that you’ll have a baby one way or another is very soothing. Be soothed by that the way you’re soothed by the simple fact that you’re deliriously attractive to so many men that they are in excruciating pain when they get a tiny bit too close to you.

Armed by these facts, get back into your goddamn wooden sled, sip your goddamn mango cream and almond and cardamom matcha, pull your coral velvet up around your shoulders, and go back to the pages of “The Great Gatsby” yet again, how gorgeous and then sad he makes all of the excesses, all of those impatient and unsettled and desperate partygoers, all wanting so badly to become someone, to matter, to be seen. As your attack rabbits whisk you over the snowy wilderness, read about Daisy’s inability to recognize real soul and sensitivity and earnest devotion when she sees it, because she’s too anxious and too determined to cloak herself in what she views as appropriate and alluring and delectable sights and sounds. Read about Gatsby’s determination to prove himself, but the more effort he exerts, the smaller his keyhole on the world becomes.

Are you a writer, by the way? Should you be writing fiction instead of creating it inside your head? Are you an artist? Should you be living like one? Do you need a little coral velvet in your wardrobe? Should you make some earrings out of bright green stones right now?

You can have what you want. Live like it’s already yours.

Sometimes when you feel afraid, you start to live inside numbers and fantasies instead of deepening your existing connections and daring to show your heart, out in the world. I understand. My fears have dragged me down this past year. But I’m an ATTACK RABBIT, goddamn it, and I want to pull some fucked up queen’s sleigh through the snowy wilderness. I want more exhausting and harrowing adventures and ridiculous experiments that sometimes make no sense at all. That’s reality. I have the energy and I have the verve and I can do anything under the fucking sun. So can you!

So hang up the dull, defeated stories. You’re not desperate. That will never be you, I’m sorry. You felt free when you had a fling because you were pretending to be someone who didn’t want anything. Once you admitted that you did want a partner, you felt 500x worse than before. Right now, you’re still nursing an emotional hangover from pretending to want less than you really want.

Stop trying to disguise the strength of your desires. Wanting a baby doesn’t make you sad, it makes you hot and bright and glorious and ready for LIFE ITSELF. You’re a rambling cliché and gorgeous clown-demon queen who grows more loving and expansive the more honest and direct she is. Have your babies. Have your cake and eat it, too. But don’t fuck guys casually anymore. It’s loyalty and honor or nothing at all. Tell them to bend the goddamn knee or get the fuck out.

Why? Because you’re special. No further explanation or proof required.

Polly

Thanks for reading Ask Polly! How do you let your fear of being a stereotype block you from showing your full self to others? What will it take to make your life a tiny bit bigger and more colorful right now? Let’s discuss in the comments. Please feel free to forward this column to a friend who doesn’t know that there’s a team of attack rabbits ready to pull them through the snowy wilderness while they snack on raspberry soft serve.

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Send your letters to askpolly@protonmail.com. Stereotypes and clichés, I’m here for you!

Bathers (1918), Pablo Picasso

Recently I had an interesting exchange with an Ask Polly reader that I liked to share with everyone because I enjoyed it so much. It begins with this email I wrote after a subscription was disputed.

Hi Teresa.

I see you disputed a charge from Ask Polly but have been reading my column for years. I accepted the dispute which should refund you the $50 for a yearly subscription.

Your dispute said “product not received.” Was there a specific complaint or some feedback you want to share about the column? I’m just wondering if there’s anything I can do to improve my column, particularly for people like you who’ve been reading for a long time.

Your money has been refunded either way, of course, and this note wasn’t written by AI or by an assistant. I’m just trying to make sure that I reach out to longtime readers because I’m very appreciative of their support over the years. Substack defaults to challenging every dispute, but that feels off to me.

Either way, best wishes to you and sincere thanks for reading for so long!

Polly

Dear Polly,

I have to admit, when I first received this email, I thought it was sent by a scammer. My personal information was recently part of a data breach, and as a longtime reader and fan of both you and Ask Polly, I certainly would never dispute my subscription charge. On top of that, it’s hard for me to believe that Polly would reach out to me personally.

However, I thought, if anyone would, you in particular might enjoy the long, somewhat strange explanation of how my subscription charge got disputed.

After receiving your email this morning, I remembered that my ex-husband mentioned some weird charges on a credit card that used to be a joint card.

You see, Polly, two years ago (almost exactly!), my then-husband told me, a week before my 50th birthday, that he wanted to leave me. For me, it was the most devastating surprise. I italicize because, when it comes to divorce, I don’t have the words to emphasize just how devastating it can be. And over the long, hard slog of the past two years of trying to move on from my divorce, I cannot tell you how many times I’ve thought about writing to Ask Polly, sometimes just to vent and sometimes to ask, “How do you get over being so bitter, sad, and angry after your life implodes in middle age?”

