I Was Pretending to Myself (1948), Yves Tanguy

Dear Polly,

I’m in my mid-thirties and I’ve spent almost my whole life living with my parents for reasons I’m not going to explain in detail here, but in summary, I’ve been really sick, on and off, for most of my adult life, and after a while, I guess I just got comfortable in the role of Chronically Ill Woma…

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Untitled (1928), Yves Tanguy

A few months ago, I went to a party and got into a pretty good conversation with an acquaintance. This person seemed fairly engaged and interested at first, but then she seemed to grow distracted. After a while, she seemed very detached — checking her phone, looking around the room, but still talking to me. It was disconcert…

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Fraud in the Garden (1930), Yves Tanguy

Hi Polly,

I’m so grateful to have this corner of the internet where I can be honest with myself about my ugly feelings. This is probably the ugliest (feelings-wise) I’ve been in a long time.

Last year I had a falling out with the closest friend I’ve ever had due to some infidelity in her marriage she’d confided in me about. She really wanted my support in pursuing what she wanted, and I couldn’t give her that support for moral reasons. She was very hurt by this, and I was shocked that she would do what she did. It made me feel like I couldn’t trust her, and we are no longer close. We do still share a close-knit group of college friends, with whom we’re still in touch.

We update this group on our lives fairly regularly, and while I’m on an upswing after a stressful move and acclimation to a new job, she is having the worst year of her life.

I’ll keep the details vague to preserve her anonymity:

• She has had to move back in with her parents because of the end of her relationship (see infidelity above). She is dating her affair partner, but he is not in a position to move in with her, and we live in an expensive city.

• She is struggling to find full-time work

• A loved one was diagnosed with a long-term terminal illness

• A member of her extended family suffered an injury and needs around-the-clock care

• Another extended family member passed away and left behind a burden of paperwork and a house full of stuff

• A close family member had a life-altering mental health crisis

I got a text today that one of her cats was struck by a car and killed.

I feel extremely sorry for her. Really, I do. I also feel incredibly sad that our friendship ended and that it’s not appropriate for me to show up for her in the way I would have a year ago. I can imagine myself coming over to help clean, drop off dinner, run errands, or just be a shoulder to cry on. She lives almost two hours away, but when our friendship was good I drove to her house at least once a month so we could see each other (she doesn’t have a car). She supported me through some difficult things, but neither of us have ever been through anything like what this past year has thrown at her.

I have no idea how to show up for her now that I’m not welcome in her life. In my defense, even if we were still close, her situation at home is precarious and volatile and visiting would likely not be helpful. I do my best to check in and tell her that no matter what, she can call me if she needs me. I mean it when I say it. She never calls.

It’s hard knowing that I’m not the person she goes to for support, and it makes me regret ending our friendship and not staying close to her because now I’m not around when she needs help. She is suffering so much and there is nothing I can do.

As a result, I’m feeling completely exhausted by the constant stream of bad news. I’m even annoyed by it, which is completely unfair to her. I know these feelings are coming from my own sense of inadequacy, knowing there’s no way I can make any of it better. She has been standing tall under fire and when she texts and says she’s had a nice day or done some chores or run an errand, we all cheer for her.

I am still holding onto a lot of resentment and pain from our “breakup” (which was actually her breakup!) last year. I’m struggling to process all of that while also being hit with wave after wave of her personal trauma. My ugly truth is that I am resentful of the positive attention she gets and I’m so tired of coddling her through every point of bad news. At the same time, I want to be supportive, I want to be attentive, and I want to be kind to someone who is in so much pain and dealing with so much. It’s amazing that she is still getting through each day as well as she is.

Is there a best way through this that I’m missing? How can I continue to support her if things don’t get better any time soon? How do I forgive myself for the horrible resentment and even borderline jealousy I’ve been feeling?? Am I a terrible person for feeling oversaturated with her tragedies? I can only imagine how oversaturated SHE feels!

Ugly & Overwhelmed

Dear U&O,

Before we discuss any of the details here, I want to congratulate you for expressing the drama of your mixed emotions so well. You did some extremely vulnerable work in writing this very honest letter to me. No one likes to admit what gets kicked up by old friends — their questionable choices, their recurring needs, their despair, their optimism. ALL of it is intense, and thanks to modern texting habits, it’s fucking relentless. As a rapid-fire quadruple texter, oversharer, and frequent flyer on Questionable Choice Airlines, I want to raise my hand and claim my status as PART OF THE PROBLEM here.

In our high-speed, ultra-modern nightmare world, a relentless avalanche of other people’s lives clobbers us every single day — sometimes every few hours, occasionally every few minutes. We’re ordinary animals, trying to keep it together, digging for our own little store of nuts, barely surviving, barely holding our heads up to look for stray hawks circling, and suddenly, five notifications flash across our eyes: terrible news, pain, anguish, emojis, comforting words, concern, more emojis, a growing feeling of dread, DO SOMETHING! WEIGH IN RIGHT NOW, YOU INSENSITIVE BITCH! WHAT’S YOUR REPLY???

It’s not natural.

Let’s acknowledge that. Some days, it honestly doesn’t matter who’s texting, we just don’t want it. We can’t handle the interruption. We can’t process the words.

The group chat amplifies these problems, combining all of the terrors of GROUPS with all of the horrors of CHATS: Not only is there an absolute calvalcade of updates and thoughts and feelings and news, but they’re all reduced to the lowest common denominator of complexity in order to be rendered digestible by all. Dead cats are greeted with loudly crying emojis, which almost seems to hint at laughter. Funeral arrangements are encountered with omg u ok, are there faint traces of mirth here? Words and cartoon hearts pile up, but it just gets more confusing, we just feel more alienated, more bewildered, more lonely.

Group chats are the devil’s playground. They are designed to twist you into knots, erode your bonds, undermine your confidence. This is why, instead of waterboarding or sleep deprivation, KGB agents now break prisoners by asking them to make a simple weekend plan with friends over a 6-person group chat. Within an hour without fail, the prisoner is on his knees, shaking and crying, begging for mercy.

You’re in a particularly unnatural situation, because your friend broke up with you after you refused to be supportive during her affair. You’re not in each other’s lives anymore except through this text thread. You don’t want to be excluded, but it feels bizarre to know so much about her sorrows without having any way of supporting her, talking to her, finding out more, showing up in person. It also feels unnerving to hear about her good days. Everyone is cheering her on and there you are, the one person she’s done with. That’s got to be a terrible feeling.

Meanwhile, she knows you’re there. Maybe she’s still angry or resentful. How could you possibly avoid interpreting some of her comments as pointed or even overly triumphant? I'm not saying that’s real. I’m saying the unnatural hell of group chats gets the imagination spinning.

Social media offers a global version of the same uncanny feeling: You know the people on some feeds, almost know the people on others, and are surrounded by strangers with similar jobs or interests on others. In some cases, you’ve half-forgotten who certain people are or why you followed them years ago. So when sorrows and joys show up there, a piece of you feels unnerved, like Congrats but also who ARE you? That sucks but who ARE you?

I used to blame myself for those alienated feelings. I used to tell myself, “You’re bad at loving people” or “You’re too grumpy and removed” and “Why can’t you welcome every single drop from this firehose of other people’s lives and intimate emotions?”

But now, whenever I go online (infrequent!), I remind myself, “This isn’t natural, so don’t stay here too long, don’t take this too personally, keep this at a distance because it’s confusing and unhealthy.”

That’s the advice I’d give you about your friend and your group chat. It feels wrong for a reason. You’re in a group but you’re not close anymore. Silence your notifications from this group so they don’t interrupt you several times a day. Let yourself check the chat once a week but otherwise stay away. You don’t need this. You might think it’s important but trust me, it’s not. Ask a friend to text you separately if something urgent comes up that needs your attention.

This group chat erodes your peace and calm. It unnerves you. The sensations begin in your feelings then those feelings move to your head and set up permanent camp. Your brain becomes a repeating song, a skipping record. Now it’s like you’re in prison being interrogated and tortured — asked for answers, expected to fix something.

GET OUT.

So that’s the practical side of this: Turn off notifications, hide chat. She doesn’t want to be friends, so keep her out of your head. She doesn’t return your calls. Respect her boundary and let it go for a while. You’ve showed your concern. You’re not going to fix her despair and at this moment, you probably can’t mend anything. Even if you were open to rethinking your position or apologizing or she was open to hearing you out, it’s unlikely that this could happen while she has so much pain in her life.

My deeper advice: You’re processing how you feel about her, how you feel about yourself, how you manage your emotions, and what you want from friendships and intimacy in general. I applaud your bravery in working your way to the center of your very mixed emotions. This is EXACTLY the kind of difficult process that will benefit you and bring you more clarity.

The key is to stay inside the vulnerable emotions and try them on for size without judgment. You started down that path very courageously in your letter: You miss her and you also resent her. You want to support her and you also recognize that being there for her right now would be difficult and maybe even irritating. You love her and you’re also envious of the way she shows herself, expresses her pain, and gets support and validation for it.

Maybe you wish you could do that. Maybe you don’t want to be that kind of person, but you still struggle to ask people for what you need. Maybe at some deep, buried level you consider it weak or unethical to lean on people too much, or to ask for attention.

I want you to notice how often in your letter you refer to helping your friend. Do your friendships take this shape a lot? Does this feel more comfortable than asking for help or admitting your own sadness or mixed feelings about your life? Can you ask your friends for support when you need it, or tell them the truth about your most embarrassing internal struggles? Do you feel strongly that you should be there whenever a friend needs you, even when you feel overwhelmed or indifferent? Does this standard apply to others, or do you feel mortified at the idea of even asking unless it’s a true emergency? If you do feel mortified, is that partially because you assume others have mixed feelings and feel alienated and indifferent, even when they offer their help?

I know these are leading questions, but I come to this inquiry honestly! Because sometimes when I’m SUPERSERVING MY MOST DIFFICULT FRIENDS (lol) I think: No friend does this for me. Why can’t I get this level of service? Maybe some part of me is trying to ask for what I want by pantomiming it! But is that even SANE? Is it even RIGHT to give people hours of your time when your heart is somewhere else some of the time?

My absent, sometimes indifferent attitude starts here: I don’t lean on my friends enough. I’m trying hard to do this more. But when I dig into my own mixed feelings and process my own thorny emotions, first I think “But I don’t need much help!” Then, slowly, I can recognize that I am very, very afraid to lean on anyone, and I’m very VERY afraid to say, “I’m at capacity, I need a week off!”

