'I Can't Decide What I Truly Want!'

It's obvious what you want, actually.

Pounding Strong (1981) by Dorothea Tanning

Dear Polly,

For as long as I can remember, I have felt stuck. 

I’m stranded at a train station with endless tracks and moving carts hurtling in and out, arriving and departing faster than I can realize where they’re going and if I’d like to hop on. I see friends and family climbing aboard on different routes and I’m left sweating profusely and on the edge of my brain stem snapping in half. I have a ticket in my hands with a destination to anywhere, which is actually a destination to nowhere, because I have absolutely no idea where I truly want to go. 

I find myself oscillating between paths of extremes, daydreaming about becoming a CMO with a corner office to living abroad with my lover to owning a small corner shop for antiques, coffee, and cats to buying land in the middle of nowhere to building a bunker. These are all ludicrous and widely erroneous thought paths in my brain. I hate corporate America and find myself burnt out more often than not when I’m forced to play office politics. The country my lover is from is a 10-hour plane ride from everyone I know and the current political and economic climate teeter-totters more than I do when making decisions. I’m abrasive when I’m not masking, which tends to slip when I deal with strangers who are rude or I’ve had a long day or just why not, because let’s be honest, I’m just a bitch sometimes. And cats in an antique store? Disaster. The bunker is just my anxious brain’s way of dealing with the potential for nuclear war, rather than a final destination. 

Everyone keeps telling me to be honest with myself. I even tried hosting a vision board party with my friends, hoping it would spark some sort of inspiration. Instead, I was overwhelmed by the chatter of the gathering and, quite embarrassingly, didn’t put a single thing down on my board. 

If we’re being truly honest — and I oh so want to be with you, Polly — I think I’m furious. I see it in the way my joints lock up for no reason at all, when my dentist accuses me of clenching to the point my teeth are sensitive and my gums are eroding at 29 years old, when the pain in my shoulders become so unbearably sore, I beg my lover to massage out the knots to the point that I sob. 

I’ve always been quite the angry little girl, Polly, as I’m sure so many people told you. It’s like that asinine quote everyone says about ducks gliding but furiously peddling; I’m wading but my wrath is under the water’s surface. No one knows this about me, how viciously vile I am. How I wish to scorch the Earth beneath my feet and rip everything to shreds with my bare teeth. 

We could spend thousands on this one topic in therapy, Polly, to get to the real root of the issue. I know my anger comes from my father, the narcissist overlord who I heralded as a god most of my life and the enabling, drunk mother who hated me and the attention my father gave me. Both of whom subjected me to emotional incest as their confidant during their torrid divorce, reconciliation, and final separation. I’ve healed those relationships and I love my parents more than anything, but I’m no stranger to who sowed this garden, Polly. 

At this point in my life, I’ve come to the conclusion that the person I’m angry at the most is myself. Time truly is a flat circle. After the years of healing and revelations and religious interventions and self help and therapy (we’ve already spent thousands, Polly!), I’m back to the same self-loathing, decrepit soul. I thought I’d overcome the self-sabotage streak in my life after I got sober, stopped starving myself, kept dangerous men away from my body, and stopped closing my eyes while I sped down the highway at 3 a.m. half out of my mind. But I see it here, in the unwillingness to choose a path, where I remain terrified of making a mistake and cursing myself for being indecisive. 

I notice the people that occupy a large portion of my loathing are those that I envy. It makes me feel like a terrible cliché. My whole life, I told people I wanted to be a novelist. In my spare time, I wrote short stories and poems for fun since elementary school and attempted NaNoWriMo each year as early as 13. I was always loved by my English teachers, my mentors, who encouraged me to pursue a career in writing. When it finally came time to head off to college, I chose a degree in journalism rather than English, touting proudly to others that I was already writing creatively and I needed to pay the bills before I was published. It didn’t matter to me that I had never been able to finish a novel from start to finish or taken a creative writing course beyond high school. Oh, how naive I was, Polly.

