'I'm Overcome By Grief and Rage, But I Need Love and Support!

Thriving means turning raw shame into pure audacity.

Our helicopter shaking like a fist (1991) by Dorothea Tanning

Dear Polly,

I have been a fan of your writing for a long time. Thank you for your incredible insights shared in such thoughtful, intimate, imaginative, and catalytic language. I'm so grateful to you — your voice feels like one of a deep, wise friend. I hope you can help me.

I'm writing to you today from a new vantage point that I never imagined I would get to. I was sure I was going to die young, and now I'm nearing 40, and finally have the strength to face my past, but I’m doing so without much support… and it hurts.

I grew up in an abusive, neglectful home, primarily raised by a mom who struggled with many things including addiction, narcissism, and an anxiety disorder. While my dad traveled extensively for his job, my mom's health waned and her personality teetered ominously between rageful and unpredictable and honey-sweet, creative, and powerfully intuitive.

My family was wealthy, perfectionistic, and emotionally stunted. The stated rule was that we each always had to be the best. Anything other than success, triumph, and domination were ignored, suppressed, or mocked. Loss, vulnerability, mistakes, and pain were outside the realm of acceptability. Everything felt fake, coerced, and driven by shame, even things that ought to be positive.

Meanwhile, my siblings tormented me. From my older sister who put me on diets, plucked my eyebrows into awkward oblivion, got me drunk as a kid in front of her friend to see what would happen, to my brother, who said explicitly and with his actions, "You are worthless, disgusting, and it would be better if you were dead. Kill yourself." I was only a child when these messages were repeatedly said. Though, because I was fat — the ultimate crime in my family — the accepted mechanism for changing that was shame, so no one did much to intervene.

There was also violence. My brother threatened and attacked me at various times, especially in our teen years. There was a near constant stream of insults and animosity. I was praised, though, by my parents for my creative abilities. In my child brain, I thought the abuse was all my fault but if I could perform and be special enough, maybe it would save me. So I learned to seek attention with my gifts.

Until the very end, my mom was haunted by guilt. She funneled her pain into self-harming and numbing behaviors with catastrophic results for her and our family. She confided in me once after getting out of rehab that she had put me on Valium as an infant because I cried inconsolably. She was on it, too. Another time, she told me that I was the result of a rape by my dad. She also confronted me several times in my adult life with the overt suggestion that my brother sexually abused me, though she phrased it as a question… a suggestion I lack explicit corroborating memory for, but have strong reasons to believe is true. I never told her that. Instead, I said I couldn’t remember.

Unbelievably, I always held it somewhat together while living in constant fight/flight/freeze/fawn. No adults ever came to help me and I never had access to therapy until I sought it out at eighteen.

Doing my best, I made my messy, undiagnosed way through the world as a traumatized, terrified, and chronically dysregulated child, teen, and young adult. When my brother acted out, interventions, resources, and medications were thrown at him. Meanwhile, I stuffed everything down under food and later weed and alcohol and sex and tried to survive and perform. But I feared authority. I feared my peers. I feared people making fun of my body and hating me. I suffered nightmares, panic attacks, immune system issues, intrusive thoughts, and hyperhidrosis all over my body. I still struggle with many of these challenges and much more.

As you might imagine, normal development was impossible for me. I came away from my early environments with few enduring friendships, no real loving relationships, and profound scars from my unstable relationships with peers, which reinforced that I was unworthy of love, protection, and tenderness.

That brings me to where I am now. Throughout my life, the people who love me always get sick of me, or keep me at a distance for their sanity. Except my ex, who has become toxic as a romantic partner. The darkness of my life feels like it renders me unqualified to be in relationship with anyone.

My parents are both gone now, after years of neglecting and abusing their bodies. My siblings and I stepped in, tried to stay connected as a family and support them in their precipitous and excruciatingly drawn-out declines. It was traumatizing, and it also temporarily brought us together. Part of it was also profoundly healing — to be present for my parents' suffering, and bear witness with compassion. I came to see them as flawed and traumatized people in their own right and offered them love and care. I found relief in the belief that though they failed me, they did their best, whatever that means. I admit that I tried to put aside my simmering trauma and kept my family actively in my life at least in part so that I might inherit wealth, a reward for playing the game according to their rules.