This is not a saintly position, to be clear. It’s embarrassing. The deep emotions and fears that dictate my mixed feelings on this front are just as bewildering and wild as the fears that cause a person to lean on others a little too much, to demand people’s attention repeatedly until they’re exhausted or resentful. These emotions live right next to the emotions that drive married people to have affairs, which live next to the emotions that lead other people to condemn those affairs. Trauma lives right down the block from these affair emotions, of course. But we disown neighboring emotions and our own! We work hard to decide which emotions are acceptable and which need to stay out of our conscious minds as much as possible!

In other words, it’s not all straight lines and clear rules and obvious infractions and rigid morals down there in the depths of our emotions and our experiences and our archaic belief systems, which we decided on decades ago. It’s a swirling, chaotic mess!

But let’s come back up to the surface now: It’s a LOT to show up for intense, emotional friends you’ve known for years and supported for years. IT IS A LOT. You know so much about them, and that’s such a gift, but it’s also draining to show up and listen for hours when someone is in an extended crisis. More specifically, it’s very intense to trust other complicated women, simply because 1) you have one or two memories of getting hurt by them and 2) you recognize how complicated your emotions are, so you’re quite naturally afraid of their buried fears and resentments, and 3) do you even trust YOURSELF, my god?!!! *room spins, colors blend, floor drops out*

Very close friendships are rarely simple or easy. SOME are. But many aren’t.

Saying no and stating your limits: This is just as important as saying yes and doing everything you can to support someone. Likewise, refusing to help someone who has made it clear she doesn’t want your help is just as important as offering to help every now and then, just to make your support clear.

I have very smart, emotional friends who, like me, want to explore all that life has to offer. This position often includes becoming entangled with smart, sensitive partners, some of whom are rigidly determined NOT to dive into the confusing, deep emotions and traumatic experiences we just described above. Things get interesting! But if I’m truly honest with myself, I am at once living vicariously through them and also distracting myself from my own intense emotions when I drop everything to field their calls.

Remember how I wrote about Bruce Tift’s book Already Free, in which he asserts that neurosis is a substitute for experiential intensity? Well, trying to get my one friend to stop solving puzzles all day and start feeling her emotions — and also trying to coax her into just living on the simple, thoughtless terrain of being a regular animal who doesn’t know shit about shit — is actually my way of, yes, AVOIDING MY OWN EMOTIONS AND CHALLENGES. Likewise, looking (anxiously?) forward to getting on the phone with my other friend whose entanglements sometimes strike me as dangerously intense is a way of living vicariously through that risk (enjoying its drama and thrills!) while also setting myself above such choices.

Again, why would I do that? Why would I relish the drama and tsk-tsk her risky choices in the same breath? Because I’m distracting myself from my own longing for closeness, escape, engulfment, risk, passion, love, and HIGH STAKES. Meanwhile, though, my real life is packed to the gills with high stakes that I’m actively avoiding: My youngest daughter is moving away in a year. Old age is accelerating towards me like a speeding truck with faulty brakes. I’m trying to write a novel which is humbling as fuck.

I AM VERY AFRAID.

Let’s dig deeper: I want more love and attention, always, even when I’m completely calm and aligned with my ideals. That’s not about my ego. I crave deep connection, particularly now that I’m capable of it without disappearing. My parents didn’t show me enough love for my taste. Only my husband is completely trusted for this. So I’m constantly puzzling through ways to get more love out of the landscape, squeeze more affection out, become more indispensable. This isn’t a conscious thought at all. This is not a top-of-the-mind goal I work hard to accomplish. It’s a subterranean compulsion that rules my actions when I should be writing or exercising or showing up for some important but boring practical tasks in the here and now.

My PLATINUM-TIER SERVICE to my most high maintenance and smart and tumultuous friends is a way of evading my own high maintenance and smart and tumultuous nature. I’m not feeling my own feelings, I’m analyzing theirs instead. There’s so much intimacy and connection there; it’s real and good and important. But sometimes my actions are compulsive and irrational. I’m avoiding my own life.

I would guess that the same might be true for you. You’ve got this ex-BFF trapped in your head, and your body and your heart resent that for very good reasons. You’re tired of her. She’s not even your real companion now. But her actions feel personal to you. Judging her is a way of not judging yourself. Feeling for her is a way of not feeling for yourself. Longing for her and resenting her, loving her and envying her, feeling sorry for her and feeling sorry for yourself: these things are all wrapped up in a big, tangled ball for you, in part because that’s how love feels sometimes, but also and more importantly because

IT’S NOT NATURAL.

So that’s what you always have to ask yourself when you engage with your group chat, or your ex-BFF, or your next BFF, or social media, or the internet at large: Is this natural? Does this feel right? Do I know how to say “I’m at capacity now, unexpectedly, and I’m sorry for that but let’s talk later”?

Do your judgments sometimes feel rigid and unfair? Do you see yourself as the one person who behaves ethically? Do you retreat into morals at the exact moment when you feel vulnerable, or confused, or more engaged with someone else’s problem than you can stand? I ask these questions not because I think having affairs is the best. I think people who give way too much of themselves and feel uncomfortable with taking or leaning on others (like me and you!) often have a lot of MORALS around their feelings and other people’s feelings. You will never NEATLY unravel feelings from morals, to be clear. But noticing how WED they are to each other can be helpful.

Here’s what I think is the source of some of my dread and my judgments of others: I hate to let anyone down the way I was let down as a little kid. I hate to get off the phone and leave someone feeling needy and lonely. There’s a visceral feeling of empathy and despair I get when I feel that I’m leaving someone all alone.

See how there’s something so tender at the center of so much anger and judgment and fear?

I think that’s the center of this for you, too. You’re feeling so tender for your friend, and that feels so vulnerable for you. THAT’S NATURAL! What’s less natural is when those sensations move into your head and then you try to convince yourself that you need to do something or change something. The move to your head is the problem.

If you want to process your emotions, your judgments, your vicarious living through this friend, your envy, your wish that things never ended, that’s good work. But if those emotions move into your head and become A COMPULSION TO FIX EVERYTHING or a NEED TO BE THE ONE WHO’S SUPERIOR OR KNOWS MORE or a DESIRE TO SET THE RECORD STRAIGHT, then that’s not good for you.

I know how it is. But you’ve got to just drop that hot plate on the ground and walk away, because it doesn’t matter. You can’t fix everything. You don’t have to be the one who’s wise and ethical. You don’t have to set the record straight. You can just let reality be what it is. Let her be in pain. She is not yours anymore.

Important reminder! Friendship doesn’t have to be all about support and keeping someone from their own loneliness and sadness and regret around the clock. Friendship can be about dumb fun and thoughtless joy, too. That’s what friends are fucking for most of the time, if things are working the way they should be!

Life itself should be about dumb fun more often!!! We need empty-headed pleasure regularly. We need to be wrong and know nothing. We need to be sweet and gentle, with nothing at all to say. We need to admit when we are unsure, or sad but who knows why.

Flexibility. That’s what grows out of letting go of puzzles and refusing the temptation to give WAY too much of ourselves or to obsess about people who aren’t actively in our lives. We can say to ourselves, “This situation is not natural. I am not helping, I have mixed feelings, and I’m not convinced that she would extend this level of concern to me if the roles were reversed.”

Then we can look closely at how we feel, and keep it dumb and simple. Do I love her? Not always. Do I trust her? Not really.

I’m curious how abruptly this friend cut you off when you admitted to her that it was hard to support her through an affair. I wonder if she gave you a chance to gently share both your harsh and tender feelings on that front. I wonder if she could respect your honesty and also accept that many (married?) people grow a little flinty when people up and leave their perfectly good-seeming spouses out of the blue.

Something about what you’ve described suggests to me that she is a person who bails at the tiniest hint of scolding or disapproval. Her shame is extra LARGE, but she has no intention of digging into the depths of her most primordial sensations.

We all know friends like this. And even though it may also be true that your own shame and fear prevent you from re-examining your lack of compassion around infidelity (although you might be very compassionate, just not supportive of it!), my sense is that you would be more than willing to dig into these difficult realms with her, if she would let you. She will not let you.

So let’s sit right here and mourn that together: Some truly beautiful human beings will not let us share ourselves with them or vice versa. They will not go into the dark with us. They will not sift through the madness, the chaos, the longing, the fear, the deeply-held values, the loneliness, and the trauma with us.

Shout out to the ones who will. They’re precious. That’s why we HAVE to say no to them when they call in the middle of the night for the second night in a row. We have to show up and be real. We have to admit our limits. We have to silence our notifications. We have to warn them that, at times, we will be unreachable. We have to go to Al Anon, sometimes. We have to remind ourselves that our vulnerable emotions matter, too. We have to ask for what we need.

We have to notice what we need. For you and me, that’s the really hard part. We have to admit that we have needs. We have to admit WAY more than we want to.

You struggle to admit how much you need. Your exfriend does not. That’s why your exfriend has become an obsession for you.

COMMON.

Don’t THINK through this. FEEL your feelings. You are envious. You want more attention and love for yourself. You miss the friendship. You wish you could have it back. You are disgusted by her behavior and also worried about that disgust. You feel so strongly about loyalty and commitment, and you also wonder what it would be like to just DITCH a motherfucker — whether spouse OR friend! — and move on.

Try on all the feelings, because it’s fine. We can feel things without wrecking our lives. We can understand our animal selves without doing harm. IT IS POSSIBLE to feel everything, to stay flexible, to let everything in, without losing it and hating yourself and everyone else.

You humble yourself with reality. You let the truth in. It hurts and it’s important.

You allow space for intense emotions.

And then you move on. You keep your feelings rolling. You let the waves pass through you. You don’t let your mind trick you into thinking that you have a problem simply because your exfriend has a problem. You let her live her life without you.

I’m sorry for your loss. Maybe some day, you two will find your way back to each other. But listen, even if she were open to that, she still needs to prove that she can weather the slightest whiff of disapproval without bailing. She might be suffering right now, but her sudden departure HURT YOU. You imagined that all of your love and care would prevent that, but it didn’t. Learn from this. Stop offering a platinum tier of service just so you can feel loved and secure. You need more from your closest friends. This particular friend isn’t one who has more to offer. Look for the ones who do.

Polly

Thanks for reading! It’s so gratifying to create a corner of the internet where we can discuss complicated and conflicted emotions without stigmatizing each other for them. And it’s also precious and important to collectively CELEBRATE DUMB FUN! Don’t forget that part, overthinkers and overfeelers and oversharers! We can be bumbling, stumbling clown babies together, too! Go read Black Bag by Luke Kennard because that’s the next Ask Polly Book Club pick and we need to DISCUSS what a dip into madness that book is!!! And if you’re somehow not a subscriber, get on that, because the book club is members only. I love writing this column so much, and your support makes it possible.

