'Am I Doing Enough to Live My Values?'

Stating your principles every day - and tolerating the anxiety this incites in you - will help you to refine your path forward.

Natural Harmonies (1956), Jane Graverol

Hey Polly,

I love your column and I come back to it from time to time when in need of online guidance from someone I admire and want to become like. Because that’s who I want to become: A writer. A space-holder. A guide. Just like you.

I’m 29, I am Italian, and in the past 3 years alone I’ve made some of the biggest decisions of my life:

1. I’ve quit a toxic job abroad to focus on making a living as a digital writer.

2. I spent $10,000+ in coaching and training (to become a ghostwriter for other entrepreneurs).

3. I came back home to do this full time.

And even if I managed to have my first three clients, my financial situation is not stable. But despite that I plan to leave my father’s house in six months no matter what.

You know... all I want in life is freedom.

And when I try to write online to create some meaningful connections or to create some brand awareness, I feel a sort of resistance in doing it even if I think I enjoy what I write about.

The things is: I don’t care about being an entrepreneur.

I do not care about making “the big money.”

All I want is to bring people together and support them in living a more open-hearted and fulfilling life. When I heard Ram Dass in this video saying part of his life’s work is to be able to bring god into everything he does — even when talking to a group of entrepreneurs — that resonated with me.

Not because I want to talk about god but because I want to feel that divine connection in what I do.

But maybe I am just undisciplined and can’t get myself to do what matters long enough to see results? I feel I haven’t found my tribe yet and even if I have a few hobbies and I’m dedicating all my time to this quest I KNOW I’m not giving 100% of myself.

Am I doing it all wrong?

I don’t think I’m wasting time because I’ve learned a lot of useful skills: sales, client management, my own self-love, what I like and dislike... but for some reason sometimes things feel out of reach and I start to question everything I do because what I care is freedom and connection and I want to give it to myself and to others and I’m not sure if I am doing it right now.

How do you navigate this unconventional situation? Could you please help me navigate this?

Thank you in advance!

Much love,

Trying Very Hard

Dear TVH,

I love how you’re processing the world at this moment, because you’re letting everything in. When you see something that inspires you, you don’t push it away or allow yourself to feel guilty or disgusted that you’re not perfectly aligned with the principles you admire. You’re not rigidly saying to yourself (like so many of us do), “Spreading divine love might be nice for Ram Dass, but I don’t have the time, money, energy, or inner peace to make that happen, and that’s not my fault! The world is fucked and I’m doing the best I can!”

It’s tempting for all of us to turn away from our most passionate, inspired, optimistic, principled selves. We witness something beautiful and authentic, something that we sense is absolutely genuine and even divine, and instead of lifting us up, it makes us feel inferior, ashamed, or overwhelmed. Or we reject it on the basis of something trivial (“This old hippie again? Everything he says sounds like a Live Laugh Love sign!”). Or we start to feel flinty and defensive and blaming and rigid for reasons we can’t completely understand and don’t have the time or energy to confront.

The stakes are high when we reject what we feel deeply. Some of the most sensitive, passionate people alive become weapons who spread hatred and blame without realizing it, simply because they can’t accommodate authentic beauty and joy and inspiration when they encounter it. They’re so accustomed to treating their own feelings as a kind of pollution that has to be repelled in order to avoid shame – and to maintain the illusion of superiority and specialness – that they form a rigid position out of their defenses and their shame. Their fears become vengeance against the unafraid. Their softness is transformed into persuasive rage against love itself.

So when you start to feel anxious about HOW you’ll align your life with your values, that’s not a bad sign at all. It’s a sign that you can still welcome new information through your feelings. It’s a sign that you recognize what’s pure and valuable and deeply worthwhile out in the world, and you still believe that you can be someone who spreads love and connects people in meaningful ways.