Now I am realizing the staggering consequences of everything. My body is collapsing and has turned on itself from the chronic tension, inflammation, and emotional pain. I literally barely know how to breathe. And I’m embarrassed about moving through life in a stupor. I have unwittingly taken up so much space in my life as a traumatized person faking my way through normalcy, and it's all cracked open. My marriage, too. After my partner revealed their own masked rage problem a few years back, their frightening behavior retriggered horrific memories of my childhood. I left them and demanded that they seek therapy, which they temporarily did. Afraid to leave the only person who had ever truly loved me, I half heartedly returned. Rather than ending it, my hunger for better love made me act cowardly. I fudged my way to opening our relationship on shaky grounds with a friend, who now hates me and has talked shit about me in the small community where I’ve lived for over a decade. It’s one of several dead relationships in this town that haunt me.

After receiving a not-so-small sum of inheritance, I quit my job which had been a salve to my deep feelings of shame. I dissolved my creative collaboration, which was going nowhere, anyway — never getting the attention I felt it merited. I've let go of almost everything, and I don't know where to go or what to do with myself. I’m electrified, undefined, anonymous yet infamous— and aging. Before she died my mom said she worried for me. And she had cause to. My trauma has manifested in some serious chronic health issues that are just coming into focus.

But mostly, I am teeming with so much grief and rage. At the same time, the masks have fallen away. I am finally feeling the dawn of a new way of healthy living from many years of self-guided healing through learning about trauma and the body’s responses to it. I stopped talk therapy because it was making me worse off, and now I am focused on healing my nervous system as best I can. I offer myself genuine self-compassion. I speak to the traumatized child within me, and to myself as an old woman, and draw comfort from merging together with them. But I know I can’t heal in isolation. Yet I can't see how I can integrate my staggering baggage into friendships, relationships, in my career, or in my family. Where does someone like me go from here, except to exorcise demons in a memoir? That question haunts me. No one would want to read such a horror show… and the redemptive ending feels far away. Writing about all of this is so terrifying. Even writing this letter scares me. But this is my material.

Because “the truth will set you free,” I trust that I am getting better, but that’s not how the world treats me. People are uncomfortable with truth tellers. I feel like I have to run away from all the ways I've already embarrassed myself and freaked out others. And all the ways I've compromised, messed up, lied, or played along as I tried to compartmentalize and only process tiny bites of my pain.

I can't bear to see my siblings right now, as these painful memories show up in nightmares and intrusive thoughts. I'm grateful that my body was intelligent enough to hold the worst of my history at bay until I was ready. But now that I am ready, I don't know how or where to be to process it. And once again, relationships that have been most important to me are failing and seem brittle and unable to grow along with me. I can't ask for what I need because the people around me don’t speak the language of complex trauma and healing. I’m always disappointed by others and it feels too vulnerable now to fail at this critical moment as I try to be healthy and to care for myself before it’s too late. In the past I have made miscalculations about who to trust, and who to love, and it set me back catastrophically in my path to healing.

I have numbed and missed out on decades of living. But I survived and I desperately want joy and connection and more health and freedom from the past. I feel hope for a better life rising up inside my chest, but I also feel so alone on this journey. I know I have what I need within me to keep growing, but I can’t do it alone. How can I know what external moves to make now to find people who will care, and an environment to comfort, protect, and serve the version of me that is waking up and coming to life?

Unprotected

Dear Unprotected,

The most difficult dimension of healing from trauma is shame. Healing requires looking at reality with clear eyes, and that includes witnessing, remembering, reflecting, and acknowledging every catastrophic emotional and physical injury you endured.

But it doesn’t stop there. You also have to understand what those attacks, shocks, and acts of erasure did to your sense of self, your confidence, your joy, and your ability to communicate with others. You have to examine the elaborate defense systems you built in order to protect yourself from further injury. You have to review the warped, distrustful, volatile relationships you cobbled together with other injured people, just to pull yourself through the darkness. And if you’re a sensitive perfectionist who was instructed to take responsibility for everything, everywhere, always — to blame yourself for your coping mechanisms, your weight, your sadness, the sun in the sky, the moon and the stars and the galaxies beyond — then you will quite naturally come to believe that everything you’ve endured is entirely your fault.

You can tell yourself, over and over again, that it’s not your fault. But your mind has been trained to believe otherwise. And even once you finally persuade your mind that it’s not true, that you were born into a world that scapegoated you, demeaned you, abused you, and pretended it wasn’t happening the whole time, guess what? Your body still feels afraid. Your body remembers.

Your body just wants to feel safe, to feel loved, to feel protected. But the very specific combination of the merciless messages you received about your culpability and your mother’s flip-flopping between kindness and viciousness add up to a body that doesn’t trust anyone, for good reasons.