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Send your letters to askpolly@protonmail.com. We are all conflicted and confusing! Do not feel shame over the fifty million emotions coursing through your bloodstream. It is normal and yes, natural.

The Absent Lady (1942), Yves Tanguy

Dear Polly,

The final paragraph of your answer to ‘How Do I Learn to Love Work Again?’ reduced me to tears — reading it felt like willingly surrendering to the earnest specificity and weirdness of someone else’s mind, like the experience of immersing yourself in Woolf or Joyce streams of consciousness, letting yourself …

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Promontory Palace (1931), Yves Tanguy

This very long column is free because I’m in the mood to share and I think there’s a lot here for all 130,000 of you. My dream is to hit 4,000 paid subscribers. Is it achievable? Probably not, but let’s dream big for a change. I need more ZAMBONI and less FRANZONI around here. Read on to find out wtf that means!

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Dear Polly

I hope this message finds you well. I’ve found your work to be a balm and so helpful since coming across it roughly a decade ago. I’ve submitted a few requests for advice to you before, and have been grateful enough to have one of my comments on a piece of yours addressed in another piece (In “Ambition vs. Ambivalence,” from September 2025, I was the person who wrote the comment you quoted that starts with “I work in an industry where…”). This time, I’m sending this inquiry not necessarily anticipating a response — you have a lot of followers who need help far more urgently than me, and truly I’m just enjoying the exercise of writing to you. Plus, I feel like I’m going to write too much for you to read, nothing like the concise and devastatingly familiar-but-also-direct letters that you typically publish, so I’m not expecting you to do all that. But since I plan to discuss my relationship to work and artificial intelligence (something that, if I recall what you’d written before correctly, you said you were interested in hearing from readers about their own relationships with it), perhaps you’ll find this relevant, interesting, and demonstrative for your other readers.

Essentially, I’m in my late 30s, lucky to be employed, married to someone I love and admire a lot, and think way too much about work. I feel like my relationship with work is poisoned, and I don’t know how to rebuild it. I’ve read columns of yours like “I Hate Work!” and “I Hate All Jobs!” and “AI Took My Career and Now I Feel like a Failure!” repeatedly, trying to remind myself that hard work is hard but necessary and actually can feed us if we find the right way to make it work for us. But for some reason, it hasn’t been working out for me to find ways to actually enjoy or get any feeling of beneficence out of the work.

This shouldn’t be an issue for me. I’m a cishet man, a person of color but from a community that I think benefits from whiteness-adjacent racism in professional settings, grew up well-off with a really loving family, and can often muster the kind of self-presentation that reads to people as “charming,” “intelligent,” “insightful,” and “nice” in a way that has helped me get jobs that I was deliriously unqualified for before. Every day, I see black women and other women and queer people of color I work with get treated like shit despite their qualifications and competence, and somehow don’t receive the same kind of pressure or backlash from higher-ups. I should probably be grateful for all the chances I’ve gotten over the years, and the ability to move in the world in a way where I don’t have to worry about personal safety, institutional hardship, real proximity to life-crushing poverty, or supporting children. Occasionally, I’ve been able to use my position to support and uplift women and others who I thought wouldn’t get the same chances but were otherwise super qualified, and I feel good about those times I’ve gotten to do that.

But it feels like it’s not enough to get me to actually enjoy the process of waking up; moving my body, getting to the office or the coffee table or wherever work is, doing the work, feeling beneficence in good and bad days alike, getting out, and having a fulfilling life after work. I have diagnosed depression, anxiety, and ADHD; I’ve been in therapy and on different medications for a good chunk of my adulthood, after having been a studious and driven and hard-working student who struggled with certain things that then became real blockers to my success in college and my first few years in the workforce (all at really good jobs and internships and institutions that would be enough to set someone up on a solid path if they were driven enough). I used to be way more physically fit and am in fits and spurts trying to get back to that stage by taking walks as often as possible and even starting to ride a bike to work, once I get it repaired and ready for the road. I am involved in a community group and have great friendships and community through that. I’ve got some great friendships that I probably take for granted but would be way worse off for if I didn’t have them, and loose plans to pursue an artistic endeavor that’s loosely related to that group.

But even when things were working the way I’d wanted them to, it was never enough to make me feel great about anything. And work/career stuff feels like the biggest problem to solve of all, the one from which everything else might trickle down.

I used to work in a field that was very demanding, subject to the whims of a bad job market and shitty executives, and constantly under pressure to innovate, adapt to times, be responsive to “the moment,” and filled with other pressures that would make a sensitive person hate their days. But I wanted to be in it badly when I started, because it relied on skills — writing and editing — that more often than not fit my disposition (the bad grammar and syntax of this email notwithstanding). I don’t know that I ever “enjoyed” the work more than a handful of times, but I felt beneficence in what I could do, and appreciated this field’s ostensible institutional commitment to values and ethics that felt impossible to find in a lot of other fields (even if the business around it is maybe less ethical than other fields’). In any case, when I left amid a reorg at my employer about a year ago, and then left a pretty senior job at a respected establishment after a month of corporate bullshit and overwhelming responsibilities made me feel like I’d never be successful without losing myself to workaholism, I vowed to take a break from the field and try something else. I don’t think I want to go back, but I also feel unmoored from what that job did for my identity and some relationships that were truly very fulfilling.

I’ve also never had a real working-class, fuck-up-your-sleep-and-sense-of-self kind of job, and kind of want the experience, but know that it’d never pay what I need to make the moves I need to make at this time of my life. My wife has had those jobs and struggles and has learned to deal with the shittiness of white-collar existence because it enables the life she actually wants, which is why she has less than infinite patience with my attitudes towards work. We want to buy a house soon, and it’s going to be very difficult if I take a huge hit in my income. Plus, I have a lot of credit card debt, largely owing to inopportune spending on DoorDash and Grubhub because neither of us comes back from our in-person jobs wanting to cook, and I don’t think I’d be able to clear it while working a job that had me lifting heavy boxes on a third shift, worsening back and shoulder issues that I have a hard time exercising through, which definitely affects my mood.

For the past few months, I’ve worked in marketing for a fairly prestigious organization I knew about through my prior life. In short, it sucks. The people I work with are largely brilliant and super insightful, but there’s no real organizational structure and our leadership (for all the things they do well) seem 100% disinterested in creating it. I’m split between teams led by a really nice but ultimately contextually ineffectual person who doesn’t want to navigate the minefield between his boss’s expectations and his reports’ cries for more structure, more support (I’m sympathetic but also resolutely feel: If you can’t lead at the level that your direct reports demand of you, STEP AWAY FROM THE JOB. NOBODY SHOULD BE IN A DIRECTOR-OR-HIGHER-LEVEL POSITION IF THEY AREN’T ABLE TO MANAGE WELL) and a tech CEO type who’s occasionally kind but more often out of pocket, devaluing the work of others and forcing direct reports to read tea leaves and moods with more mental energy than I feel he ever puts towards anybody who works for him. The ADHD means that I’m putting a lot of effort into trying to make work work in these settings, but more often than not, I’m just overwhelmed, my mind going blank in meetings and emails piling up in my inbox while I promise deliverables in shorter windows than I can deliver them.

AI, which I used to abhor and still don’t love for its impact on our environment and economy, has unfortunately become my lifeline in this job, helping me do the work better and more quickly than I could by just staring at my computer screen before. a deadline motivated me to action (it can do SO MUCH if you’re able to prompt it right). I’m not thrilled with it, and feel like I’ve lost my own competence at things I was good at, to the point that if all the LLMs shut down, I wouldn’t be able to get back to what I was doing without it (and bogged in administrative bullshit that it can handle well at times). Plus, since my therapist can’t respond right away to any intrusive or repetitive bad thought I have, and my wife and friends can’t always be the repository for my negative or toxic attitudes, I’ve turned Claude into a sort of emotional support tool, and it’s been useful for telling me that I’m not at fault, that my work environment is toxic, and that I can take some concrete steps and offload some administrative bullshit to it to survive another day of disappointment before I can leave the office for something I hopefully like more.

Something I think about a lot now is how nice it must be to feel like you can live your life without the help of AI. I honestly resent the AI backlash almost as much as I resent the tech titans, politicians, and opportunistic fucks who shoved it down our throats in the first place. It calls to mind the backlash to social media, all the proof points we had about how it worsens our lives and makes us less connected and facilitates genocide and body dysmorphia and cyberbullying — and still, it’s just around, doing the thing it always did. If those Anthropic researchers who (I think) cynically called out the mass extinction potential last week to burnish their careers as middle-of-the-road anodyne AI accountability advocates are actually right, I truly hope that this apocalypse comes — I’m sick of people warning about an end of times that never really comes, snake oil salesmen who think the sudden end of our world is somehow worse than the slow trudge towards its demise in climate catastrophe that we’re *actually* having to live through now. That my career has involved close relationships with people in tech doesn’t actually help me feel better. Plus, if I can find a good startup to invest a few bucks in and get rich, like all these other people who figured out that hard work actually doesn’t guarantee you material success, maybe that’d be cool, though it’s of course a pipe dream that would put me in touch with the kinds of tech scene head honchos that I hate.

But I’m well aware that this is all about my shame, my insecurities, my intellectual responses to an aversion to my own emotions, and all these things you write about so much so presciently.

Wow, I’ve already written so much. But if you’ve come this far, here’s the point I’m trying to get at: It feels impossible to live my life slowly, deliberately, and empathetically while trying to rebuild my connection to myself...AND also do all that’s expected of me, in and outside of work. Recently, with AI’s help, it took me a whole workday to do a third of the tasks I needed to do that day, and I see myself losing stamina every day I come back to a to-do list that never shrinks. And I don’t know a single person who makes the kind of salary I feel I need to sustain the life my wife and I want (I’m in the mid-Atlantic US, so I currently make $80K, and would like to sustain that salary) — one with fun trips abroad, nice food from cool restaurants at all price points, going to concerts (the thing that I actually love the most, so long as drunk 20-somethings don’t crash into me when I’m not even in the moshpit) and the occassional chic cocktail — in a job that’s just simple, where the to-do list can get cleared in a day, where you don’t have annoying office politics, backstabbing coworkers, or moody disorganized bosses fucking up your shit. I can’t think clearly about what would make me happy when I’ve got reports due that I have no interest in, but need to get done to placate someone who probably won’t look at them. I can’t budget exercise in the day if I get to the office at 9, have three hours of meetings, need to stay on until 7, and then get back just in time to have dinner with my wife before she goes to bed because she has to wake up early to make it to work on time. Maybe someone can’t do all this and still move deliberately, but tons of therapy, drugs, and ADHD podcasts haven’t really made me into that kind of person. Plus, even when I’ve gotten great opportunities in the past to do work I thought I wanted to do, I just hated it. It’s all too hard, all too directed toward ends that don’t feel fulfilling, all just noise in a world full of noise and few really great ideas that actually make the world better.

