The Fortune (1901), Pablo Picasso

Hi Polly,

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

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Le Prince carnaval (1966), Pablo Picasso

Dear Polly,

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

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Drunk Woman Is Tired (1902), Pablo Picasso

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fernande’s Head (1906), Pablo Picasso

Dear Polly,

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

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

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Flowers (1901), Pablo Picasso

Dear Polly,

Here’s the deal: We have a three-year-old. I don’t need to work full-time — or at all. I would prefer to not work full-time. It took several years of therapy to get me off the hamster wheel of a traditional career track. I currently work part-time, but stress levels for me and our family feel unnecessarily high.

I …

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Melancholy woman (1902), Pablo Picasso

I used to be firmly anti-regret. I prided myself on having few regrets and refusing to fixate on the ones I had. “Sure, that was a mistake,” I’d say about a bad breakup or impulsive decision to quit a good job, “but it led to so many new experiences I wouldn’t have had otherwise!”

(COULD I HAVE BEEN MORE INSUFFERABL…

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Lovers (1923), Pablo Picasso

Dear Polly,

My wife and I are in a downward spiral lately and I’m finding it hard to pull out of it. When I try to connect or relate, it goes sideways and I’m surprised or frustrated or indignant. Even though it seems ridiculous, where I notice this the most lately is when we talk about books. We both enjoy listening to audiob…

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Head of a Woman No. 5. Portrait of Dora Maar (1939), Pablo Picasso

Most of us have been trained to minimize our negative reactions to the world, stifle our criticism, mute our irritations, play down our frustrations. As kids we were trained not to grumble or roll our eyes or talk back. As teenagers, we were told we had “an attitude problem” if we were sk…

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Man and Woman in Café (1903), Pablo Picasso

Dear Polly,

Sometimes I write to you to get through my own feelings. Today, a friend and I broke up. I told him, “We are no longer friends.” I feel awful. I hate friendship breakups because they cast doubt on all my existing relationships.

I read part of an ethnography called “The Mystic of Friendship.” It’s abou…

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Apple (1914), Pablo Picasso

You know how I keep advocating for experimentation — feeling your way forward, figuring things out as you go along, trying new things? Well, that approach is biting me on the ass right now.

I signed up for a drawing class. I wanted to take an oil painting class, but I figured I should start at the very beginning before I started wasting expensive paint. But unfortunately, my drawing class doesn’t include colored pencils or sketching or charcoals. We aren’t even drawing faces or animals. We aren’t drawing houses or landscapes or even cartoons of angry squirrels (my personal passion).

Nope. We sharpen our pencils — boring, regular PENCILS!!! — and we sit and stare at an apple and try to draw it. APPLES ARE SO BORING. And then we try very, VERY hard to shade in the shadows and erase some highlights and… Listen, I can’t even use words to describe what we have to do, because I have no fucking idea what’s going on. For two hours I sit there feeling confused and failing, over and over and over again.

I like my teacher but she isn’t the most verbal person. I think she’s been an illustrator for so long that she can’t remember how to put any of it into words. She just sits there and draws an apple and shades it in as we’re watching. Occasionally she says things like, “Now I’m shading.” and "Do it sort of like this.” and “Let’s capture the shadows now.”

Then we have to try. (TRY WHAT, EXACTLY? HOW?!!!) She walks around the room and says stuff like “Maybe make smaller strokes.” or “This looks a little hairy.” Then she asks to take each person’s pencil and she corrects what they’re doing. “Like this,” she says. “See?”

No, I don’t see. I have no idea what she’s doing or how. But I still say to myself, “Make it less hairy!” As if I understand! And then I try and fail to make anything less hairy.

I don’t blame the teacher. Mostly, I’m amazed at how terrible I am at drawing. DRAWING!! I THOUGHT I WAS PRETTY GOOD AT DRAWING!!! WHO KNEW DRAWING WAS SO HARD?!!!!

Yesterday when I got home, I called my friend.

“I thought drawing would be fun,” I told her. “But as it turns out, drawing is not fun at all. In fact, drawing makes writing look like hot sex.”

“Well, it sounds like you are learning something important,” she said.

