'How Do I Trust Myself?'

Stay curious, get a little greedy, and keep daring to respect and honor your core desires without shame or apology.

Éperdument (To Distraction) (1962), Dorothea Tanning

Dear Polly,

I am almost 50. Your response to What's the Point? was so deeply and wildly and awesomely right and it made me want to ask a question about how you begin to trust yourself as you try to feel your way through your life. I spent most of mine looking to other people for the answers to how I should live.

My first ever therapy appointment (which I went to like a dog going to the vet but I was both the dog and the one holding the leash) the therapist mentioned that when she asked how I felt about something I responded by saying "Well, I should feel like..." and never actually said how I felt.

I was really startled when she pointed this out and then slowly began to notice it everywhere in my life. Both in what I did and in how I talked to myself. I should do this, that, the other thing, about work, about what I did with my free time, about what I was like, about how I presented myself to others. I was a caretaker/keep the peace/be good so you don't cause trouble/gain accolades because these are the only ways people will love you child and I never really recognized how that had stunted me once I became an adult. I didn't even know what I actually wanted, it was so far outside the realm of anything my brain ever did that it almost seemed impossible to access.

And then of course one day I decided to use this newfound mental freedom in an objectively bad way and do something I definitely should not do and I've suffered for that and made others suffer too and in some messed up way it was also necessary.

So.

My question is, how do I learn to trust myself? I have tried with random things (I wrote stupid things at first but I know it's not stupid even if it sounds trivial). I used to tell myself I didn't deserve a second tea bag and just reused the first one, now I get the second tea bag and sometimes more. I take time to 'pay myself first' in the morning as often as possible by writing and exercising (you are so right about exercise). I love to read but it's honestly hard for me to read books for fun because I feel like I should be working.

The example that made me want to write was I had a long day visiting an academic institution and giving a talk and having a ton of meetings and dinner and it was lovely and I was also exhausted. I woke up the next morning with no plans for the whole day. I had given myself a single day in this other city, very far from my home, to walk around, which I love to do. And after I spent the day on my own wandering all over and getting ice cream and having lunch and just sitting in the sun I got back to my hotel and I just started crying my face off. I felt so guilty and disgusted at myself for having taken that day off. Who am I to take a day off? I have a kid, I am in a field that's being decimated by the current US leadership, I SHOULD BE BEING PRODUCTIVE. I know that's not right. I know that this is some weird reptilian brain/old defense mechanism stuff, but I also worry that if I let myself feel and be guided by feeling I will just, I don't know what, be a selfish asshole?

The one weird place that I don't have any of this agony about "should" is my kid. I wanted to have a kid, I had a kid, the kid is the best decision I have ever made and we have fun together and love each other and sometimes argue and don't always want to do the same stuff but we hang out anyway and trust each other and it feels mostly really easy and sweet and cool and the best. So, some part of my brain was like "we are not fucking this thing up" and I always trusted myself as a parent. I am not really sure how that happened but I am grateful for it.

I realize this all sounds a bit insane but I think what I need is help with some signposts of things being OK as I work to trust myself and feel my way through life?

With love and thanks, always,

Crack-Smoking Scientist (Shout out to Filler!!)

Dear CSS,

What you’re describing is so real and relatable. So many people reading this are thinking, “Whoa, this is me, too!” or they’re thinking, “Is this me?” Or they’re thinking “Wait, I go for what I want, don’t I? I just have a productivity fetish, whatever, and I’m angry at myself all the time for not doing enough, whatever, and I’m always kind of rushed and I don’t feel that passionate about anything except I do have a big crush on a coworker but it’s the only thing that feels like it’s purely FOR ME, so I indulge it… unless I’m escaping into Instagram and feeling sick afterwards, unless I’m drinking too much and feeling guilty afterwards, unless I’m spending too much money on dumb things and feeling regretful afterwards. But that’s just how people live these days, whatever whatever whatever!”

Sorry for the imaginary digression. My point is that when you don’t know how to recognize your true feelings outside of a maze of strict narratives, imperatives, and moral-seeming obligations, you become prone to IMAGINARY DIGRESSIONS. Your feelings evacuate your real life, your life becomes dissatisfying and dispassionate, and you start to build out fantasy realms, smoldering obsessions, and burgeoning addictions to make up for it. This includes workaholism, losing marathon hours to social media, binge watching, neurotic fixations on self-improvement, struggles to connect meaningfully with friends, allergies to community settings, and a slow, disturbing loss of self in general.