Truly, I don’t have much hope for myself, and only semi-jokingly tell people that more than a dream job, I’d just like for an Amazon van to hit me so I can sue for enough to not work for a few years (probably driven by someone with no workforce protections, pissing in bottles, doing this to support a family that could get deported by the same administration that’s making the economy worse for us). I briefly wanted to be a great writer, but writing sometimes made me unhappy. I wanted to make other kinds of art, but I’ve seen and talked to enough people who do those things to know that it’s more work for less money than I actually want.

Truly, I actually miss being unemployed. I was sad but days spent smoking weed and watching TV were way more fun than what I’m doing now. But the financial hit it’s taken, and the career hit I’d take if I left ANOTHER job (in a city where a lot of people know each other, so it’s hard to burn people or disappoint them and hope for the best) after less than a year for nothing that I’ve planned out. Writing cover letters and resumes makes me depressed, since I’m pretending I want a job for any reason other than “they don’t pay you well for not working and smoking weed and listening to shoegaze.” LinkedIn has become the most toxic social media outlet, filled with craven morons willing to throw their opinions out there to justify their place in an economy they won’t understand in a decade. And the gatling gun of dumb social media influencers, people younger and hotter and harder-working than me with bullshit advice for how to lead a great life, makes me depressed about any prospects I could have making money as a podcaster or content creator, or something adjacent.

I know that’s a lot, and a lot that doesn’t have to do with work, and you probably stopped reading five paragraphs ago, but I still feel compelled to ask the question: How do I learn to love work again, knowing that I can’t change my circumstances right away and that the roots of what I need to tackle will take so long to tackle that I’ll still have to work while I’m trying to understand how to live with it better?

Sincerely,

Can AI Just Take Me Already?

Dear CAIJTMA,

Your letter made me push aside my novel this morning. I’m not supposed to do that. I’m supposed to work on my novel first thing, then squeeze everything else into the rest of my day however I can. Sometimes I work on the novel for six hours straight. It’s slow work and once I’m completely focused on it, I’m surprised and alarmed that it’s already the afternoon and I haven’t accomplished much.

I’m a good writer because I’ve been writing every day for thirty motherfucking years now. That said, this experiment with fiction always feels haphazard and ridiculous. I’m proud of my work but it is painstaking. Ask Polly is fun and fast and automatic. My brain knows the dance, enjoys it, improvises easily, falls off the stage but then fakes it like it was all a part of the plan. I learn things from the improvisation, from the clumsy fall, which is in some ways a motherfucking TRUST FALL. I trust the process. I feel good that no robots are watching or helping.

I find it impressive that someone who uses robot assistants all day wrote the letter that you sent to me without any robot assistance. Yes, I know the difference and so do many other people. You know the difference, too, but you probably don’t use robots to write important letters.

Knowing the difference. Having fun and falling and learning from the fall. Discernment and discovery. Experimentation and joy. These are all elements someone as smart and emotional as you are will need in his future work. I mean, look at how you live now: You took an aggravating job and automated it. There are a few bad things in that move, but it’s also remarkable how you’ve adapted. So I think you need to stay very clear about one important thing right now:

You can adapt. You are adaptive. You enjoy the adapting phase. But you’re also easily bored, because you’re so smart. You need a lot of variety, and you need big challenges.

It’s very difficult for depressed, overworked, highly emotional people to recognize their love of HUGE challenges, because it just sounds like MORE, like too much, like Jesus Christ, just let me rest.

But that’s not you, man. You are not about that life at all. I know you daydream about getting stoned and hanging out, but that’s just a false flag for the actual FUN you want to be having from solving problems, making new things, organizing talented people, improvising, and giving your all to some project or position that actually earns your favorite word: BENEFICENCE.

You want beneficence and novelty and fun. It might take three different projects or pursuits to cover everything you need. Or you might discover one thing that will fulfill you and earn you enough money to live.

I interrupt now with one important piece of advice: Never, ever confuse a pursuit with the people who do it. Never look online at people who do something and say “This is who I will become if I do this thing. I will look like them and sound like them.” No. You have principles and ideas so you will create your own category. You do not need to be dragged down by the ways that other people do a thing. Ignore them in order to grow your own weird garden in peace.

You also mention just wanting to get hit by an Amazon van so you can collect the disability and be let off the hook from working. I know that’s sort of a joke, but I think you want to communicate to me that you don’t want to struggle every single day with the torment of trying and failing to figure out how to move forward. You want me to know that this isn’t a casual thing like “Oh my job sucks!” or “Gee, my tentative job search is going badly!” You feel desperate and lonely, and you don’t know how to express to your wife that you can’t just trudge along and do what’s required to make a certain amount per year. You have to feel like you have free will or everything else crumbles around you.

There’s a lot of guilt and obligation in this picture. It’s so fucking hard to feel capable of improvising and taking on big challenges, which I think are two CORE NEEDS of yours, when guilt, shame, and high expectations are in the mix. Here’s a (sexist, sure) corollary: Imagine that your wife had a baby and she came to you and said, “I know I was supposed to watch the baby for five hours a day but as it turns out, I am not cut out for that, I am feeling like I’d rather walk into the sea, and that makes me feel like a big disappointment as a mother, woman, and human being.”

You are an evolved and egalitarian man who’s guided by compassion and firm principles. Therefore, I know you would tell her something like: “My love, don’t think for a second that this moment is a verdict on your value. You are luminous and you will be an incredible mother no matter what. Let’s rearrange some things and figure this out.”

This is a little bit of a swerve, and maybe I’m just falling off the goddamn stage at this point, but I need to say something important directly to you:

My love, don’t think for a second that this moment is a verdict on your value. You are luminous and you will have an incredible life no matter what. Let’s rearrange some things and figure this out.

I really want you to take those words to heart. You’re special. I am a little anti-SPECIAL at this moment, because I think we’re ALL special and this world makes life hard on most of us. But I also want you to understand that I really see you. I started reading your letter quickly, half-hoping I would lose interest immediately so I could tackle my novel like I’m supposed to. But I kept reading. And towards the end of your letter, I started to feel this quite honestly gutting wave of emotion for you and everyone like you. A voice inside my head said to me:

YOU HAVE TO DO SOMETHING!!!! YOU HAVE TO BUILD THIS MOTHERFUCKER A TEMPLE USING ONLY YOUR WORDS!!!!!

If I didn’t believe in falling right off the stage like a clown, I would back up now and say to myself, “No no no nonononono niet nein NEVER. Stop. Start over. Be reasonable.” But that’s not how temples get built, bitch. You build a temple because you’re overwhelmed, you’re passionate, you feel everything. You also have a method of managing those feelings, hence the temple. You want to share your method and your madness, even if it means picking up an old cliché and throwing it into the mix.

By the way, my husband told me that Jonathan Franzen stops reading a new novel after the second cliché. That makes perfect sense, but also, that’s how you become Jonathan Franzen. That’s the beauty and the terror of being Jonathan Franzen right there: The rigidity! The drawing of firm lines in the cement! The ripping up of cement with an expensive jackhammer, so you can redraw the goddamn line because your very important and rigid standards have recently become EVEN MORE RIGID AND SO MUCH MORE IMPORTANT THAN EVER!

We can’t live like that, you and me. We have too many goddamn principles already. I see anyone making good money and I think, “Not like that, though. Never like that.” I have debts to handle! I have guilt around my husband needing to work too hard! And sometimes I feel like I reject particular options simply because they involve money. Money would mean I’m selling out. Expansion would steal the improvisation and fun out of my hands and it would never return. I’m too ugly to be famous. I’m too weird to have a real business to run.

Do you hear all of the voices of discouragement that rise up out of that FRANZONIAN RIGIDITY? (I know Franzen would prefer FRANZENIAN but I like FRANZONIAN for its similarity to AMAZONIAN [exotic, sexy, and also just a deadly dumb empire of terrible vans designed to run you over!] and also ZAMBONIAN [smoothing the ice, making it nice!])

See how I’m putting more parentheticals inside my parentheticals? (Even my goons got goons vibes.) That’s the energy you need in your life. But you’re not going to get it from an occasional walk. You’re depressed. You must do workout routines and maybe also run. Start with a free app but commit to a path. While we’re talking about concretes, buying a house is a good idea. It’s forced savings. It’s movement in the right direction. But you can’t work as much as you’re working. It sounds to me like you’re delivering a ton and now everyone expects too much from you. Fuck that. Ease off the peddle but don’t announce it. Leave earlier in the day or go in late and use that hour to exercise, then use the energy from the exercise to find something else — another job, yes, and a project that feeds your soul, too.

The biggest problem you have is that you currently see REST as what you want the most. In your case, considering your specific letter, this is a manifestation of the fact that even though you’re using AI to make your job more efficient, you have way too much computation going on in your head around the clock. You think you can’t think straight because the AI is working for you. This is understandable and will be the case for many people eventually. But I think a big piece of this for you, at this moment, is the unbearable guilt and despair that’s eating away at you. You feel you’re already letting your wife and yourself and the world down, simply by subsisting with the shitty job you have, simply by half-assing things and feeling lost and not wanting to commit to continuing on this shitty path but not having an alternative in mind.

This is when I remind you that I should be writing my novel right now. Here’s something I recently figured out: When I put Ask Polly in the “A” position (my first priority), it suffers. This is my DEEPLY FRANZONIAN brain, which is rigid and exacting and says DO YOUR ACTUAL JOB, YOU FRIVOLOUS HUNK OF BACK FAT! My FRANZONIAN brain tricks me into thinking that I make widgets for a living and also my widgets better be the best widgets in the universe or I’m a fucking failure.

But here’s the truth: When I put my novel in the “A” position and Ask Polly in the “B” position, my novel isn’t neglected for months on end, I gain momentum, and I have something new (see also: easily bored, impatient, restless mind requires novelty) to believe in. And guess what? Ask Polly has always thrived in the “B” position. Back when I had freelance book reviews and essays to juggle, Polly was my lively and weird break from careful, slow crafting. Polly was my flow, my getting in the zone. Also, Polly hates pressure and too much attention. As long as Polly can pretend that she’s just a fun experiment, Polly is fully ALIVE.

You need something else in your A position. It can’t be your fucking stupid job. Once you work out every other day (vigorously motherfucker, without injuring yourself) and you have something in the A position (It can be an experiment! You don’t have to commit just yet! It’s a trust fall. It’s fun. Improvise, bitch!), then you’ll start to have the energy to imagine a full life that includes whatever job will pay the bills.