So here you are: Your so-called healing journey… Oof, those words! Let’s call it a path of discovery instead. Your path of discovery *necessarily* incites shame. Why? Because it includes stories in which you, a human who was raised to be a perfectionist and to take responsibility for every single fucking thing, are behaving sub-optimally — out of fear, out of confusion, out of pain, out of raw need, out of loneliness. You look back at your life and you are always saying the wrong things, choosing the wrong people, behaving the wrong ways. And because you’re sensitive and you need human connection and your survival depends on figuring this stuff out, you are determined to observe all of that wrongness, correct it, apologize for it, clean it up, and try again and again and again.

That’s how we do the work, right? But maybe I should say that’s how an OVERACHIEVING PERFECTIONIST does the work. And let’s be honest, as a fellow overachieving perfectionist, I love how hard you’ve worked and I love how much responsibility you’ve taken for yourself. That said?

There is still so much shame embedded in your picture. It’s the kind of shame that isn’t expunged easily, like chasing a rat out of your house. This shame is an extra-large ghost that rattles its extra-large gold chains at night. You can’t exorcise a spirit this formidable just by doing the work. You don’t kick Big Chungus out of your brain and body by re-litigating the past over and over, which always includes recalling the specific ways you hid and dodged and failed.

To push past the shame instead of kicking it up over and over again with your meticulous audit, you have to get a little weird. You have to become messy and impulsive and audacious at some level, like you were when you were younger. To get rid of Big Chungus, you have to THINK like Big Chungus: big gold chains like a cross between Jacob Marley’s ghost and Tupac Shakur, stomping and growling through the house, ravenous and full of longing. You have to take those dark, haunted woods inside your soul and plant them in your front yard, where everyone can see them. And when people drive by your house and point at your haunted woods and roll their eyes, you have to wave to them and smile, or give them the finger, or blast “How Do U Want It?” by Tupac followed by “Reincarnated” by Kendrick Lamar.

I know that sounds and feels impossible. Your mind wants to write a memoir. Your mind wants to tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth. But your body doesn’t want you to do this. Your body wants you to feel safe. Your body is afraid.

This is where Father John Misty comes into the picture.

I’ve always been a tiny bit skeptical of Joshua Tillman, and on first listen to his song Mashashmashana, I was rolling my eyes at his haunted woods, so earnestly displayed in front of his split-level ranch. The song is plodding, melodramatic, pretentious, maudlin, sentimental, and absolutely interminable. Who starts their album with a self-important NINE-MINUTE-LONG ANTHEM? It’s like Arcade Fire did Ayuhuasca with the Dalai Lama and hired a twenty-piece orchestra to play backup while they fingerpainted a map to a reimagined universe.

Cue up the song, goddamn it! You need to listen to it while you read these words. The man has a lot of gall, is the point. And at the start of the song, he’s as grating as every truth-teller you’ve ever met, disguised as a twee, bearded, millennial preacher man. I mean, come on, who sings the words “resplendent in donor-class panache”? Who refers to revelations “only singers could describe”? Who BRAGS that only special, special, extra-special singers can capture the world accurately?!! Sweet god, this man’s confidence disturbs me.

I have to admit, at first I felt the same way about your letter. It was absolutely sad and startling and it grew more daunting by the second, like walking into a dark closet and finding a cathedral, like stopping by for a cocktail and staying for a funeral. You can’t read a letter like yours without abandoning every stray thought you had when you started reading it. All previous agendas and imperatives dissolve and are replaced by a fugue state of sorrow and anxiety. Suddenly you’re constructing your own cathedral from dusty bricks salvaged from your own melancholy, crumbling temples and terrifying crash sites. Suddenly you’re kneeling to pay homage to the echoes of cruelty and terror that live inside your own body.

Not everybody wants that. Not EVERY BODY wants that, either.

That sounds dramatic because it is dramatic. Your letter is a horror story. Of course you feel a kind of shame and revulsion over it. I get the sense that Joshua Tillman, the Big Chungus of orchestral indie rockers, sometimes craves an escape from his melodramatic gold chains and multi-piece horn section, too:

Mahashmashana

All this silence

And in the next universal dawn

Won’t have to do the corpse dance

Do the corpse dance

Do the corpse dance with these arms.

PREACH, GIRL.

That’s the thing about audacity. One minute you’re rolling your eyes, the next minute you’re sobbing openly. And let me be clear, I think great songs are made to be interpreted however you want to interpret them. The best songs unnerve you to the point where you start projecting, hallucinating, making connections, unraveling. The best songs make you scavenge your own collapsing churches and decomposing bomb shelters for materials to build a new temple, a new dance hall, a new rocket launch pad, a new oasis.

