What a gift this particular Ask Polly column is Heather. No matter who we are or how important we may appear, god, aren’t we just the same. As always, thanks for providing proof that human kindness, intelligence, honesty and connection exists. ❤️
Everything in this paragraph was relevant for me and I really really appreciated it:
"Ultimately, I had to go balls to the wall and conclude that perhaps being whiny isn’t the biggest crime, and that, pound for pound, in terms of sheer grit and hard headedness, no one is more employable than a determined sick girl."
My body has some similar stress warning signs that I'm actually very grateful for nowadays!
One of them is a heart murmur that gets way worse under stress--it's not the fatal kind, just the kind where you can't really do anything because you feel like you're constantly catching your breath. So I have to be like, sorry, I can't do that or my heart will stop beating! It's a clear boundary!
The other one is not nearly as glamorous, I call it "stressarrhia" ha ha. I think it's saving me from getting into so many bad situations though! Sometimes your body knows things that your mind is still catching up on.
The answer to Q2 really landed with me. I have limiting physical illnesses I've had since childhood - though not as severe as Lena Dunham's - and I completely recognise her account. But the process of minimisation/masking/amnesia - which becomes not just habitual but practically invisible to yourself to the extent that you have to UNLEARN it in order to see it & explain it - could just as easily be a description of how a person copes with the sort of mental illness caused in childhood by a stressful parent.
I suppose the unspoken word is, eventually, denial; but when you grow up, as I did and many do, with a stress that's as real and as normal as one of the walls of your bedroom, you're not in denial. You're simply growing up differently to the kid next door whose life isn't being bent in the way yours is. You both think you're normal; you only truly find out that, mentally, you're not by a process of working back from your current psychological problems, usually in therapy.
This -
"I have some form of perverse nostalgia where uncomfortable experiences are actually more interesting and tempting for me to revisit than dreamy ones. I ... am much more likely to experience a curious and somewhat detached play-by-play of moments that, as they were happening, I assumed would go into the mental black box where we often store our pain."
- surely gives insight into a creative person who is able to use her painful experiences, perhaps precisely because her parents didn't lay shame on her. I'm far from saying parents are always a direct source of shame, or even the major source. Maybe, for a child, they're just the shame transmission medium. But Lena can look in the pain box fearlessly; that's huge.
It's when Polly asks Lena directly about shame and self-hatred that she recounts how her parents had an unusual attitude towards it. I don't know many who would describe shame as a "ghost twin". Literally, she's saying she feels she was born with it, which, y'know, smacks of original sin and religious guilt, but that seems unlikely in her case. I'd argue most of us don't feel born with shame as a companion; we DO identify our parents as our major source of shame. If you believe in shame, then they made you the man or woman you are today. If you don't, then it's a case of "They fuck you up, your mum and dad." But she knows her parents didn't transmit shame in the usual you've-got-to-measure-up-or-I-will-not-love-you ways; she knows a) it's real (contradicting her father's belief) but b) it's extrinsic, and that simple fact seems to free her. That's why she can say honesty is the antidote (which struck me as a bit glib the first time I read it) and she deploys honesty above all in her creativity (as does Polly).
This column usually has a robust and intimate comment section, but I wonder if regular Ask Polly commentors will shy away from commenting on this, because Lena is Too Famous. Like, people might feel weird commenting, because it feels loaded when someone famous might paying attention.
I only bring this up because it's a good example of "celebrity" making things weird! Some types of people want to talk to Lena because she's famous, but other types of people WON'T talk to her, because talking to her would seem like attention-grubbing, or insincere in some way. Seems like it would be very lonely to have all your casual acquaintances either open up inappropriately or shut down preemptively.
Wow, interesting discussion with Lena Dunham! May I 'comment' here, maybe as sort of an introduction to a 'recap' of sorts of all my own stuff, which you can then go back into Proton Mail and 'look up' somehow? (Always hoped to carefully stay private & thus workable, but you (maybe accidentally, maybe intentionally) have persisted in the opposite direction. Uh. Ok?)
I enjoyed Dunham's Kingsley Amis paraphrase (née quotation sort of, lol) and then when she identified shame as a 'ghost twin' of sorts, fom birth back-to-back, always there but never visible to her.
But anyway, has it been about two years since I first wrote you, based on raw, approximate months at least and not truly events? Well, doggone. I am pretty sure not many others write so many addendums to you, but that amount of time off an unanswered letter can't be so rare, I'd guess. Any gut feelings -- publish it all, sure; publish some, but emphasize #11 & minimize #8 & get rid of #s 3-6; or publish none of it and go f yourself, you ranting low-life scum; etc. etc. The question is still open, as always.