***

Every week on Wednesday morning, I think about skipping my drawing class. Why should I go? What’s the point? Two hours of torment, that I paid money for?!!

I thought it would be relaxing and meditative. I thought we would get to sit behind giant easels and draw naked people in huge strokes. I thought we would be able to MAKE BOLD LINES WITH BIG MESSY CHARCOAL STICKS. I thought the room would be packed with hot, skinny men with strange facial hair, not retired women who seem to dislike drawing just as much as I do.

I’ve never taken an art class as an adult, outside of pottery classes. I probably should’ve done a little research before I signed up, but I liked the feeling of leaping into something I knew nothing about. If the experience was jarring, all the better! I wanted to do something completely new and unknown.

What a ridiculous choice!

But I’m honestly surprised by my lack of improvement. And I’m stunned by how little explanation we’re being offered. Yesterday the woman next to me was very confused and I actually had to explain to her what was happening, because after puzzling over it for a solid five minutes, I finally figured it out.

“I’m very good at math, and this makes no sense,” the woman said.

“The angle is steeper than it should be, because you’re not drawing a cube with 90-degree angles,” I said. “You’re drawing how it looks from a very specific angle and distance away. So the angle gets steeper or less steep depending on where you are in relation to the object.”

“Oh!” she said. “I get it! I was so stuck inside my preconceptions!”

“Me, too,” I said.

***

It’s hard not to get stuck inside your preconceptions. But I know now that I don’t want to waste countless hours trying to learn how to draw. Because I don’t like practicing drawing at all. It feels like wasted time. In fact, while I’m drawing, all I can think about is all of the other things I’d rather be doing.

It’s funny (and a little jarring) to remember that experimenting doesn’t mean deciding on something and then doing it better and better from that point forward. Experimenting means fucking around and finding out. That means you might discover that you love something, or you might discover that you hate it. You might succeed immediately or you could fail repeatedly. You might hate it and then eventually learn to love it.

Experimentation lays bare your assumptions after the fact. I realize now that I assumed that I was someone who would LOVE to draw. I imagined that I’d be GREAT at it immediately. I thought I’d be drawing beautiful, realistic trees overnight. I pictured the teacher walking over and saying, “My god, you really have a talent for this! You have to keep going, you’re an absolute prodigy!”

Trying something out shows you what your true priorities are. By sitting and drawing for two hours every week, I’ve cultivated gratitude for how much I love to write. It can be easy to forget how much I love it, because I write so much every week and I’m always pressuring myself to write more.

Maybe I need to stop asking myself for MORE. Maybe it’s time to write less and enjoy it more. Maybe I need prioritize a few important projects and let the rest go.

***

I have to admit, I’m actually starting to relish how much I hate my drawing class.

I think I can relish hating it because I’m not ashamed or anxious about how shitty I am at drawing. Learning how to make pottery over the past three years has taught me how to be bad at something for a long time. Now I’m fine with it.

It’s obvious which women in the drawing class feel anxious about being bad at drawing. The anxious ones keep groaning and then saying “I think I’m getting a little better!” and then groaning again.

So here’s the big lesson underneath all of these other lessons: It’s fine not to get better. It’s fine to just stay bad at a thing. It goes against every lesson you’ve ever learned, but the fact is, what matters the most is enjoyment.

What I enjoyed the most in my last drawing class was explaining to the confused woman next to me what was going on.

You have to abandon what’s inside your head, I said. You have to forget everything that came before. You have to look at something for a long time, until you recognize that it’s not what you imagined.

You have to let go of what you imagined, and work with reality instead.

Thanks for reading Ask Polly! What are you bad at that you still enjoy a lot? What are you good at that you’ve stopped enjoying? How do you locate meaning, connection, and pleasure in doing what you love? Do you have to remind yourself how to enjoy things sometimes? I have to run out to watch my mom play pickleball in a tournament this morning, but then I’ll be back and I really want to discuss this with everyone, so step right up and tell me about how you navigate your own interests, passions, hobbies, and experiments!

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Send your letters to askpolly@protonmail.com. I appreciate your support a lot!

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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Send your letters to askpolly@protonmail.com. I appreciate your support!

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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