While you’re here, in this hopeful and fearful and anxious state, in this idealistic place where everything is about to begin, I want you to make a strong commitment to what you love and believe in: freedom and connection. You’re a writer, so I want you to spend a few minutes every day reminding yourself of what you value. It sounds to me like some of your values include spreading inspiration, lifting others out of despair, and making deep connections with those who make sense to you and share your ability to recognize the magic and joy that sine underneath the mundane surface of daily life.

It can be hard to find your tribe. I’m an absolute cynic and slob in so many ways, and my belief in connection is often illegible in the real world. I have to trust people to show them who I am and what I love. This is one of the reasons I, personally, also struggle with marketing. Like you, I don’t care about being an entrepreneur and I don’t care about making the big money. And when I see someone who IS making the big money by spreading a flavor of magic that’s similar to the (flawed, dirty, hardworking, humble!) magic I believe in, I often hate the way they’re doing it. I don’t like how they sound. I question their intentions.

Even after all of these years, I can’t tell if I’m just being competitive (I am very competitive!) or negative (I can be incredibly negative!) or just a holier-than-thou purist about what I will and won’t do. I can’t tell if I’m being sexist or just grumpy! All I know is that I don’t personally care about building an empire, and I’m extremely suspicious of empires that are linked to egos. I don’t want to trot my ego around and act wise and special in front of other people, because that looks rotten to me.

But I’ve also reached a point in my life when I can speak very fluently and effortlessly about shame and joy and what I see as the major obstacles to happiness that most people have to reckon with over and over again. So sometimes I feel like I hold myself back with my essential inability to distinguish between what I love and what I hate.

At the center of this problem is the fact that I avoid the problem. I often refuse to put in the hard work to clarify how I’m going to use my gifts and take them seriously. I am so afraid of becoming one of THOSE GURU TYPES, out in the open, posting little videos of my fucking face saying shit I know, that I avoid the whole puzzle.

In other words, I need to outline my ideals more often. I need to understand my fears and what I dislike and what I truly believe in, so I can move forward with more clarity.

So my advice for you is the same as my advice to me: You know what you love and care about. That’s the most important thing. So take fifteen minutes each day and write about what you value the most.

As you write, I want you to have faith that you’re going to find a way to put your values into motion. But on days you can’t feel your faith, I want you to simply write about it anyway, knowing that the writing itself is like a prayer. You are honoring your highest self in those moments. You’re also showing respect for your instincts and your gut. You’re paying homage to what you already are, what you already know, what you’ve always known. You’re a sensitive soul who understands what this world truly needs, and you’re someone who is determined to serve. You are passionate about connection itself, freedom itself, and if you look back on your life so far, you’ll see that you’ve always been this way. You’ve had your struggles, but your core desires were always there.

If you want to live a joyful life, you’ll continue to respect, honor, and love this pure, freedom and connection, which lives at the center of who you are.

After fifteen minutes, you’ll move on to doing your work. Some of this work will be the daily grind of actual ghostwriting jobs. Some of the work will be marketing and promoting yourself. And at various times during the day, you’ll lament that your work is too far removed from what you believe in, what you love, what you expect from yourself and the world around you, what you want to spread and connect with.

That’s when you need to remember that if you can’t feed yourself and pay your rent, you can’t honor and respect your principles and values. It’s not that you’d take a job that’s completely opposed to your ideals. That’s not you, and if you ever find yourself there, you should pay attention to the dissonance that arises, because it’s telling you that you’re off track.

I don’t think you’re about to betray your values. Remember that building a sustainable way to feed yourself isn’t a betrayal. And here’s a message that I think we both need to metabolize: Looking for ways to work, reaching people, expanding your circle of influence doesn’t need to be mistaken for an ego-driven or deeply corrupt attempt at manipulation or power.

In my case, I think isolating the things I don’t want to do for very good reasons is important. I need to outline which forms of promotion I find soul-sucking and poisonous, and I need to make peace with the simple fact that these things will never be right for me. I sometimes feel guilty that I don’t do more promoting, and that’s true in part because I haven’t put in the (thankless!) hours of really scrutinizing what I can do in contrast to what I truly believe is corrupt or detrimental to other people’s faith in themselves.

