Thank You!
Ask Polly has been thriving independently for over three years now.
Crested like palms, like waves, they too subsist (1990-91) by Dorothea Tanning
This week I want to focus on gratitude. If you have something — or a bunch of things — you’re grateful for, please send a letter to askpolly@protonmail.com and I’ll try to publish a new one each day this week.
Today I’m grateful to everyone who reads this column (and to everyone who reads its darker, less predictable twin, Ask Molly). This is the best job I’ve ever had, and I want to keep doing it as long as I possibly can. Your enthusiasm, your honesty, your intelligence, and your encouragement have kept this place going, and I am so thrilled to have you here.
I don’t always feel deserving of your attention, but I’m committed to surprising and delighting you as much as I possibly can. I’m committed to helping you confront the weight of reality without letting it crush you. I’m committed to helping you keep all of your most exotic dreams alive and feeding your wild imagination, while also reminding you that staying connected to the real human beings in your life always includes hard work and sometimes, yes, frustration and sadness. When you feel discouraged and disheartened, I’m committed to waking you up to the brilliance and inspiration and raw emotions that live inside your body, to the almost unbearable beauty of this day, to the darkness you carry around with you, but also to the value of that heaviness and the joy that lurks inside that despair.
I want to bring you renewed courage whenever I can, so you can always face how you feel and where you are and who you are. I want to share with you the peace that comes from allowing the world to be as terrifying as it is without backing away from it, without telling stories about how doomed you are, without feeling shame and guilt over your own relative helplessness, without living in denial or subsisting inside a destructive fantasy. I’m here to wake you up to the real power you carry around with you. I’m here to get you to believe in your body, your space on this planet, your voice, your desires, your imagination, and your ability to connect with other bright souls around you. I want you to understand your potential to lift others up — out of hopelessness, out of fear, out of loneliness, out of shame — simply by being your honest, true self, simply by revealing the love that’s alive and kicking in your heart, even on the worst of days.
I want you to always understand that I don’t know that much. I’m not special. I’m not here to convince you to trust me, elevate my messages, do what I tell you, be more like me. I’m here to convince you to trust yourself, to elevate your own words, to do what you feel, to respect your body, to rescue your core self from the basement, to celebrate your deepest desires, to enjoy your strangest thoughts, to understand what you value, to welcome the spirits that dance inside your head, to make room for who you already are.
You’re much smarter than you think you are. I do want you to trust that. You have a million times more energy than you realize. You’re more lovable than you know. No matter how brightly or dimly you shine right now, there is more to you. Today, respect your tenacious body and your giant heart. Be good to your light. Don’t tell stories about what you’ve fucked up and what you’ll never manage to achieve. Don’t tell stories about remaining stuck and lonely forever. Listen to that anguish until it reshapes itself into hope, until it becomes reassuring and sublime. When you’re patient with your sadness, when you trust it to show you more, it always does. It shows you more. There is always more.
I am so incredibly thankful to have you here. I am so grateful for the precious gift of being able to reach you, being able to share my thoughts and perspectives with you, and being able to send you my love.
Polly
Remember to send me a letter about a what you’re grateful for! And don’t forget that free one-year paid subscriptions are *always* available to those who can’t afford them. Just write to askpolly@protonmail.com. Paid subscribers: You keep the lights on around here! Thank you, thank you, THANK YOU!
As others have shared, I'm insanely grateful for this newsletter. Ask Polly has been a guiding light to me for a decade now. I recently "paused" my subscription during a big cross-country move (pinching pennies wherever I could lol), and it just reactivated this past weekend after months of minimal to no Polly. Never again, my friends! I've spent the morning drinking coffee and reading all the wonderful posts I missed.
I'm always left with the same feeling after reading Polly's advice, regardless of the topic. It's the feeling of hope. Or more like, the belief in hope. That it's good to hope and to simply decide the world is full of possibilities and new ways to delight you, whether it's love or friendship or art. It's never over for good. It's never all bad. The world can, and will, surprise you. As someone still struggling to put together some major puzzle pieces in my life, it helps me so much. It reorients me from my anxious find-the-puzzle-pieces!! energy to, hey, maybe if I just, I don't know, leave the house regularly, I'll eventually stumble across a few puzzle pieces on the ground.
Thank you, thank you, thank you, Heather. And congrats on your anniversary!
Your writings have held my hand through darkness Polly. I have wept into the night, and gone through my saved posts and saved emails again and again, reading your words, your voice resonating in my head, overpowering every negative voice that tells me that I am worth nothing, that I deserve nothing. I begin each day thinking that I deserve all the good things in the world. I fall, I get up again, shaking off the dust. You do so much good by writing for us, so so so much good. And I am so grateful that you exist. My faith sometimes wavers and I struggle with my prayers, but somehow when I meet and hear beautiful, genuine, honest, authentic, kind and amazingly brave people like you, somehow I feel the balance in the universe is restored. Anything in that moment seems possible. Thank you, Thank you, Thank you.