Eight years later and I’m so far removed from the dreams I once had. After a somewhat successful career as a journalist, I left the field two years ago out of a desperate need for a stable income that would help me save up for a house (Surprise, I still can’t afford a house in this fucking economy and that makes me livid!). Now I find myself in a soul-sucking marketing job for a private-equity blood bag where I use ChatGPT to crank out copy because I can’t stand to put forth the effort. With each passing day, I can feel my brain rotting in my skull. 

I loathe other writers from afar, to the point that it’s embarrassing. They have no idea who I am, this angry leper with beady eyes and gnashing teeth. I won’t dare share the same air as them, for fear that they’ll smell the desperation, the imposter stench in my sweat.  I can’t bear to call myself a writer, the thought is so reeling I’d rather eat my own hand and I dry heave whenever anyone says it to my face. I’ve spent my entire career writing and I still can’t call myself that.  Even you, Polly, one of my favorite writers. Your columns and books have made me laugh, cry, and feel SEEN for once in my miserable existence and as much as I love you like I think a human can genuinely love a stranger, I also ache at the thought that I will never be like you. I'm mortified to even send this to you! To this day, when people ask me what I would do if money didn’t matter, I shamefully tell them I’d live in the woods and I’d write books. That I hope people would read them and like them, but I’d be okay if they didn’t. It’s true and I HATE that it’s true, Polly. 

I’ve tried to release the poison from the wound by buying books I don’t read and subscribing to writer Substacks I passive aggressively refuse to open because I’m terrified of my own mediocrity. I’ve tried to write creatively, something that used to feel like breathing to me, and it felt like trying to turn on a project car that’s been sitting in the backyard for years with a rusted out engine on cinderblocks. Beneath that wrath, I’m terrified that the raw girl who wrote stories that scared her teachers is gone and she left me with all her anger with nowhere to put it. 

And so now I’m here at this station, a ticket in my hand to anywhere. But the train I wanted to take has already left and I’m devastated. 

Yours Lovingly and Bitterly, 

Mad As Ducks

Dear MAD,

A lot of the writers I know – and I know a lot of writers – could’ve written me this letter. But their letters wouldn’t be the same as yours. Their letters would express many of the same elements – I hate corporate offices, my parents expected me to parent them, I’m torn between practical and creative paths, I can imagine multiple alternative lives, I’m furious, I’m vile, I’m lost. But only you could paint this particular portrait, which is so raw and vivid and passionate.

Your letter is a unique creation from an exquisitely original soul. Your letter is the still trees outside my window, waiting quietly for dawn, basking in cool blue light. Your letter is the strange mechanical sounds of the album I found on Pitchfork this morning, that’s playing in my ears. Your letter is an entirely new depiction of anguish and longing.

Even before you got to the part about writing, when you were still talking about offices and parents and anger, I thought, “This is a writer.” I was so happy when you mentioned writing, because then I thought, “At least she knows exactly what she is.”

You don’t get to escape what you are. No one does. While plenty of people are natural writers like you, not all of them are passionately in love with writing the way you are. Your exhausting, devastating love of writing is manifested in every word. People who don’t write will think I mean your choice of words makes you a writer. No. I mean the way you describe the drama and agony of NOT WRITING indicates that you’re a writer. Refusing to write hurts you, but writing also hurts you because it incites this dread of NOT BEING ENOUGH, not being like those triumphant writers you bump into online and everywhere else. They are marching toward the future. They are secure in their skills, in their importance. They know something you don’t know.

And then there’s me, serene and successful, surrounded by everything I ever wanted.

AAAAAAAHAHAHHAHA! Man, I wish you were here right now so I could tell you that I am exactly like you at every level. I’m happy, but I am still you, because I still want cats with my antiques, I still want a dance party or a bunker, a polygamous colony or a castle on the moon, fifty great American novels or a PhD in literature or a poetry book or an album of amazing songs. My conflicted writer brain always wants too much.

For a few months there, I couldn’t even write about self-loathing, because I kept discovering that my assumptions about myself had collapsed in on themselves. And when I finally dug for what was haunting me, what I found was ANOTHER layer of self-hatred, but this layer was immovable and solid like marble. Even though I want to assure you of my confidence and swagger and raw enthusiasm out in the world, among other people, even though I want to explain that it took years to dig through the shame and the other gravelly and rocky and solid-granite layers of self-hatred that lay above this new, exposed marble like a subterranean layer cake, the simple truth is that at my core, I am full of love and ALSO full of self-hatred.