But you can’t become FRANZONIAN about your job or your A project or your life or even your marriage, for that matter. You can’t get rigid and expect the best from yourself in all things. Dude, you need to sit down with your wife and say, “I need to feel like I have choices. I promise I will not choose to become a stoner. But help me trick myself into feeling more free! I am trying to choose AMBITION ITSELF, but I’m realizing that I can’t even make a choice at all at the moment because I’m so afraid of letting you and myself and the world down along the way!”

Then your wife gets to tell you all of the things she’s feeling FRANZONIAN about and all the things she dreams of doing. She will also probably tell you that she’s afraid you’ll end up like Grant, that motherfucker who hasn’t worked for two years and Kyra is about to fucking leave him for some hot weirdo she met in Al Anon.

Now that we’ve reached 4813 words (I blame at least 2757 words of this on your exceedingly long letter!), I should mention that I just canceled my lane reservation at the lap pool. Why did I do this? Why did I shove aside my novel and my swim for you? Isn’t this the opposite of what I’m telling you to do?

No. I’m demonstrating the highly non-Franzonian method of following intensity wherever it leads. I’m showing you that life can be entertaining and weird and extremely hopeful, as long as you have the guts to show up for it and expose your entire fragile, scared, intense heart and brain and spirit to its vicious, unpredictable maw, which will either lick you affectionately or bite you in half on any given day. That’s reality.

I love Jonathan Franzen so much, but I can tell you right now, that man doesn’t spend enough time in reality. Or maybe that’s the Franzen of 20 years ago. I’ll read his new book and give you an update. In the meantime, I want you to read two books: Already Free by Bruce Tift and Black Bag by Luke Kennard.

I know you’re too busy and reading sounds exhausting at the moment. But I want you to replace a chunk of your fretting and puzzling hours, which only make you hate life, with just reading these two books. Read them without guilt. Read them with an open mind and an open heart.

Both books are just for you. Remember that as you read them. The only reason I found the time to read them myself was that I put my novel in the A position and then I said, “Novelists read more than you do, you foolish twat!” So now I get to read during my A-position novel-writing hours, because it’s essential. My brain has been so underfed.

Neurosis is a substitute for experiential intensity.

This is Bruce Tift’s variation on Jung’s “Neurosis is a substitute for legitimate suffering.” That’s so fucking Franzonian of Jung, honestly, but remember that Jung was buddies with Freud before they parted ways, so he has that punishing mentality in his DNA, even when he’s working so hard to bliss out on Eastern alternatives.

Tift’s variation is even better, particularly in this era of blaming ourselves for all of the world’s ills, then blaming ourselves for NOT SUFFERING LEGITIMATELY on top of that. I would argue that our phones inflict legitimate suffering on each of us every single fucking day.

What Tift is saying is this: We are always working very hard to circumnavigate experiential intensity. That avoidant work takes countless forms. We can get into difficult relationships in order to have a big emotional puzzle that needs to be solved before we do anything else. I have done this dozens of times. We can also take on jobs we hate, and pretend that life can’t change until we quit the hated job, but when we do quit, we are hit in the head with the frying pan of reality and EXPERIENTIAL INTENSITY and we become very afraid and then we crawl back to some other shitty job. We can also pick up difficult friends, struggle with old troubles from the distant past even though they are long buried, pick weird fights with imaginary foes inside our heads, torture ourselves with the lives of strangers online, drink too much, or smoke too much pot, thereby delaying the present moment and its INTENSITY indefinitely.

We have millions of avenues for feeling neurotic instead of feeling the blunt force of reality, which for sensitive people is so overwhelming that it crushes us into dust very quickly.

Yet when we simply feel that blunt force, face reality, endure that pain and fear, invite EXPERIENTIAL INTENSITY into our lives, and DARE to stand our ground as we scream, cry, and feel way too much, something strange happens: We actually expand, grow, and catch a clear view past our immediate troubles. We suddenly stop seeing ourselves as POISONOUS and weak and damaged and we stop seeing the world as uniformly corrupt. We can take a deep breath and let the world be what it is.

I know that feels exceedingly difficult right now, but it is still possible for you.

That’s why we all (everyone reading this, and everyone you know) need to walk straight into the violent storm of EXPERIENTIAL INTENSITY and let it transform us into people who can exist on this planet and build good things and fight for what we believe in.

Here’s what EXPERIENTIAL INTENSITY requires from us:

• Flexibility

• Self-forgiveness

• Curiosity

• Principles

• An Appreciation For Raw Sadness

• Improvisation

• Patience

Here’s what EXPERIENTIAL INTENSITY offers us:

• Passion

• Commitment

• Connection

• An understanding that “The miracle is to walk the earth,.” (Thich Nhat Hanh)

This is what I want for you. I want you to be able to dream again — I mean in the “Embrace your biggest dreams” sense, but also in the “I had the craziest dream last night” sense.

Speaking of which, I had the craziest dream last night. I was walking around San Francisco, and all of these steep roads were blocked off by piles of crumbled wreckage. There had been a huge earthquake. People’s furniture and mirrors and clothes and books were scattered across the roads, along with the splintered remains of their Victorian houses. Finally I made my way down to the harbor. A huge gray battleship was there, carrying people in white hazmat suits with weird black symbols on them. They were all holding assault rifles.

I had a small dog with me, brown and floppy, maybe a King Charles Spaniel or similar. It’s not the type of dog I personally favor, and this one was very needy. It needed me to protect it from whatever the fuck was going down in the city. A few minutes later, I found another King Charles Spaniel, but this one was white with weird black marks on it. This new dog was also not to my taste, but it also needed my protection.

When I woke up (2 am, ouch!) I thought immediately of my father, who died from a heart attack 31 years ago this month. When he died, he was my age right now. I thought about how I have been running and swimming a lot, just like he did the year he died. I thought about how I’m reading his copy of Thich Nhat Hanh’s The Miracle of Mindfulness right now. And then I had this visceral, deep understanding of how much painful work my dad to do just to stay afloat as a human being. He was a flawed person, but he was vibrant, thrilling, oversensitive, intense, and wide open in ways that were a true miracle.

I knew I needed to go back to sleep. But I lay there in bed and instead of thinking, “This sucks!” I welcomed the flash of understanding that had arrived at such an inconvenient moment. This wasn’t about feeling my feelings (like I often tell people to do), because I wouldn’t have been able to name my feelings at all. This was about welcoming experiential intensity instead of pushing it away. It was about choosing the sensation over the thought.

I lay there knowing how it must’ve felt to be my father. That’s all. I wish I could tell him that I understand, I thought. But then I thought: He knows. And also: I need to feel this way about my mother before she’s dead and gone. I need to be more understanding of how hard she has to work to stay afloat.

Then I had this strong feeling that my dad was saying to me: Your mom exercises constantly. The pickleball, Christ. The gardening. I’m honestly impressed. And she’s so cheerful. Tell her I’m impressed with her.

Now listen to me: My parents got divorced long before my dad died. He was not in the habit of saying nice things about her. And if I called my mom to tell her this, she might just tell me to fuck off. So this was absurd. I’m also not saying my dad was talking to me from beyond the grave. I’m not saying he wasn’t, but I’m definitely not saying he was, either. What I’m saying is that EXPERIENTIAL INTENSITY takes some wild and savage forms, so wild and savage that you might just suspect that they are NOT reality.

Embracing experiential intensity means refusing to judge and label. We have to say to ourselves, “Whatever this is, I will accept its gifts. I won’t fixate or name.”

So now I think you understand why I pushed aside my novel and canceled my swim. My very firm conviction is that I thrive when I follow my gut, improvise, and allow intensity to guide me. I’m here to let the world in, whether it shows up at 2 am and involves assault rifles, hazmat suits, my dead father, and two dogs that need me way too much, or it shows up at 9 am and involves a guy who fucking hates his shitty job.

This requires balance. I need to work out but never optimize. I need to follow a schedule but also follow my muse. I need to remember how fucking broke I am but also respect my principles.

This column is 6457 words long, and I don’t give a fuck, because today I have some shit to say to you. I need to build you a temple. You need to understand, deeply, that I see you and I feel you and I am with you. The world is fucked and it’s terrifying. We don’t get to stand in the path of a fucking AMAZONIAN van. We cannot become FRANZONIAN and rigidly reject anything that is not pure and brilliant and perfect. We must allow our overworked brains a rest, to become ZAMBONIAN and smooth the scratched-up ice until it’s real nice. We do this, paradoxically, by letting the world in more. Not through our phones, but through our senses, through our faces, through our bodies.

We smooth the ice real nice by cruising around in the world like a motherfucker riding a Zamboni does. Those guys are always so fucking chill, have you noticed? They love their jobs so much. You know why? Because they just get on the goddamn machine and go. They cruise. They don’t overthink it. They feel the moment. They drink in the electricity. Winning or losing, they love those very scarce moments on the ice.

This life is so brief. I fucking hate how brief it is! That’s reality. That’s experiential intensity. You are a brilliant freak and you need to honor what you are at any cost. You must build a life that works for you. Stay awake and alive and lean into the terror of where you are. I can see that you’re already feeling too much for your taste and you want a break. I would argue that what you call “feeling” is just thinking, and that’s the part you need less of. The feeling is not the enemy. The intensity is not the enemy. The reality of this rough world is not the enemy.

Your busy mind can slow down. You will still be just as smart. Turn away from your brain’s puzzles. But don’t distance yourself from the intensity of what you’re feeling. Don’t be afraid to feel more. Stop stabbing your feelings with the sharpened stick of neurosis. BE THE SOFT, INTENSE, BRAVE HUMAN YOU ARE OUT IN THE OPEN.

Your temple is already right here. You made it with words, with art, with music, with jokes, with your marriage, with your friends, even with your current job. Maybe you’re also supposed to write a novel. Maybe you’re also supposed to create a community arts foundation. Maybe you will eventually start a new company that supports people in their efforts to reshape this fucked up world into something more livable. You can live inside a big question mark right now and also choose some random way of honoring your ideals, your body, your intelligence, and your imagination.

But most of all, I need for you to honor your love of huge challenges. You need to own your passionate, larger-than-life call to build big things. It’s all there in your letter. Every time you tell me how fucked up things are, how impossible and sick and corrupt, that’s what I hear. I hear the truth of how invested you are in this world, how much responsibility you take for it, how vivid your ideals are. That’s why I love your letter so much, and that’s why I built you this 6958-word temple. I built you something way too long and way too big in honor of the way-too-big stuff you want to build.

You don’t have to do it all in one day. You don’t have to do it AT ALL, in fact. You just have to admit to yourself that you are much more intense and fragile and also ambitious than you pretend to be. And instead of protecting yourself and the world from that person, it’s time to let that person breathe freely.