The best letters I get are the same way. You just have to commit to them. That’s why I usually run them unabridged, and that’s why I write so many words in response. I would be a million times more popular if I didn’t force every single reader to commit to a long, sad letter and an absolutely interminable reply.

I would be more beloved and much, much richer if I spoke in grammable soundbites with a nude mic strapped to my head. It takes courage of conviction to believe in my long-winded advice column. It took courage of conviction for you to write me a 2,000-word letter about your terrifying life. And it takes courage of conviction to start your album with a nine-minute-long anthem about the meaning of life.

It takes courage. It takes conviction.

That’s what I want to give you right now. More courage and more conviction. Because when you hear true courage in a song, it rearranges your bombed-out hospitals and crushed storm cellars into a chapel. When you read true conviction on the page, it replaces the the echoes of cruelty and terror that live in your body with sunlight, with sensation, with hope. Do you feel what I’m telling you? Audacity makes your body feels brave.

But let’s be realistic, too: A backlash of shame is inherent to that kind of audacity, just like it’s an unavoidable piece of every exhaustive and exhausting healing journey. You don’t name yourself Father John Misty without courage of conviction, yet you still have mornings where you wake up and say “Why did I, the child of an evangelical home, yoke myself to this religious fucking moniker? What the fuck is WRONG WITH ME?”

How do I know that? Because no matter how thoroughly you chase out the rats of humiliation, there’s a self-hatred that still echoes through your body, there’s a fear that still rattles your nerves. That’s why you start your whole fucking album with a song that rises to a devastating crescendo immediately. Big Chungus SMASH! You trust your absolutely twisted vision of what you want from your song, what you want from your day, what you want from love, from life, from the tall trees, from the moon, from the universal dawn.

This is what that kind of courage looks like to others: GALL.

Most people don’t like it — unless you’re famous, and even in that case, they only like it for so long. Eventually, they’ll want to unpack their adjectives just to knock down your temple. Why? Because motherfuckers out there DO NOT GO INTO THEIR OWN HAUNTED WOODS. They watch you do it and they say “Whew, everything is so dark with you!” And then they eat a ham sandwich and do the fucking Wordle.

And when you try to talk to them about your mom and how unpredictable and intense she was, they say shit like, “Yeah, you two always butted heads.” That’s right. These ham sandwich motherfuckers literally don’t know the difference between an adult and a baby. They will casually blame you for your WHOLE PAST, simply because they’re imprecise and indifferent like that, simply because they avoid the truth at every turn.

The only remedy is to stop blaming yourself for your whole past. But you haven’t stopped yet:

Throughout my life, the people who love me always get sick of me, or keep me at a distance for their sanity…. The darkness of my life feels like it renders me unqualified to be in relationship with anyone.

This is the sound of a perfectionist mind that was instructed to take responsibility for everything, everywhere. This is the sound of a fearful body that was taught to distrust everyone. And as long as you tolerate that kind of shame, and treat it as inevitable, audacity will feel like a threat. As long as you refuse to stand up for yourself EXACTLY as you are right now, on a fucking healing path but never, ever fully healed, i.e. just like every other human alive, you’ll still feel embarrassed when your dumb neighbors say shit like, “Cut down those weird trees in your front yard and you’ll be a lot happier.” lol.

People say stupid shit like that because they’re incredibly afraid of being themselves, afraid of being seen, afraid of telling the truth. They don’t know what they want from work or love or life or any given day. They only know what they DON’T want: They don’t want pain or discomfort. They don’t want to feel unsafe or uncertain. In other words, they’re chasing paradise: total peace and safety, freedom from hurt, from worries, from frustrations and disappointments, from loneliness and despair.

And when you eat the shame they serve you instead of knocking off their platters and laughing in their faces like Big Chungus, you become just like them.

Shame sends us all in search of paradise, and perfection, and absolutes. Shame keeps us from connecting with regular human beings, because they’re not safe, because they’re not trustworthy, because they “don’t speak the language of complex trauma and healing.” Shame has us inviting people in quickly, putting them on a pedestal, treating them like saviors, and then blaming them for everything bad in our lives as we shove them out the door. Shame treats every day like a square on a board game that ends in paradise, and makes every other player into someone who will either save you or “set [you] back catastrophically on [your] path to healing.”