All of these behaviors are essentially FEARFUL. You’re so accustomed to doing the so-called right thing and following the supposedly correct path that you start to feel very anxious and off-kilter whenever you allow yourself some time and space to reflect on what you truly want and how you truly feel. Sometimes that unfamiliarity with intense feeling will make you take any new emotion too seriously, until you’re hurtling yourself at some perceived ‘solution’ – a new job, a cross-country move, an affair. Other times, the discomfort of feelings will make you burrow back into work or into numbing activities which feel soothing at first (because it’s a relief not to be neurotically beating yourself up just for existing!) but quickly curdle into a sour emptiness or low-key dread.

These are all very common afflictions, by the way. What’s strange is that the qualities and strengths that get you through the first decade or two of your adult life — committing, persevering, working hard, being decisive, stating your values clearly, sticking it out through tough times — can kind of bite you on the ass once you have the time and space to truly explore what you want and need and crave. Even though at first you think “Of course I know what I want, I am a person who is in touch with herself and always does things correctly!”, as you start to dig for your desires, things get scary or wild or strange. You start questioning things that you hoped to never question. You start wanting things that it seems very embarrassing to want. And a piece of you is always asking “Why would I bother with all of this unpredictability and chaos at all? Why do I even want to know more about who I am or understand how much I secretly dislike myself or don’t feel satisfied by my friendships or want more, more, MORE from life? Why not just go back to being a diligent worker robot or drinker robot or creative special egotistical show-off robot?”

See how many kinds of robots exist? You think you’re a freewheeling, sensitive adult, creating a life that’s cool and interesting, but when you slow down and really dig for your feelings, and then ask some difficult questions, and then strip away your ego and your compulsions, guess what you find? A person who is still following childhood orders by DOING THE RIGHT THING. You’re not freewheeling, you’re not improvising, you’re filling a series of roles based on other people’s standards. NO WONDER YOU FEEL SO GUILTY AND ASHAMED AND ANGRY AND CONFUSED UNDERNEATH ALL OF YOUR SUCCESS!

I love that there’s this pure and beautiful area of your life where you’re grounded, engaged, and deeply connected: with your kid. I’m the same way. My relationship with my kids has always felt right, and I’ve always trusted myself as a parent, and I’ve managed not to drag the high strung bewilderment of other parts of my life into that space. I don’t write about parenting a lot because I didn’t come here to brag and I don’t think it’s that useful to others to say “Oh, that was surprisingly easy for me!” But I want to mention it here because I think you’re going to find your way to self-trust and self-love and big, enjoyable desires more quickly than you realize, because you already know how to trust yourself and feel grounded and have a good time.

So let’s talk about WHY it’s so easy with your kid. My guess is that you’ve always respected your child’s loving nature and spirit and energy, and you’ve created a lot of space for those forces without letting them run rampant over you. You’ve set up firm boundaries but you’ve also been a friend to your kid every single day. There probably aren’t a ton of rules but the rules are understood and presented without drama and treated as simple and inescapable. You are consistent.

I want to point out to you that this consistency springs from an area that’s giving you trouble right now: You make firm decisions and you stick to them and you don’t overthink the work that comes from these commitments. That’s a kind of rigidity and intellectual dedication to a cause that is actually very useful, even though when you apply it to your emotional life it can fuck with you. So I want you to celebrate these tough and firm and recalcitrant dimensions of your personality right now, because they brought your life structure when you needed it (as you began your career) and they also provided firm boundaries and rules in parenting — just enough that you could also relax and engage and respect your child as a wild, interesting, creative, baby animal.

What if you did the same thing with yourself? What if you set up a certain amount of work that you have to get done every week? (Not every day because some days get screwed by outside forces and we can’t go around blaming ourselves for that every time!) And then once you fulfill those requirements, you let yourself roam a little, experiment, wander, have an ice cream cone.

I’m going to guess that even though you love wandering (a good sign!) you only do it when you’re with your kid or when you’re out of town. So you’ve made this thing you love into a rare treat. It absolutely makes sense why your relationship with your kid is so good. Those times are your rewards, and you show up for them fully, you’re present, you engage, you savor it as much as you can. (Btw, parents of younger kids, do not panic! This is not always easy to do with tiny kids but it gets easier as they get older and talk more!)