Well, as for my life (which I think is what's been under discussion these many months), I know in surface design every single day can't be 100% magical time-of-your-life beauteous nonstop-party perfect, but in undeniable spiritual core maybe they ought to be? The days I mean. Really good. And maybe I have just unrealistic, exaggerated, stupid expectations thereabouts. That could be a nice way to break my situation down. If someone feels alienated, could that be because everyone else is an alien and they are the human, or because everyone else is a human and they are the alien? Or is the feeling itself incorrect, invalid, not what a life should be about?
One of the annoying things about writing to me is that I might never answer. I'd like to answer everything, publicly or privately, and for a long time I tried. Ultimately the effort and the guilt of failing would stress me out so much that I had to give it up and focus my energy on making the column as good as it can be.
I'm sorry that life doesn't feel better for you. Life doesn't have to be a party but it SHOULD feel good. Feeling alienated is terrible and I have been there often. Finding a good therapist has made a world of difference in my life over the past three years. Someone who is fully present and listens closely changes everything. No matter what their advice or guidance ends up being, these qualities are rare and precious.
When one person listens to you very closely, that alone can heal you. It sends you the message that you deserve to be heard. I hope that, in spite of my not choosing your letters for my column, you know that you deserve to be heard, because you do.
You sound angry that Polly's not replying, or publishing your "ask". But, just numbers-wise, she publishes about 80 posts per year on Ask Polly, and not all of those are replies to asks. So maybe 70 replies? She has over 100,000 free subscribers plus thousands more who pay. Her postbag is gonna be huuuge; it's got a couple of asks of mine in there for sure, jostling among the deep ranks of the unanswered.
Obvs I can't speak for her but she likely picks asks that are common, or illustrative, or that just appeal to her in some way. And we, her audience, read the asks & her replies to see what we can get out of them, what might help us. And there's a ton of help in there, all from replies to emails other than mine, or yours. And we engage in the comments if we feel we have something relevant or helpful to add, rather than "hey, why no reply?" But you know all this, right? - because you feel she could help you. And she can! So read on, man.
What a gift this particular Ask Polly column is Heather. No matter who we are or how important we may appear, god, aren’t we just the same. As always, thanks for providing proof that human kindness, intelligence, honesty and connection exists. ❤️
This was a lovely and heartening read.
Everything in this paragraph was relevant for me and I really really appreciated it:
"Ultimately, I had to go balls to the wall and conclude that perhaps being whiny isn’t the biggest crime, and that, pound for pound, in terms of sheer grit and hard headedness, no one is more employable than a determined sick girl."
Two icons ❤️ gasped when I saw this in my inbox!
My body has some similar stress warning signs that I'm actually very grateful for nowadays!
One of them is a heart murmur that gets way worse under stress--it's not the fatal kind, just the kind where you can't really do anything because you feel like you're constantly catching your breath. So I have to be like, sorry, I can't do that or my heart will stop beating! It's a clear boundary!
The other one is not nearly as glamorous, I call it "stressarrhia" ha ha. I think it's saving me from getting into so many bad situations though! Sometimes your body knows things that your mind is still catching up on.
The answer to Q2 really landed with me. I have limiting physical illnesses I've had since childhood - though not as severe as Lena Dunham's - and I completely recognise her account. But the process of minimisation/masking/amnesia - which becomes not just habitual but practically invisible to yourself to the extent that you have to UNLEARN it in order to see it & explain it - could just as easily be a description of how a person copes with the sort of mental illness caused in childhood by a stressful parent.
I suppose the unspoken word is, eventually, denial; but when you grow up, as I did and many do, with a stress that's as real and as normal as one of the walls of your bedroom, you're not in denial. You're simply growing up differently to the kid next door whose life isn't being bent in the way yours is. You both think you're normal; you only truly find out that, mentally, you're not by a process of working back from your current psychological problems, usually in therapy.
This -
"I have some form of perverse nostalgia where uncomfortable experiences are actually more interesting and tempting for me to revisit than dreamy ones. I ... am much more likely to experience a curious and somewhat detached play-by-play of moments that, as they were happening, I assumed would go into the mental black box where we often store our pain."
- surely gives insight into a creative person who is able to use her painful experiences, perhaps precisely because her parents didn't lay shame on her. I'm far from saying parents are always a direct source of shame, or even the major source. Maybe, for a child, they're just the shame transmission medium. But Lena can look in the pain box fearlessly; that's huge.