But I never sent those letters. Because I thought, Why would Polly answer a letter from the embarrassing stereotype of the middle-aged lady who was left by her husband and didn’t see it coming?

Instead, I ended up channeling that energy to writing a personal essay (because, of course, I am a writer, too) about how a sad middle-aged lady can become an unexpected badass. It even got published on New Year’s Day! Which is a win I very much needed. In my essay, I wrote:

“Yes, I have failed in life, not because of my personality, but because I am human, and sometimes being a human in this world is hard. But when I do find myself standing alone at a crossroads, I always make the choice to push through.”

But, oh, how I have digressed from the topic at hand! To give you the short explanation after this rambling response, my ex-husband disputed the charge, somewhat ironically, to a subscription that helped me survive the last two years of my life.

So, now, I’m going to go sign up for a new subscription to Ask Polly, using a credit card that is mine and mine alone, because it turns out even a devastating surprise divorce can set a woman free.

Thank you for reaching out personally and for writing Ask Polly. I can’t wait to continue reading.

Sincerely,

Teresa

Thanks to Teresa for her great reply! Her essay is relatable and inspiring so I wanted to share a link so that all Ask Polly readers can enjoy it.

I also want to take this opportunity to remind everyone that I love answering letters from embarrassing stereotypes! It is absolutely impossible not to be a ridiculous cliché over and over again, from birth to death. So many of the jarring or devastating events in a life feel both shameful and HORRIBLY TYPICAL. Most of us simply can’t believe that, instead of dodging the mistakes and dead ends we’ve worked so hard to avoid (and believed we COULD avoid, with enough hard work), we ALL wind up being humbled in one way or another. (Or in many, many ways!)

One of the worst things about the internet is that it teaches us to see every aspect of the human condition as stereotypical. Our most fundamental battles and tribulations as humans were once honored in great literature; now we’re exposed to millions of snide jesters who turn shared rites of passage into disposable punchlines.

But disappointment, frustration, regret, and bewilderment come for all of us eventually. So don’t hesitate to write to me about it. And remember to talk to your friends about your mistakes, regrets, and big worries, too. When you treat your despair like it’s shameful and stupid, you amplify your suffering for no reason. Even when there’s no easy solution, one of the best things to do in the face of dread and anxiety is to talk about it.

“I feel like I’m all washed up,” I said to a good friend a few weeks ago over a beer. We laughed and she said that she felt the same way. And ever since then, I’ve felt so relaxed and optimistic. Sometimes you have to admit that you’re a stereotype in order to experience the unique joy of being you.

Thanks for reading Ask Polly! If you ever have a subscription problem, feel free to contact me directly at askpolly@protonmail.com. If you’ve been reading for free for years, I’m publishing less free posts these days, so consider a paid subscription to stay in the loop. Paid subscribers keep this column running and I appreciate your continued support so much!

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Jacqueline with Flowers (1954), Pablo Picasso

Dear Polly,

The social fallout from my recent breakup feels crushing, and I don’t know what to do about it.

About three months ago, I ended a three-year relationship. Both of us saw marriage and a family as the next step. We had been living together for a year, and I felt sick with ambivalence. I tried to expre…

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When I was very young, one of my roommates had a lot of notes for me. I didn’t dress correctly, I didn’t eat the right things, my taste in art was all wrong, I said the wrong things, my song lyrics were too obvious. I should try to emulate the Pixies, I should study fashion trends, I should make cooler choices. I was a rube…

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Dear Polly,

A precursory thank you: Your column often feels like I am reading something that was written by a fairy secretly employed in the deepest depths of my own chest, tirelessly working to keep my heart open and loving. You manage to write the perfect thing I need to hear and help me tap into the hardest parts of …

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Weeping Woman (1937), Pablo Picasso

Dear Polly,

Is it possible to forgive yourself? If so, how and when? It not, how do you live with yourself?

Fifteen years ago, my fiancée discovered I was having an affair. She broke off the engagement and immediately moved out. She sent an email detailing every way I’d broken her trust and the damage I’d done. She said …

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The girls of Avignon (1907), Pablo Picasso

Dear Polly,

I have pored over your column since the beginning. I often find myself reading your last line and saying aloud, in open-mouthed awe: “That’s fucking GENIUS.”

(To quote Penelope Cruz in Vicky Cristina Barcelona: “… I said genius, … ge-nius…”)

And I genuinely mean that. Where else can we source real, sou…

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