So now you need to learn how to enjoy that treat (and other treats!) when you’re alone, in town, and you’ve finished your mandatory work load. You need to assign yourself downtime, fun time, wander time. Let’s call it experimental time. You can’t have expectations around it. You have to allow it to be a blob, a question mark, guilt-free and undetermined.

ARE YOU STARTING TO FEEL VERY AFRAID?

I’ll bet you are. This is something I’ve discovered in myself, too. I’m fearful of free time because I expect too much of myself. Even when I say “You can do anything!” some part of my brain wants ANYTHING to feel productive. Even when I say “You can write whatever you want!” some part of me doesn’t know what I REALLY want to write on any given day. In some ways, even now, I’m both impatient with what I want and afraid of what I want. (Just read a book that speaks to this, and I’m doing a Zoom event with the author on Thursday!)

My point is that learning to trust yourself takes time. You keep hearing your shame and pushing back against it. You keep encountering this old voice that tells you what’s right and wrong, or warns you that you’ll become a selfish asshole if you listen to your deepest feelings and desires, and you reply, over and over, “No, that’s a lot of moralistic bullshit. I can honor and respect my wild, interesting, baby-animal spirit the same way I honor and respect my kid, and it will only make me MORE loving, MORE generous, MORE expansive, and MORE alive.”

You actually have to repeat this over and over. You have to confront the moralistic, rigid, suspicious attitudes out there, which will materialize inside your head every time you do exactly what you want. You will hear “You’re being a greedy bitch right now” and you will need to say, over and over again, “That’s not true at all” and “I reject that with every cell of my being” and also “Eat a fat dick.”

I’ve been on that path for a while. As a self-proclaimed artist (I know, EWW, but whoomp there it is), I find it useful to go FULL MOLLY and embrace and celebrate my sins: I am selfish and greedy, I am lustful, I am proud, I am gluttonous, I am vain, I am slothful. This is my emotional caramel ice cream double-scoop on a waffle cone with whipped cream and sprinkles on top. I get to fucking eat it up and enjoy it. I do this by writing weird stuff and loving it without scrutinizing it or forcing it to adhere to someone else’s standards, someone who reads dull, lifeless shit I hate anyway. I also do it when I show up to my pottery class and meander creatively: Maybe I’ll make a weird-looking bud vase today, or some kind of a rabbit face, or a bowl that’s coral red with green vines.

Humility, patience, temperance, diligence, charity, and kindness seem to rise up out of my indulgences whether I want them to or not. (Chastity: Not so much.) I am humbled and sent back down to earth. I fail at what I try to make. I eat too much. I am not nearly as hot as I’d like to be, ever. I eavesdrop and dislike a person in seconds. I am casually rejected by acquaintances because I’m weird or too direct. Exploring and experimenting and living ass-out includes rejection, always. You will feel like you’re flying high and then life will ground you for a while.

The best advice I can give you is that the path toward trusting yourself is long and slow and painful at times, but if you throw yourself into it and honor and respect your sweet, curious, savage, greedy child, you’re going to have SUCH A GODDAMN GOOD TIME. Because bitch, it is FUN to finally wake up to yourself and your desires. It is FUN to resolve to honor what you are. It is FUN to give yourself much, much more time and space to explore and play and wander.

It's even fun not to know what you want, if you’re patient about it. It’s even fun to discover that you hate yourself, over and over and over again. There were a few years there where I kept finding new layers of hardened self-hatred under the old ones. It was incredible. Eventually I was in awe of all of that self-hatred! I felt almost proud of it! “THIS LAYER SEEMS UNUSUALLY HARDENED AND SHINY AND STUBBORN!” I’d say to myself. “Who knew any human could feel this angry at herself at such a subterranean level?”

Delight at discovering scary things, at noticing fear, at tasting confusion: this is the big benefit of casting off shame over and over again. You make feeling and digging for more and surrendering to desire your practice, you drop kick neuroticism and overthinking and second-guessing out the window, you relish uncertainty and lingering questions, and eventually, you notice how your tolerance for this slow process is making you feel much more grounded and engaged and loving. Your curiosity starts to outweigh your shame.