It’s not about making everything positive. It’s about letting everything be what it already is. It’s about letting go of control.

Letting go of control will make you more practical, too. Take a year off from getting food delivered. Learn to make beans and rice. I miss expensive food and lazy living, too, but I can’t afford it. Eat more potatoes. Austerity measures can be invigorating.

Guilt is your enemy. Guilt is a big piece of your depression. You don’t want to fail anyone. Talk to your wife about this. Look for a sliding-scale therapist who sounds smart. Travel less for a while. Look at small houses that need love. Yes, I’m implying that you might not hit your income goals, and you need to adjust your lifestyle to accommodate that. You two have to build a shared vision of the future together. You each have to make a living obviously. You each need a job. But you also need to build a combination of job, projects, and hobbies that feels like a full life and not a fucking miserable, exhausting slog.

Treat yourself with care. Care includes understanding and honoring your nature. You’re going to be fine, more than fine, absolutely joyful. But you will also suffer sometimes. That’s the reality of being sensitive. We aren’t trying to steer you away from pain. We want you to feel the pain so that you’re less depressed. Depression leads to workaholism and also stoned video games. Joy and pain lead to experiential intensity, the temple, vibrant dreams, big challenges, exercise, and deep, honest, intense love and connection.

Write down earnest, embarrassing ideas and thoughts more often. Make that your A project for now. Eventually, your A project will become something big and beautiful that grows out of those thoughts and ideas and feelings. And every day you pull it off, every single day you put your big, ambitious project (that is embarrassing, that maybe pays nothing, that makes no sense, that doesn’t matter and never will) in the A position, I want you to say to yourself what my dad told me to tell my mom:

Quite honestly, I’m impressed.

You have the right to honor your genius so much more than you do. You have the right to marvel at your fortitude. But you also have a right to work less hard at your job. I mean, for fuck’s sake! Draw firmer boundaries! But most of all, THINK LESS ABOUT WORK. Your day job is your B position, always. Remember, I love Ask Polly, but it can’t be in the A position or it suffers. I can’t overthink it. You’re like me. You need something wild and free in your A position — your top priority, your experiment, a way to challenge your big brain. You can fail at this thing over and over and it’s still going to save your ass, because it’s too hard and too important to bear.

Having fun and falling and learning from the fall. Discernment and discovery. Experimentation and joy.

Don’t give up on yourself. Stop soaking in how bad everything is and instead, imagine that things could get even worse. Let that in. Feel the pain of it. Feel the terror of strangers in hazmat suits, carrying automatic rifles. Feel irrational love for a weird, floppy dog that is not your favorite breed. Say to the dog: I will take care of you. But we won’t be too pure about this. We’ll get scrappy. We’ll build a little shack from these splintery boards. We’ll gather wildflowers from abandoned lots. I’ll make it nice for both of us. It will be beautiful. Don’t be scared. Things will get scary, but I am here.

Polly

Thanks for reading. I’m going to make t-shirts that say “LESS FRANZONI, MORE ZAMBONI.” If you want one, email me and I might actually do it: askpolly@protonmail.com. Either way, I’m going to keep building us a temple from splintery boards. Things will get scary, but I am here.

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Squirrel Plate (2025) by Heather Havrilesky

I’ve been making pottery for three years now. Sometime during the second year, I realized that my clay was never completely centered. This won’t surprise anyone who’s taught me anything — I am very stubborn in my insistence that I LEARN NOTHING. Yes, I will open my eyes wider and appear to be listening. But internally, there’s some part of me that associates learning with BEING DOMINATED.

Ridiculous! I wouldn’t even have known this or named it, if I hadn’t stuck with my pottery habit for so long. It’s pretty unusual to commit to something while also committing to the opposite of the thing. But when I look back at my life, I see this tendency arise over and over again. I cradle an essential ambivalence in my arms like it’s my little baby that will never ever leave me. My fussy baby protects me from having to fully commit, having to be defined by a thing, having to be a part of a community, having to surrender to all of the eccentricities and absurdities of that hobby or practice.

CLAY is a real thing here in North Carolina, too. The soil is red clay in many parts of the state. Some of the pottery greats lived here, nurtured by the pottery greats of other nations. Notice how I am not sharing the details. I DON’T KNOW THEM. I have remained absolutely RECALCITRANT in my refusal to know a thing about North Carolina pottery, because everyone around me can’t stop name-dropping the GOATs, how they studied with them, assisted them, own one of their plates. I moved 3k miles away from Beverly Hills FOR THIS?!!!

But my resistance to fully learning and embracing pottery is bigger than any of this. It’s not about any vibe or any teacher. It’s not even about how hard pottery can be (it’s hard) even after you think you know wtf you’re doing (you don’t).

My emotional position in most areas is self-protective.

I don’t want to invest. I don’t want to show that I care, because that’s humiliating. I know I’ve written about this a lot. But it goes beyond what I’ve written, I’ve realized lately. Even though I believe that ambivalence is natural and I want to stand up for it, even though I think everyone should learn their own special, slow way and stay committed to any practice that they can sense (in spite of their absolute lack of skills or talent or even passion) is bringing more LIFE to their life, sometimes it seems safest to be HALF-ASSED.

This isn’t just about caring too much. It’s also about vulnerability. It’s about not wanting to ride on the violent waves of enjoying what you love and then feeling afraid of what you love, afraid that you’re shitty at it, scared that you’re not good enough, fearful that you might not enjoy it today. It’s about not wanting to drown, but it’s also about not wanting to HAVE SHIFTING MOODS AT ALL.

Ambivalence can also be about not wanting to identify with what you do, to avoid depending on it. It’s about not letting any one thing become very powerful in your life, because what if you can’t do it suddenly? What if you’re an idiot for doing it at all? What if the other people who do it drive you crazy?

Ambivalence is often a defense against overinvesting and overcommitting, sure. But it’s also a strategy for protecting yourself from the raw joy and corresponding deep disappointment of TRULY LOVING SOMETHING WITH ALL OF YOUR HEART.

***

When I look back at the past three-plus years of making pottery, what I see is someone who loudly claims to want MORE while always insisting on LESS: I’m not really a potter. I am just relaxing. I am bad at this. I don’t like to learn things. Some of these are jokes. But above all, what’s here is CONTROL.

My most essential position for the past three years has been:

I WILL REMAIN IN CONTROL.

Ambivalence offers control. Ambivalence is a defense against passion, which is frightening. Feeling conflicted, pretending you’re not invested, making jokes: These are ways of refusing the DRAMA OF BEING ALIVE RIGHT NOW.

We might believe that we’re looking for more feeling. We might believe that we are pro-emotion, pro-passion, pro-sensation. But when we look at our actual lives, we may witness the many ways we protect ourselves, shield ourselves, defend ourselves, numb ourselves, avoid trouble, circumnavigate drama and sadness and negativity and also uncertainty and real engagement. What we see is a grab for control, which necessitates an avoidance of emotional intensity.

But when we release our grip on control and resolve to remain present to the uncertainty of life, that intensity and passion and deep love for existence comes flooding back.

That intensity is there either way. The fear and lack of control is a reality, no matter how many defenses you have. You can invest or not invest, keep life at arm’s length or dive in, fall madly in love or sidestep love, avoid creative pursuits or sink into dangerously difficult artistic enterprises, and your essential position, your essential TERROR, will remain the same.

Your position? You are invested. You care. You want what you want. Your desires are oversized. You want too much. And you are very afraid.

Your defenses might keep your life nice and flat and predictable, but they don’t change the intense, passionate, terrified, ecstatic human underneath your choices.

***

This brings me to the squirrel plate I made sometime last year, the one pictured at the start of this column. Life was difficult last year. We were living with my mother and even though I had fed myself a real fantasy about how perfect it would be, I ended up feeling shut down and creatively blocked. Yes, people told me that this was inevitable. But remember how I love to avoid learning at all costs?

I am foolish or I wouldn’t write this column about how to live. My bumbling nature, not my wisdom, is what keeps this motherfucker SINGING!

But look at that plate. It’s one of maybe ten pieces of pottery I’ve made that’s up to my standards. And let me just admit that I love it to an irrational degree. Thanks to that one squirrel, I started carving squirrels into everything. None of them are as good, to me at least. I love the smearing. I love how it looks like the squirrel is tip-toeing somewhere, being sneaky. I love the flowers.

No one else gives a fuck about this squirrel, to be clear.

I can barely allow myself to care about pottery, but somehow I can care about this squirrel. This squirrel meets my standards. I don’t mind if other people can’t see it. I love believing in something like this, without fear or self-consciousness, without shame or apology. I love to love what I love with this kind of conviction.

Hilariously, the people I have historically made fun of the most, inside my head, are people who love what they love with the least shame and fear. I give a free pass to old people and children and also youngish adults who are experimenting, but I truly love to keep middle-aged people with hobbies on blast inside the vicious hellfire of my mind. Pretentious white women who call themselves “potters” used to make me rolllllll my eyes so hard, inside the sick and twisted fiery furnace of my mercilessly judgy brain.

Why? Because it me, motherfucker. IT ME. I am passionate about the most absurd things. I am fully invested in pottery whether I want to be or not. I was invested after my first class. I’ve always loved it desperately. It’s not rational. It’s expensive and stupid. As my friend Jessica (a great pottery teacher fyi) likes to say, “Pottery doesn’t solve problems. Pottery creates more problems.”

There’s an energy that comes from surrendering to the tumultuous seas of your passions while also giving a free pass to the fire and brimstone inside your brain that says your passions are fucking dorky and embarrassing. There’s an intensity to feeling your very strong and ferocious feelings for the ups and downs of life while also noticing how terrified you are of feeling ALL of it, the highs and the lows, the connection and the revulsion, the pride and the unrelenting shame.

We all have so much to gain from seeing how often we recoil from what we are, what we care about, what we love, when we witness it in someone else. Right now, I’m looking back at all of the ways I’ve removed myself from contention, from competition, from what I’ve perceived as the narcissistic stylings of other writers. It’s not like ALL of my observations are inaccurate! But that hellfire in my brain is fueled by fear: I don’t want to be like them. I don’t want to fully invest. I want to remain invisible. I don’t want to join any community.

I don’t want to feel vulnerable.

Most of our stories keep us safe from what we fear. That’s why doing the exact opposite of what we do to stay safe — feeling our fear, attuning to reality, noticing that we’re a lot like the people we MOST want to avoid becoming, admitting that we’re not in control — can feel irrationally, nonsensically GOOD.