That’s not how life works. Failed connections, missed chances, pain, delays, hurts, calamities, mistakes, lies, nightmares, terrible days, shit-talking exfriends, toxic exlovers, humiliations, regrets: These are not setbacks. They’re dusty bricks to build with.

So this is my message to you: Stop looking for paradise. You quit your job, you quit your siblings, you quit your collaboration, you quit talk therapy. I don’t blame you for any of this. It makes perfect sense to experiment, to see what you can live without, to see if life gets safer and kinder as it gets smaller. But what you’re building right now isn’t a church so much as an airtight jar.

You have to take off the lid and let in some air, some risks, some flaws, some surprises, and yes, even some catastrophes.

This world will never match you perfectly. Your memoir doesn’t need an uplifting ending, but it does need AUDACITY. You can only generate savage, melodramatic work for so long in a vacuum. At some point, you have to call the horn section. Those guys are a pain in the fucking ass, too, I guarantee it.

No one will seamlessly provide the exact kind of attention and care you require. You can’t look for perfection, because perfection is a shame-driven fantasy. You need a job. You need a schedule. You need imperfect acquaintances and imperfect casual friends. Otherwise, your money is going to seal you into a safe room. That’s not living and that’s not how anyone makes good art.

Trust me on this. I’ve worked from home for three decades. I have tried to control my life, to keep myself safe, to avoid pain. What I’ve learned over the years is that the world is a mess because it’s ruled by people who are ruled by shame. And the only way to feel good in this world, for me, is to get on my hands and knees and crawl through the fucking wreckage of my crash sites and my flattened temples and build something fuuuuuuucked up from those dusty motherfucking bricks.

Crawling through the wreckage includes forming acquaintanceships with pushy retirees making pottery on the wheel next to mine. Getting on my hands and knees includes playing poker with math nerds who like to condescend to me about my strategic choices. I have casual friends who don’t get me and never will. I have acquaintances who probably don’t like me at all. My body reacts to these environments and these people with fear at first. I have to say nice things to myself. As I drive home, I have to coach myself to drop it, don’t overthink it, don’t take detailed notes on what you did wrong. Show up and crawl, period.

True paradise is mundane and dirty and your body is still afraid sometimes. True paradise means planting more and more haunted woods in your front yard and also chatting politely with your normie neighbors about the peonies. True paradise means still feeling bouts of unexpected shame, but absolutely refusing to soak up the ambient shame in every room simply because people think that’s your job because you’re open and you tell the truth. You must learn to be firm, to say words out loud that are calm but not necessarily nice. I’ll bet people say all kinds of nonsense to Father John Motherfucking Misty because he’s living out loud, he’s showing his ass, he’s aiming his rocket at some distant galaxy. That’s the life of Big Chungus. You rattle your chains loudly enough, you’re going to haunt some folks.

So listen to me. Don’t aim for perfect safety, perfect comfort. The divine version of you that’s waking up and coming to life doesn’t want the sealed-tomb form of paradise that you’re building. Your divine self craves the dirt of reality. You will find people who care too much, care a little, and don’t care nearly enough, and it will be very hard to tell them apart sometimes. You will find people who love you so much that they cut you off and never talk to you again. You’ll find confusing and bewildering and audacious people who will sometimes appear to be using you, simply because they’re also looking safety and comfort and protection above all else.

People will act like children around you. They will act like parents. They will become indifferent. They will be impossible. They will grow tedious. They will back up. They will get too close. You will behave in all of these ways, too. You need more courage and more conviction, but you will never become a god.

And because you’re not a god, you can’t build cathedrals without regular people, without hard work, without disappointment, without suffering. Some people will roll their eyes when they hear your most triumphant anthems. They won’t even bother listening to the rest of the album. My last book was the most beautiful thing I’ve written so far, after 28 years of writing, and both of my siblings and half of my friends haven’t read it.

That’s just how people are.

Period.

That doesn’t mean they’re bad. If I want an environment that will comfort, protect, and serve the version of me that is waking up and coming to life — and yes, there is a new version of me waking up right now, too — I have to build it for myself, in the company of people who are building their own palaces, constructing their own pagodas, organizing their own choirs, writing their own symphonies.

Besides, the kinds of people you want to avoid aren’t the ones who seem unsupportive or unpredictable or uninterested at times, whether it’s because they’re a little creeped out by you or because they have their own temples to build. The kinds of people you want to avoid are the ones who would rather sit in an airless, sterile jar than dance in a dusty cathedral. You don’t need to avoid people who’ve said some terrible things or made gigantic mistakes in the past, who are a little too needy or a little too avoidant for your taste. You need to avoid the ones who are still ruled by shame and still looking for paradise. They are the attack dogs, the vicious fantasists, the moralistic escapists, the insecure, vengeful manipulators.