Right now, I feel bad and good, on and off, because I’m going through a few brand new kinds of challenges. But thanks to the fact that my curiosity outweighs my shame, whenever I feel shitty I get curious. I ask myself questions. I sit with pain and let it show me things and don’t try to shut it off or “solve” it. I take on the world by moving through it with open eyes instead of rejecting it and picking it apart with my words. I watch and listen to other people, I ask them questions, I read, I notice things.

I am still fearful. That’s a new discovery. I am very afraid of trying hard things that are new to me, still – particularly pursuits that I value a lot. So right now I’m trying to honor and respect my fear while also repeating the words: COURAGE. STICK WITH IT. KEEP GOING. TOLERATE THIS FEAR.

So that’s what I want for you, too. I want you to notice your fear and your impatience with uncertainty. I want you to start loving it when you stumble on more shame, more self-hatred. I want you to treat yourself like a curious, lovable child who needs a steady flow of encouragement and also requires a few firm boundaries to make things feel safe. I want you to indulge your emotions as much as possible while NOT indulging neurotic, shameful, guilty or anxious responses to those emotions. I want you to answer anxiety by moving into your body, breathing, and reminding yourself that you are on a wild and courageous adventure and this rattling, jarring moment will pass. And I want you to trust yourself.

Let’s wrap this up with a story: Years ago, I had a new editor at The Cut who pointed out to me that I ended a lot of columns by starting each sentence with the same phrase like “I want you to x, I want you to y,” "or “You will dare to x, you will dare to y.” She said this was repetitive and it was getting predictable. She may have even used the words “annoying” or “irritating.” She suggested that I resist the habit.

I took her word for it. I stopped doing it. I had probably picked it up from reading a ton of Joan Didion right after college. I was never imitating Didion directly, but her tone and pace would sometimes drip into my essays. Preachers also repeat the same phrases a lot, to build momentum and suspense. Rappers and songwriters do it. But maybe a lot of shitty writers use it as a crutch? I guess? Maybe it sucks? Maybe people with MFAs are wary of it and recognize it as an amateurish, stupid thing to do? Maybe I was clueless and lacked the pedigree to be truly great?

Eventually, I wandered my way back into that habit, because it just feels very natural and right to me. I love for the ends of my columns to have the pace and passion of a sermon or a song or a poem. It feels organic and effortless, like the time I spend with my kids. I only slip into that rhythm when I’m fully engaged and inspired and I’m truly feeling what I’m trying to express. I find myself cradled and buoyed by a kind of easy, flowing musicality and I know I’m in the zone. I feel fully present and optimistic and alive.

And occasionally, I hear that editor’s voice, trying to tell me that what’s essentially my style, something organic and natural, is bad and predictable and annoying and embarrassing.

And I think, “What the fuck do you know?”

That might sound like a negative, selfish-asshole vibe, but I’m landing here for reason: Your self-hatred and shame and years of working so hard for approval are going to show their ugly heads often. I want you to be patient and sit with the pain and the self-consciousness of that. I want you to be courageous and calm in the face of reflexive fear and self-doubt. I want you to experiment, ask questions, and see if those voices are offering anything useful to you.

And once you’re pretty sure you’ve taken what’s useful and drop-kicked the rest out the window, I want you to take pride in your discernment and taste. I want you to remind yourself that you’re the one person who gets to decide what’s exactly right for you. It’s not up to anyone else. Your chaotic, greedy, loving animal baby is capable of so much passion, so much brilliance, so many incredible intellectual feats, so much deep connection, so much kindness and joy. Nurture that little brat. Let her be bratty as fuck. Let her be selfish and weird and nasty and ridiculous at times. Let her be who she is. She will not break your heart the way this world has. She is yours and yours alone, and you are hers. Trust her, and tell those who don’t get it to eat a fat dick.

Polly

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Thanks for reading Ask Polly! If you want to hear more about uncertainty and patience and trusting yourself, join me on Thursday night at 8 pm ET for a Zoom discussion with Elizabeth Weingarten, who just wrote a truly soothing book called “How to Fall in Love with Questions.” You can get 30% off an annual Ask Polly subscription for another day I think and then this offer disappears forever, so GO FOR IT, YOU DESERVE IT!

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