It's when Polly asks Lena directly about shame and self-hatred that she recounts how her parents had an unusual attitude towards it. I don't know many who would describe shame as a "ghost twin". Literally, she's saying she feels she was born with it, which, y'know, smacks of original sin and religious guilt, but that seems unlikely in her case. I'd argue most of us don't feel born with shame as a companion; we DO identify our parents as our major source of shame. If you believe in shame, then they made you the man or woman you are today. If you don't, then it's a case of "They fuck you up, your mum and dad." But she knows her parents didn't transmit shame in the usual you've-got-to-measure-up-or-I-will-not-love-you ways; she knows a) it's real (contradicting her father's belief) but b) it's extrinsic, and that simple fact seems to free her. That's why she can say honesty is the antidote (which struck me as a bit glib the first time I read it) and she deploys honesty above all in her creativity (as does Polly).
This column usually has a robust and intimate comment section, but I wonder if regular Ask Polly commentors will shy away from commenting on this, because Lena is Too Famous. Like, people might feel weird commenting, because it feels loaded when someone famous might paying attention.
I only bring this up because it's a good example of "celebrity" making things weird! Some types of people want to talk to Lena because she's famous, but other types of people WON'T talk to her, because talking to her would seem like attention-grubbing, or insincere in some way. Seems like it would be very lonely to have all your casual acquaintances either open up inappropriately or shut down preemptively.
A joy to read. Icons!
Wow, interesting discussion with Lena Dunham! May I 'comment' here, maybe as sort of an introduction to a 'recap' of sorts of all my own stuff, which you can then go back into Proton Mail and 'look up' somehow? (Always hoped to carefully stay private & thus workable, but you (maybe accidentally, maybe intentionally) have persisted in the opposite direction. Uh. Ok?)
I enjoyed Dunham's Kingsley Amis paraphrase (née quotation sort of, lol) and then when she identified shame as a 'ghost twin' of sorts, fom birth back-to-back, always there but never visible to her.
But anyway, has it been about two years since I first wrote you, based on raw, approximate months at least and not truly events? Well, doggone. I am pretty sure not many others write so many addendums to you, but that amount of time off an unanswered letter can't be so rare, I'd guess. Any gut feelings -- publish it all, sure; publish some, but emphasize #11 & minimize #8 & get rid of #s 3-6; or publish none of it and go f yourself, you ranting low-life scum; etc. etc. The question is still open, as always.
Well, as for my life (which I think is what's been under discussion these many months), I know in surface design every single day can't be 100% magical time-of-your-life beauteous nonstop-party perfect, but in undeniable spiritual core maybe they ought to be? The days I mean. Really good. And maybe I have just unrealistic, exaggerated, stupid expectations thereabouts. That could be a nice way to break my situation down. If someone feels alienated, could that be because everyone else is an alien and they are the human, or because everyone else is a human and they are the alien? Or is the feeling itself incorrect, invalid, not what a life should be about?
One of the annoying things about writing to me is that I might never answer. I'd like to answer everything, publicly or privately, and for a long time I tried. Ultimately the effort and the guilt of failing would stress me out so much that I had to give it up and focus my energy on making the column as good as it can be.
I'm sorry that life doesn't feel better for you. Life doesn't have to be a party but it SHOULD feel good. Feeling alienated is terrible and I have been there often. Finding a good therapist has made a world of difference in my life over the past three years. Someone who is fully present and listens closely changes everything. No matter what their advice or guidance ends up being, these qualities are rare and precious.
When one person listens to you very closely, that alone can heal you. It sends you the message that you deserve to be heard. I hope that, in spite of my not choosing your letters for my column, you know that you deserve to be heard, because you do.
Probably the strongest arguments for therapy I've ever read!
You sound angry that Polly's not replying, or publishing your "ask". But, just numbers-wise, she publishes about 80 posts per year on Ask Polly, and not all of those are replies to asks. So maybe 70 replies? She has over 100,000 free subscribers plus thousands more who pay. Her postbag is gonna be huuuge; it's got a couple of asks of mine in there for sure, jostling among the deep ranks of the unanswered.
Obvs I can't speak for her but she likely picks asks that are common, or illustrative, or that just appeal to her in some way. And we, her audience, read the asks & her replies to see what we can get out of them, what might help us. And there's a ton of help in there, all from replies to emails other than mine, or yours. And we engage in the comments if we feel we have something relevant or helpful to add, rather than "hey, why no reply?" But you know all this, right? - because you feel she could help you. And she can! So read on, man.
Very well put, thank you One Eye John :-)
👌🏻🙏