I have to show my WHOLE ASS to do this job. That’s why I do it. It’s good for me to feel my fear. It’s probably why I make pottery, too. I love to try and sometimes succeed and sometimes fail. Vulnerability to failure is part of the appeal. Pride in dumb and silly and small and useless things is also part of it.

I am released into the uncertainty of the present when I invest in what’s small and dumb and embarrassing. I like it. I want to make more dangerously dumb, daringly absurd things from here on out.

So my advice for feeling more alive, more present, and more aware today is this: Ask yourself what stories you tell to stay safe from uncertainty, from investment, from sensation, from the full range of your moods and emotions. What do you fear you will become, if you aren’t safe? Try on the opposite stance. Surrender to the things you fear the most. How does that feel? Do any buried desires arise there? Do you simply feel more alive when you let these taboo emotions into your body?

The goal isn’t to fix or change anything. The goal is to simply understand how you resist life itself, how you back away from passion, how you protect yourself from things that aren’t dangerous at all — they’re only dangerous inside the merciless hellfire of your vicious mind.

Forgive yourself for everything you are. Then start loving how odd, how complex, how interesting, how ever-changing you are. It’s a wild ride. Get on board.

Thanks for reading Ask Polly. Send your letters to askpolly@protonmail.com. The next Ask Polly Book Club book is Black Bag by Luke Kennard, so GO GET IT AND START READING!

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The Sun In Its Jewel Case (1937), Yves Tanguy

Dear Polly,

I went through an incredibly complex break up six months ago. We were together for two and a half years. It was both of our first relationships (22F & 23F). The early days were really special but things ended badly. I deeply regret how the break-up happened and the fallout since.

We parted in Februa…

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The Lovers (1929), Yves Tanguy

Dear Polly,

Should I dump this guy I’ve been dating for three months?

I just turned 30 a few months ago. Transparently, my twenties kind of sucked. I was in a career path I didn’t like. I was living in a West Coast city I loved, but left during the pandemic, and despite many opportunities, never returned to. Honestly, I just kind of burned out. I had a lot of promise and little to show for it. I spent a lot of my twenties depressed and angry. I kept leaving jobs, kept traveling non-stop, kept having optionality at the front of my brain. I wanted to be a writer, it’s all I want, to write and make great art, but I have little to show for it.

Last year, after a lifetime of being mostly single, I fell for a bearded guy I met when I showed up three hours late to a bar crawl. It felt like I was in “Before Sunrise,” but he was dealing with a lot of family tragedy and it didn’t matter how many times he biked me five miles out of his way so I wouldn’t go home alone, he was never mine. Meeting him inspired me to get more in life. After working hard and saving a bunch, I decided to quit and walk away from my shitty career. I didn’t know what I was going to do next, I just knew… not this.

Right after I quit, bearded guy sat me down and told me, after hours of me waffling on what I should do next, that maybe my life was somewhere else, that I had been everywhere and done everything, and maybe the braver thing would be to commit and really be where I was. That I had so much where I was and he couldn’t believe I couldn’t see it. Then he told me he didn’t want to date me. Again.

I traveled, then I crashed out and got severely depressed. It took me four months to realize what I’d done — that my career prospects had been limited, that I would have been better served getting a promotion, that I would have been better served doing anything else. That I’d essentially fallen in love with a friend who didn’t want to be with me. I completely fell apart.

I spent the next few months getting back to myself. I went on meds. I took a meditation class. I started working one day a week at a pie shop. I got a consulting gig. I started a weekly illustrated blog. I draw every day. I have a list of 387 reasons my life is good. I joined a cycling team. I got a desk at a co-working space. I started to realize my life, which included lots of friends and some savings and a family that loved me and a life in a bikeable, affordable city with a giant arts scene and space where I could work part time, actually wasn’t all that bad. And in the middle of it all, I started going out with a guy I met last summer at a group bike ride. I wasn’t planning on dating, it just… happened.

New guy is great. He is funny and sweet. The sex is impeccable, best I’ve ever had. I like cuddling with him. He understands my career nadir. We like to go on adventures. He’s incredibly considerate. He cooks me breakfast, he always sets up multiple fans when I come over because I get hot at night, he remembers things I said because he writes them down. I like that we talk about when things are awkward. I like that he plans things, like a progressive date night. I like that he has passions and interests and is great at making things. He has a great sense of design. He is supportive of my creative interests and wants to help me leave space for them. He seems open to kids because I want them, he wants a longer term thing. It’s awesome! This lovely thing fell in my lap. I like talking to him. I like sitting on the couch naked with him eating cake. Sometimes I think I love him.

But I’m getting a sense that maybe it’s not all the best. He’s 12 years older than me. He has some whiny tendencies, especially around a friend group he’s in. He yells at cars when they’re behaving poorly to pedestrians. He is really fed up with work drama right now, and I heard him complain about it all night, and I’m like, I get it, but can you let it go? He apologizes when he gets into “Eeyore mode” as he calls it, and it’s not that often, but I just find it annoying, someone being dour and awkward about everything. It feels like he blames things on the world when his life isn’t working out, and it’s not always that way, but I just.. don’t want to be around that? Sometimes he’s a little prescriptive on things, like what we should order for dinner or how I should do a thing, although he takes my opinion when I push back or suggests something else. Superficially, he’s also kind of short and bald, not usually who I go for. I also feel like I missed a window to live in London or Brooklyn, even though I like living in an affordable mid-sized city where I could build a thing.

(Also bearded guy texted me again and I just remember how deeply I miss him, how talking to him expanded my brain.)

The thing is Polly, I just want to be a writer. I want to create and make. I want to live in a dense city, but I also want to live in a bungalow with a yard and a dog. I want to start a small business. I want the kids. I want the partner. And this guy… he’s lovely! Really! I’ve been so single, and he makes my life better, and I want to give it a go. But. Man. Idk. I just need to take this creative ambition in me seriously, because I haven’t for years, and it’s made me miserable. I don’t want to slide into another life.

(I realize the writing isn’t totally related but even having him sleep over messes with my routines. But that seems like a silly thing to dump someone over? I also have been single for so long…. I’m worried the problem is me.)

Help!

Am I The Problem Or Do I Just Not Like This Guy That Much Or Am I Just Projecting?

Dear AITPODIJNLTGTMAIJP,

The guy you’re dating is a regular person, one who can fuck well and makes you breakfast. He sounds great in a rare way but only you know how you feel, and your feelings are obviously still percolating. Be patient with yourself.

Bearded guy is interesting but he’s not really in your life. He’s a symbol of something you want but can’t have. If he weren’t a symbol, if he were real, he would be far less interesting to you. It’s impossible for you to believe that, I know, but believe it anyway. And if he were your boyfriend, he would also (for sure, frequently!) become dour and blamey, and on top of that, he would sometimes disappear to give some new girl a ride home on his bicycle. I don’t know why I suspect this, but I do. He’s the kind of guy who texts you just as you’re moving on.

That guy is always like that. He’s not in your life. He’s just THAT GUY. He isn’t relevant.

NEVERTHELESS, it’s sometimes nice to have that kind of symbol around, so you can pretend that something romantic and brilliant is just out of your reach. You can tell yourself that you might someday be able to win the romantic, brilliant, glowing orb of a life embodied by the bearded guy, you just have to work very very very hard, concentrate, focus, channel your energy, usher all of your imagination and sensuality and blast it at one single point on the map.

But you never win. The glowing orb symbol is always floating far away, and somehow it includes the hidden promise of LONDON and BROOKLYN. There is zero baldness and shortness and awkwardness in the orb, because it’s ENTIRELY IMAGINARY.

But we writers looooove imaginary things! Plus, having a symbol in your life can make it easier to focus and work hard. Sometimes a symbol can help you write more often. Sometimes it makes you more open to the world around you, too. Sometimes a symbol can help you to grow, even when that feels painful.

I am not against symbols, orbs, imagination, or dudes with bikes who make you feel like you’re in a scene from “Before Sunset.” But when a person is a symbol and not a real person, often you’ll feel a sense of emptiness and confusion when you think of them. The deliciousness of their interesting ideas and clever insights will evaporate, leaving questions: Who the fuck was that guy? What did he even want? What did he get out of any of those experiences? Was he truly a friend to you? Why is he texting you right now?

Here are some much more important questions to ask yourself: Why do I need to have fifty alternative options open to me at all times? Why do I want fifty million things at once? How will I ever finish a truly great piece of writing if I keep my head crowded with five to ten imaginary distractions at all times? Why do I insist on questioning what’s in front of me while idealizing what’s out of reach?

Our high-capitalist universe cultivates around-the-clock FOMO. Resist it. Ground yourself where you are WITH ALL OF YOUR SENSES. Nothing will guarantee your happiness more than learning to do this. It doesn’t matter where you are — mid-sized city, Brooklyn, London, Fuckyville. Learn to relish the present moment.

Your questions about your current boyfriend are just forms of resistance — resisting life in one place at a time, resisting giving up on glowing orbs, resisting the hard, slow work of writing, which is excruciating and painful and takes so much focus and consistency. Trust me, I’m not saying THIS IS YOUR MAN and I’m not saying THIS IS NOT YOUR MAN. I have no idea and no insights there. The only thing I know is that you’re not ready to dump him and you’re not ready to marry him.

In other words, there aren’t big questions to ponder about him at this point. It’s only been three months!!!!! He exists in your life in a real way, which is nice. You can see him clearly for what he is. He tells you who he is. The sex is great. You like him. You’re not sure if you love him or not, but that question is rattling around inside your head and it’s noisy in there, so you’re not going to solve it intellectually. Meanwhile inside your heart, a cake is baking or collapsing. Let it continue to bake or collapse. Be patient. Let your body exist in this uncertain place without judgment or impatience. Enjoy the sex and the companionship for a while without questioning it.

I’m not pretending to be some peaceful Buddha who is above these things. The truth is that life is DRAMATIC even when you’re old and settled. Each day asks something new from you. When you’re dedicated to feeling everything, when you’re devoted to being fully attuned to the world around you, you’re also open to THE EMOTIONAL WEATHER that blows in and out without warning.

Speaking of which: This morning, it was gray outside. I wondered if it would rain, so I checked the weather on my phone. Then I checked the weather in Los Angeles. Then I zoomed in on my old house in LA. Then I closed my weather app and opened Google Maps so I could get the street view of my old house in LA. The latest photo is from 2024, three years after we sold it. For some mysterious reason, the new owners chopped down the one tree in the front yard and in the photo, there are huge chunks of TRUNK lying around where my flowers and green grass used to be. Now the yard I watered and mulched is mostly dirt and dried weeds. A few of the native plants I put in ten years ago survived; they’re enormous now because they were built to thrive in the desert.