I know this will sound like absolute madness, but I think I could make pretty solid TikTok videos about my ideas, as long as these videos had zero to do with my ACTUAL FACE TALKING EARNESTLY. I could sew a really good puppet and deliver my message that way. I would have to use a weird voice, too.

Why is that true? It’s not because I feel ugly or afraid of being seen. It’s because I don’t want to make other people feel things using my face as a tool. I don’t want to be the face of wisdom or insights, because I need this face to just be a regular jackass in my regular life, which makes me happy. It’s not about avoiding fame, it’s about separating what I love and have to offer to relative strangers from what I love and have to offer privately. It’s also about just preferring wise rabbits to wise people? And choosing cartoonish voices over regular voices?

Am I a lunatic? Possibly. But the things that give me some resemblance to a lunatic are also the purest and realest parts of me. I am passionate about exuberance itself. I believe that life should feel romantic and weird and dark and beautiful as much as possible, and the core self that holds these beliefs close to her heart also loves rabbit puppets. Maybe puppets are a way of admitting that sometimes it’s easier to trust imaginary animals than it is to trust real people. We have so many accumulated negative associations with real people! Imaginary beings can float out of reach of these prejudices and this trauma. (Of course, if you were traumatized by a puppet as a child, this doesn’t apply to you.)

What I’m trying to describe to you is the inherent lunacy of TRUSTING YOUR INSTINCTS. Because you won’t insert your principles and passions into your work until you learn how to trust yourself. Trusting your instincts and making a clear and thoughtful map of your values and principles will guide you along the path to creating a career for yourself that’s fulfilling and joyful and inventive. By trusting yourself, you’ll figure out how to SERVE OTHERS the way you so strongly desire.

But it won’t be easy. There will be hours and months and even years when you feel like your work and your values aren’t aligned as beautifully and satisfyingly with your core self as you’d prefer. I don’t want you to lose faith or to stop writing about your values, though. I want you to build a strong relationship with your own ideals and principles. I want you to honor the child who knew that connecting with others and cultivating freedom for others and serving higher principles would be a part of your life. I want you to pay tribute to the soft center of who you are, and also respect all of the strength and resilience that’s built up around that soft center, in order to protect it.

Anxiety will make you believe that you have to protect yourself by being less principled, more defended, more rigid, more tenacious, more tireless in your pursuit of success. You’ll think that you have to give 100 percent of yourself to your work or give 100 percent of yourself to your ideals. You might be tempted to weaponize your ideals by rejecting the softness and love at the core of who you are. You might be tempted to turn against your body like a saint and give everything to your vision of freedom.

Giving 100 percent to anything or anyone is a mistake. When you feel anxious, take time off to exercise. Go for a long walk and reconnect with the natural world and remember what you love the most, what you believe in the most, what the core of your beautiful heart wants for this world. Use your anxiety and pain and fear as signs that you need to return to the core of what you are and honor that pure, sublime core, your most passionate self, your purest desires.

We all have to build a daily routine that keeps us healthy and fed. We all have to do hard, thankless work every single day and it feeds our souls in ways that we can’t measure. Don’t turn yourself against the work you do, even if it’s not perfectly aligned with your principles yet. As long as you keep reminding yourself of your principles every day, you will naturally and slowly align your work and your life with those principles.

When you see things that make you feel guilty or worried or sad, when you hear things that tempt you to turn against yourself, move towards those things and look at them more closely instead of backing away. Become interested in the things that make you feel intense emotions. Ask yourself why. You won’t always know. Keep noticing without shame. Keep embracing open questions. Stay curious.

When you see curiosity out in the world, get curious about that, too. Notice how people who are genuinely open-hearted tend to create possibilities and joy and a sense of optimism around them.

Staying curious means that you get curious about what’s causing you pain, what makes you feel sick, what makes you feel depressed, what makes you feel numb and distant. You notice when you start to feel superior to others, and you ask yourself why. What are you defending against? What are you afraid of?