The intensity of my love for this column, for you, for the sky, for the trees outside my window, for writing music, for waking up in the morning, is fueled and funded in part by my hatred of corporate offices, crappy books, snobby idiots, and sure, myself – my wretched, vainglorious, rapacious, restless self. I hate my conviction that I’m special, because I think it’s stupid and it makes me a monstrous, ego-driven twat who doesn’t want to read a brilliant book by a peer on the wrong day or I’ll emerge thinking: You are not special. You are lucky, but you’re kind of a worthless dolt in general, and everyone knows it. Everyone agrees. You are nothing and no one. My husband doesn’t love to read these kinds of words from me, because they’re so inaccurate to him.

They’re inaccurate to me, too. They are real and true and also absolutely incorrect.

Living inside that clash of love and hate is not easy. But the alternative? Numbing who I am? Or occupying a humble place where nature is everything and making things is silly? Or stepping back and saying, “I’ve had my share of fun, let’s let the kids do their thing now”?

Fuck no, girl. This bitch no go gentle into that good night. You know why people read my words? Because I follow my whims. Sometimes it doesn’t work, but mostly, my whims slap.

I want you to carve that into your desk:

MY WHIMS SLAP.

Because that’s what you win, as a reward for the torment of being a true writer, a person who can’t exist without writing, a human who absolutely is supposed to be writing even when it’s just half-drafts of novels, or bad short stories, or scribble on napkins. Your reward for having a narcissist father and a savage brain and a needy emotional core that blends up love and hatred into a scary, sad smoothie every single day is that YOUR WHIMS SLAP.

You can trust your whims. Your whims rise up like winds in a storm when you’re feeling yourself. Your whims are beautiful and weird and they’re bigger than you are. You love to see them dance and churn and slap and get freaky. You would follow them anywhere.

I’m not saying never edit yourself. I’m not saying don’t work hard and improve at your craft. I’m just saying that following your whims is the FUN of life for you. And you can’t feel your whims or watch your whims get weird or track your whims into the wilderness unless you believe. That’s why your work on the face of this earth is to BELIEVE.

When you believe, you shine. The world around you rises up and becomes more detailed, more colorful. You breathe deeper. Soft sounds around you take the shape of music. This world is all yours.

You have the power to feel this good every single day.

Here’s the part that’s easy to forget: Belief can’t blossom when you’re stagnant or neurotic or hiding out in the dark. You have to build good habits that support and feed belief. Belief will grow from rest and reflection if what you desperately need is a break. But often, your body will trick you into thinking you need more breaks, more naps, more time to feel what you feel, more space to DECIDE DECIDE DECIDE HOW TO PROCEED, HOW TO BE BIG, HOW TO BECOME SOMEONE BETTER!

But in those moments, what your body often needs is for you to stop thinking and just take some frozen spinach, boil it in a pot, take a frozen piece of fish, cook it in the oven, eat both, and then run three miles. Often when your body says it wants a warm donut, what it wants is a frozen plant. When your body says it wants a back rub and a nap, what it wants is a hard workout and a tough phone call to your mother. When your body says it wants compassion, sometimes what it really wants is to scrub the fucking toilet.

Tough things clarify your desires more than modern humans are prone to recognizing at this sad date on Planet Earth. Extreme frugality cleanses your palate of overindulgent poisons. A difficult schedule straightens out your thoughts. Suddenly you understand at a cellular level that you don’t have to get bigger or become someone better or be more important out in the world. All you have to do is create the conditions you need to BELIEVE.

Right now, your love/hate blender of a brain needs to build something every day by following its whims. Every morning, you MUST love your whims and trust your whims, as you write anything and everything you desire, without shame, without purpose. Let it suck and let it be brilliant, too. Write way too much and then write too little. Feel hopeful and feel ashamed and understand that this is how you will live forever. Your brain is melodramatic. It wants to show off and then eat itself alive. Let it be what it is.