I was never built to thrive there. I know that now. But I loved it there for 23 years in spite of that fact. Sometimes you’re torn but you stay grounded in one spot anyway because that’s what life demands of you. I almost moved to NYC when I was 31 years old but then I met someone in LA (who turned out to be a nightmare) and after that I met my husband and then I was stuck in LA. Good things can get you stuck the same way bad things can. Every single day of your life includes compromise.

I love North Carolina and I thrive like a native SWAMP MILKWEED here. But I’m a writer just like you are. I have a rich imagination so I’m always living fifteen lives at once. This morning I had a lot of questions about why the people who paid a huge sum for our old house would’ve chopped down the one tree in the front yard and then left the trunk strewn about like that. Why don’t they use the irrigation system we painstakingly installed? Why don’t they bother to clear the dead plants from the front yard? Why are their curtains covering all of the windows? Don’t they ever open the curtains and stare out at the beautiful old high school across the street, with the mountains behind it and the swaying eucalyptus trees beside it and the bright blue sky above?

So then I pulled up the Google street view from 2021. Incredibly, my husband is on the front porch, wearing a mask! Google happened to get a photo of him, how weird is that?! In the street view from 2018, the grass in the front yard is bright green and lush, and yellow flowers are blooming by the front wall. I remember what it felt like to live in that house with my two big dogs (now dead), and my nine and twelve year-olds (now 17 and 19). I miss that life. I miss living in a sprawling desert city with all of those crazy LA humans, with their brash voices, their wild desires, their endless longing.

I fell back in love with LA this morning. I want to visit but I’m too broke. So instead, I took screenshots of my house in 2021, 2018, 2017, 2011, 2008 (before we bought it). I texted the 2021 photo to my husband. Then I got out of bed and put a load of laundry into the washing machine and boiled water for tea. I looked out at the wide expanse of green grass in our front yard, flanked by dogwoods and crepe myrtles and Japanese maples. It’s going to be 97 degrees today. There might be a thunderstorm tonight. I love the weather here in late August and early September. The air is heavy. The cicadas and tree frogs form a chorus. The cumulus clouds are moving works of art.

But I also want to sit by the front window in my old house in LA and watch the kids arrive at the high school. I want to walk down the hot, brilliant sidewalk to pick up my kids from the elementary school. I want to carry my younger daughter’s backpack for her while she tells me about the boy who had a meltdown in class and the girl who threw her juice box at the wall during recess. I want to listen to my older daughter practice piano while I play Candy Crush on my phone.

You’re a romantic like me. You will always be torn between one place and fifteen other places. Let that bring you more conviction, more desire, more imagination, more freedom, not less. Don’t buy into the flat FOMO that our shitty culture feeds you through your phone. Instead, relish the contradictory passions that live inside your body. Celebrate your conflicted mind and your tender heart. This is who you are: A dreamer. A sensualist. A fearful, fragile soul. A robust, resilient adventurer. A writer.

Your mind is often a battlefield and your heart often feels way too much. That will never change. You’ll be this person forever. What will change is your ability to ground yourself in one place and let it be enough for now. You might not be ready to do that yet. Let the cake bake, motherfucker! Take your head out of it. Stop doing math and live where you are and WRITE ABOUT IT.

WRITING is the most important thing right now. NOT boyfriends or bearded dudes on bicycles.

Write a novel about a bearded man in London and a short, bald man in Brooklyn and a depressed rat in Fuckyville. Write about the fine details of being 30 years old and wondering what will complete your picture at last. You can write journal entries about these things, but I also want you to write dense, weird, unlovable prose (with drawings!) and strange overly sentimental poetry (with doodles in the margins!) and intensely angry essays about how life will never be enough for you (to go with an oil painting of your disgruntled face!).

But after you write and create and let your colorful feelings fly, ground yourself where you are. When your boyfriend speaks, notice how you feel inside your body. Be more curious about yourself and about how he feels. Listen to him and learn what he’s made of. What is it about his anger that you don’t like? Are you afraid of anger in general thanks to someone angry from your childhood? Do you fear that you’ll end up with someone who can be whiny and depressive? Do you think you need someone in your life who’ll buoy you without expressing their own needs and desires? (This is a legitimate thing to want and it’s possible to get it, but it comes with a whole different set of troubles and frustrations.)

In order to bake the cake inside your heart (or destroy it, lol), focus on being present to what’s here. Attune yourself to your body’s reaction to your boyfriend’s stress. Notice your underlying anxieties. Ground yourself in the moment and soothe yourself a little so you can hear his words a little more clearly. Use this time of UNCERTAINTY as an exercise in showing up and feeling where you are.

I have no way of knowing if this particular man is right for you. I don’t think you have any way of knowing that yet, either. I think you need to live where you are without dicing it into tiny cubes. Dice it into tiny cubes in your writing instead. Create a character who embodies everything BAD about your boyfriend, then create another character who embodies everything GOOD about him. Experiment. Let them talk to each other. Make them fight each other.

All of your ambivalence is art waiting to be made. That’s why it’s healthy for people like you and me to write. We can’t move in straight lines like other people. We have to become anguished over the smallest things. It’s okay to do that. The key is to relish it instead of turning it into one math problem after another. Math problems like “Should I dump him now or next week? Should I move to Brooklyn or London? What kind of writing should I do? When will my writing matter and who will it matter to?” don’t add up to anything at all. These are just forms of procrastination.

What adds up is RELISHING EXACTLY WHO YOU ARE WITHOUT SHAME.

How do you do that? You welcome whatever you’re feeling and you pronounce it ACCEPTABLE. You embrace what’s here, whether you’re a little angry or annoyed or afraid or unsettled or overly optimistic or deliriously inspired. Relishing EVERYTHING YOU FEEL is a daily practice for a writer. In order to continue writing, you require strong sensations, raw enthusiasm, and an almost foolish desire to show your FULL SELF. You have to honor your unique, restless soul.

That’s what I love about being a writer. I have to be fully engaged with what’s in front of me while also living inside my head at times. I have to get lost in a maze of old Google street views, surrendering my morning to waves of nostalgia and longing, and then I have to say goodbye to my daughter before she leaves for high school.

Every day, I’m knocked over by tidal waves of strong emotion. I meet my deadlines and I drift. I love my life and I want more, too. I want more and more and more, like every other flawed human on the planet. My job as a writer is to honor my essential nature as a ravenous, insatiable savage.

So stop trying to either BE SETTLED or REFUSE TO SETTLE. Embrace exactly where you are for now. Love your ambivalent soul with more ferocity, with more devotion. Don’t nail down the rest of your life. Nail your ass to a chair and write with everything you have. That’s all. Do it today and tomorrow. Dare to believe in who you are, in all of your restless madness. Dare to believe that you can do this — this impossible thing, at this impossible time.

Has it ever been harder to write than right now? Sometimes I don’t think so.

Writing requires belief. That’s what makes it so hard. I have to find my religion again and again, day after day, sometimes by drifting, sometimes by daydreaming, sometimes by sitting where I am and looking at what I have right now. Each day, writing asks something different from me. That’s where the variety I crave comes from. That’s where your restless mind wants you to live, too.

But even when you’re feeling impatient and ambivalent, you have to RESPECT IT. You can’t say “I wasted all morning taking screenshots of Google street views when I should’ve been writing!” You have to say “I miss the desert,” and “I loved having little kids” and “Soon there will be no kids in this house anymore” and “I feel sad” and “It’s good to feel everything” and “I am just a SWAMPY MILKWEED, waiting for the next thunderstorm.”

What kind of plant are you? What weather do you love the most? What do you miss from your past right now? What are you the most afraid of? What’s electric about this moment, in this room, at this minute of your life? Will you write today or not?

I can answer that last question for you: You will.

Polly

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Send your letters to askpolly@protonmail.com. Respect the chaos of your emotions today! Honor what you’re made of! Be proud of your fragile heart! SENDING YOU LOVE! XOXOXO

Sleeping (1971), John Wesley

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

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

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

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

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

Then it swerves into traumatic coping territory:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

BUT READ THE BOOK FIRST!

Okay, who wants to start?

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

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Many Have Lived (1939), Yves Tanguy

Dear Polly

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

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

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

Signed,

Not Feeling Excited About Life

Dear NFEAL,

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

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

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

Real gratitude strengthens desire and passion.

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

Your life is built on avoidance.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You want to feel more.

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

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

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

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

Your mind will say:

There is no desire or passion here.

Your body will say:

I feel nothing.

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

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

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

This is a way of standing up for your desires.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Polly

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Light Loneliness (1940), Yves Tanguy

Dear Polly,

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

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Imaginary Number (1954), Yves Tanguy

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

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

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

Dear Polly,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Happy But Lonely

Dear HBL,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Polly

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

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Indefinite Divisibility (1942), Yves Tanguy

Dear Polly,

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

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

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Deux Fois Du Noir (1941), Yves Tanguy

Dear Polly,

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

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The Light of the Shadow (1939), Yves Tanguy

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

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

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

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

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

YOU ARE STILL ALIVE.

You’re still alive.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Untitled (1926), Yves Tanguy

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

Dear Polly,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Never The Girlfriend

Dear NTG,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What does your heart say?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

SHOW SOME RESPECT FOR WHAT IS UNKNOWABLE.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Respect what is unknowable.

Welcome what is vulnerable.

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

Honor who you are in this moment.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

YOU ARE A LUSH GARDEN. HONOR WHAT YOU ARE.

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

Love to you!!!

Polly

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

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

Time and Again (1942), Yves Tanguy

Dear Polly,

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

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

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Les Jeux Nouveaux (1940), Yves Tanguy

Dear Polly,

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

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

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Robert Plant, 1973. Photo credit: James Fortune

Hi Polly,

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

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

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

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

I don’t know, I’m just rambling.

Confused

Dear Confused,

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

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

RAMBLE ON.

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

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

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

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

The people around you seem impatient.

Are you impatient, too?

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

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

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

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

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

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

I JUST DON’T KNOW.

and

THESE THINGS ARE UNKNOWABLE.

and

OTHER PEOPLE ARE SOMETIMES ILLEGIBLE.

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

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

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

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

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

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

No. They’re working with what they have.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You say

Ah, sometimes I grow so tired

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

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

RAMBLE ON

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

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

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

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

I WILL BE KIND NO MATTER WHAT.

I WILL EMBODY MY VALUES.

I WILL SHOW MY HEART.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Polly

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From Green to White (1954), Yves Tanguy

I’ve been stressed out lately. A lot of stuff is slipping through the cracks. I’m disorganized. Each day it feels like a new set of problems land in front of me and I have to solve them immediately. This morning I started estimating college costs for my younger daughter and ended up in an anxious downward spiral th…

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