If you want to stay aligned with your values and bring those values into your work, you can’t be afraid of reality or your feelings. You have to use your feelings to guide you forward and refine your path based on that information. That doesn’t mean that you tell yourself, “I’m afraid of public speaking, so I should avoid that at all costs!” It means you notice your fear and then you investigate where those fears come from, what they have to do with your core self and your core beliefs. Sometimes that investigation will be confusing and it will take YEARS to understand what you truly feel. The more you dare to feel what you feel and the more curious you are, the less slow and arduous your path toward understanding yourself will be.

You’ll change your mind often, too. If you’re ambivalent, notice that. I had to go back and look at my ambivalence about books over and over this year, in order to finally understand what I truly wanted to write next. I had been avoiding the question of what to write by DECIDING ON A TOPIC and then IGNORING MY RESISTANCE. Instead I had to push myself to face my resistance every single morning. I couldn’t protect myself from the dread that this incited. I couldn’t shelter myself or defend myself from a very hard truth that I had to discover about what I want and don’t want at this moment in my life, and how that aligns with my core values and my core self.

I’m making that sound arduous but after pushing through that reckoning, I had a breakthrough. I could suddenly see a way to work that would feed me instead of depleting me. And now I have a clearer sense of what I need and a lighter feeling overall about my whole existence. It’s counterintuitive, but that’s how you often feel when you lean into anxiety, pain, difficulty, shame, fear. You tolerate reality and reality humbles you. You face down your fantasies about yourself. You take your vanities apart and you rebuild yourself without them.

Disappointment, rejection, and pain can be so transformative and also so practical for these reasons. When you’re forced to break all of your rigid stories and fantasies about yourself apart, you are inevitably reacquainted with your purest core self, your highest ideals, your strongest desires. This gives you energy and makes you feel more hopeful.

I want you to understand that, as you look for a place to live and you work hard to support yourself, you will be humbled. But no, I don’t think you’re off track simply because your job isn’t all about freedom and connection every minute of the day. You’re putting in hard hours of work in order to create a sustainable base of operations. As long as you keep putting in those hours of believing in who you are, outlining what you love, supporting what you desire, and also underscoring what you don’t want, what you dislike, what you’d like to avoid, what you believe spreads imprisonment and alienation and everything you stand against? You’re going to mold your work around your passions and values.

I believe in you! I love your conviction. I think your pride in who you are shines through and is genuine and pure and you shouldn’t doubt it or question it if you can help it. That pride is linked to your vulnerable, pure, soft, sensitive heart, which you need to continue to honor at all costs.

You’re going to have a beautiful, adventurous life filled with love and joy. I know that’s easy enough for me to say, with thousands of miles of cold ocean between us, and thousands of miles of desert and mountains and pastures, dotted with cities and towns and villages, filled with people who are striving and failing, struggling and mourning huge losses. We will all lose so much, today and tomorrow and the next day. There is so much mourning ahead, so much struggle and hard, thankless work and despair waiting for each of us, no matter what we do.

But I believe in you and me and all of us. I believe that as long as we understand the core of who we are — as long as we have faith, trust ourselves, let go of our superiority and our rage and our anxiety, and feel the tireless waves of love that live inside our bodies — we can experience joy and forgiveness, every day. We can spread love and freedom and connection, every day.

All of heaven lives within us. It’s our job to spread that heaven to others, to encourage them to recognize the heaven inside of them.

Sending you love with all of my heart,

Polly

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Thanks for reading Ask Polly! Shout to Vaibhav Munjal, who spreads open-hearted enthusiasm in everything he does. (You can watch his excellent videos here. Vaibhav talks about Ask Polly here.) (No, I don’t take payment for links and don’t do sponsored posts.) Thanks as always for your continued support and your faith in me.

Send your letters to askpolly@protonmail.com. Keep believing in your core desires and celebrate your feelings every single day, even when it’s hard. Feeling your sadness and fear will clear the way to more joy. Trust that.