Don’t be like them. Make your life bigger and softer and messier. Fill it with acquaintances and strangers. Fill it with friends and not-quite-friends. Be gentle. Expect to be disappointed regularly. Everything good is sitting right next to what’s bad. Every unbearably deep, passionate connection starts with a mundane miscommunication, a stupid chat, some pointless small talk. Your job is not to avoid sadness and pain. Your quest is not to erase mundane moments or to eliminate uncertainty. Your greatest joys will grow straight from your deepest sorrows.

Continuing to look for paradise is the surest way to become increasingly neurotic and isolated, increasingly angry and self-righteous, increasingly fearful and controlling. Instead, swallow your pride and tolerate your fear. Join awful clubs full of stupid strangers. Take pointless classes with annoying randos. Exercise vigorously. Read difficult books. Garden with ruthless determination. Go on very long walks.

You will never feel completely safe. You will never know what comes next. You will build half of your cathedral and then you’ll knock it down. You could make a friend and then lose that friend, fall in love with the wrong person, wind up sad and lost. Sometimes your fears will take over, your passions will blossom, you’ll try too hard, you’ll say too much. This is how it is for the audacious. This is the shape that courage of conviction always takes.

Write a memoir without a happy ending, but that’s not all you need. You need everything. That’s who you are. You need to write beautiful poems and also play dumb board games. You need to slow dance with a stranger and also clean leaves out of the gutter. You need to believe in the next universal dawn but also do the fucking corpse dance with these arms. We’re all doomed and we have to keep showing up anyway — reaching for each other, swaying, singing, surrendering to life as it is.

A perfect lie can live forever

The truth don’t fare as well

It isn’t perched on lips mid-laughter

It ain’t the kind of thing you tell

Like there’s no baby in the king cake

Like there’s no figure on the cross

They have gone the way of our flesh

and what was found is lost

yes it is

yes it is.

At this point in Mashashmashana, the organ and the strings rise and rise and rise like a cross between Hallelujah chorus and a rocket lifting off. The words “Yes it is” are an affirmation of deep sorrow and reckless joy, of exuberance mixed with unbearable regret, of showing up and reaching out even when you feel doomed. There’s this muddled blend of voices crying out in the background, and the notes just keep getting higher and higher like a balloon that might burst in the upper atmosphere.

And that’s how you’re supposed to feel at the end of that song, like you’re floating up above the earth and into outer fucking space, cold and dark, where all is lost, everything is lost, it’s all over, yes it is, yes it is.

That’s courage. This motherfucker started his album with a long, sentimental goodbye. The gall, the absolute twisted, insane gall of the man. I love him so much when I listen to this song, it breaks my heart.

And that’s only the beginning.

This life, when lived correctly, is designed to break your heart. This life, when lived audaciously, is supposed to humble you until you’re nearly destroyed. Courage of conviction. You can’t build a cathedral without letting the whole world in. You can’t build a temple without risking everything. You have lost everything, and you will lose so much more, again and again.

Courage. Let the pain in. Conviction. Show yourself. You will make careful plans that dissolve into a fugue state of sorrow and anxiety. You will walk into a dark closet and discover a cathedral. You will stop by for a cocktail and stay for a funeral.

Show yourself anyway. Reach out to people who sometimes seem undeserving, who maybe don’t match you and never will. Do the corpse dance. Maybe it’s all over. Maybe all is lost. You will never have everything you want. Feel your heart breaking. That’s how you’re supposed to feel.

And then? Dust off a single brick. Think about where it should go. Your pain has rendered you uniquely qualified for this job. Your shame has formed you into a supernatural being: quivering, afraid, haunted, unstoppable. Paradise is right here, waiting for you, in this dirt, underneath your fingertips.

Polly

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Thanks for reading Ask Polly! Speaking of audacity, my name is Heather Havrilesky and in my other newsletter, Ask Molly, I define words like loser and risk. In the New York Times, I write about crushing it and the prom and froth. My book Foreverland makes the perfect gift for anyone who’s happily married and therefore understands that marriage is a fun ride in a clown car headed for a steep cliff. Every morning you bandage up the clowns and do it all over again. Please consider subscribing today in order to support this plodding, melodramatic, pretentious, maudlin, sentimental, and absolutely interminable celebration of sadness, anger, loss, darkness, and joy.

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