But after you write, turn off that super-sad love-hate whirlwind and behave like a more concrete human, doing the hard things, the concrete tasks, leaning into the tough, gravely layers of life, and taking pride in that. NO THINK. NO DECIDE. JUST DO HARD SHIT.

Too much hard shit or too much love-hate blender will fuck you up. You need balance, always, always, always. Learn to shift gears with gusto. This is a skill you will have to relearn over and over again.

The temptation to question everything will always be there. It’s just who you are, so make peace with it as much as you can. Recently, I broke my toe and got soft and avoidant and chippy, and these things made me doubt myself a lot. I was on a doubting path and then the doubting path wound up in the dark woods. Suddenly my words were unnecessary, unneeded, foolish, embarrassing, ridiculous. For a while, I let the stupid sounds of our shallow, fickle culture trick me into thinking that I am just a longwinded old person with major delusions of grandeur.

What’s extra challenging is that this is at least partially true.

BUT MOTHERFUCKER, I CHOOSE TO BELIEVE ANYWAY.

The other day, I joked to my husband that I went up the hill and got two tablets from God but one just said BITCH and the other one said PLEASE.

That’s how it feels to be me. Even God is skeptical of my whims. But honestly, what does he know? Creator of heaven and earth and all living beings or not, he’s one of the most vainglorious motherfuckers to have ever lived, and the Bible could use a heavy-handed line edit, if we’re being honest.

Believing in yourself is a decision. It’s a leap into the unknown that you consciously choose because it makes life more fun, more interesting, more electric. Believe without any reason to believe. Do you know that this is how it feels for most of us? Do you realize that even the writers you envy for their talent, and also the writers with crappy books, and also the strategists with enigmatic Instagram posts and poetic newsletters and Italian memoir retreats and merch galore, they all have to choose to believe again and again? Some of them are not half as talented as you. Some are fifty times more haunted than you are. Some of them are lonely and half mad and broke, with no family and no chops and no followers and no nothing.

We all choose to believe every single morning. It is not a feeling. It is a choice. No number of published books makes it easier to believe, trust me. I wrote the best book I’m capable of, about a happy marriage, and the New York Times published a newsletter a few days ago that listed divorce books and then said “There are also some good books about HAPPY marriages…” and I lit up! But my book Foreverland was not mentioned, even in passing, even though my book slaps. (And it was a Best Book of 2022 according to The New Yorker and the Chicago Tribune. This parenthetical brought to you by my rapacious ego.)

BITCH, PLEASE! you’re probably thinking.

I believe anyway. I am old and deluded and I believe. I am many, many humans wrapped into one. I want antiques and cats, I want to be the CEO and I want to make incendiary art installations, I want to couch surf and also build a castle for me and my fifteen husbands.

Love what you are, MAD. Love your demons and your angels, your humiliation and your pride, your anguish and your joy, your doubts and your delusional ego. You are a writer. Get a decent day job. Full-time, half-time, whatever. Be frugal, save (even when you’re in debt), and exercise more. Whenever you’re tempted to buy something (literally anything!), picture Georgia O’Keeffe in a nearly empty house with a few stones she collected from the river. Faith loves simplicity.

You need to believe more than you need anything else on Earth. This is why you write. This is your religion. You were built for this lifelong struggle. You’re already passionate about it. You’re already all in. Stop trying to escape what you are.

Oh, and speaking of escape? Don’t move away from everyone you know. You need those people. Hug them closer. They love what you are already. Have you noticed? They believe in you.

Now it’s your turn.

Polly  

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Thanks for reading Ask Polly! This was supposed to be a paid post but so many people need a reminder to BELIEVE right now that I have to make it free. Cultivating faith in what you are and what you love the most isn’t easy. It takes daily work. But the work itself will feed you. Be gentle with your needy core but do the hard work you need to feel good. Thanks to every single paid subscriber for sticking with me and continuing to believe in me. Sending you love, love, love, BIG love.

Send letters and subscription inquiries to askpolly@protonmail.com. YOUR WHIMS SLAP.