Dear Polly,

Yesterday, I woke up to an email in my inbox with the subject "Uncontested Divorce Papers." I need to sign them and send them back to the lawyer, at which point she'll file them with the courts, and I'll officially be a divorcée. In order to make the process as quick and hassle-free as possible, the reason given for the divorce is "irretrievable breakdown of marriage over a period of at least six months." The problem is, as far as I'm concerned, that's a complete lie. 

I'd been married for fourteen months and twenty days when my husband told me he was in love with one of my close friends and that he didn't want to be married to me anymore. The day before he told me this, he'd sent me flowers at my office. The night before THAT, he'd texted me that he loved me so much. When friends say, "Well, there must have been signs," I ask if flowers and love poems and dates are signs of irretrievable breakdown of a marriage. Then they stop asking. 

I met my husband in graduate school, where we became good friends. Deep down, I knew I had developed feelings for him, but I denied them, because he had a girlfriend. When he moved to New York after graduation, we kept in touch, talking every day for hours on g-chat. When he told me he had feelings for me, as more than a friend, I was ecstatic.  He'd been telling me about problems with his girlfriend for a long time, but they were still together. I told him he needed to break up with her and then we needed to take a break before we could start dating. I assuaged my guilt by believing he didn't love his girlfriend, that she was possessive and boring. I never asked more questions because I was too happy. 

We dated long distance for a year, seeing one another almost every weekend, until I moved to New York to be with him. We adopted a dog and got engaged. After eighteen months of planning together, our wedding was by far the happiest day of my life. Though I'd felt isolated when I first arrived in New York, I eventually made friends of my own at my job (one of whom became the woman who is now my husband's girlfriend), and got closer with his friends. I loved our life together. 

One thing I knew about my husband, though, was that the same boundless ambition and creativity that made me love him was also a destructive force in his life. Nothing he did was ever good enough. My real fear was that nothing I did was ever going to be good enough either, but he assured me this was not the case. It turns out that I was right. Though he gave me no sign that he was unhappy with our relationship, I'd somehow missed the mark. 

It's been three months since he told me he didn't want to be with me anymore, and since then, we've had very little contact. Every time I've tried to reach out for answers or to express any emotion, he hasn't responded. When I asked him why he never gave me a chance, he responded that our "marriage was my chance," though he'd never expressed his unhappiness to give me a chance to try and make things better. 

I've moved back to where I lived before I moved to New York and I'm doing my best to move forward. I'm seeing a therapist. I'm keeping busy. I'm doing yoga and talking to friends and taking care of myself.  We had many mutual friends, many of whom are still his friends, which is another difficult situation. 

My question to you, Polly, is how do I continue to move forward when it feels like I've failed at my marriage, my love, the life I loved? Though rationally, I know it was his actions that destroyed our relationship, it's still difficult to keep from feeling like I messed up somewhere along the way and that no one will ever love me again. I'm torn between anger toward him (and her) and devastation for the huge loss I feel.

And I don't know what's better—that sadness, or the anger? The anger feels better than the sadness but I don't want to become bitter. Is there a middle ground? 

Looking for Balance

Dear LFB,

I know this is going to sound harsh, but bear with me, because it's necessary: You did mess up somewhere along the way. You engaged in an ongoing flirtation with a guy who not only had a girlfriend, but had the bad taste to complain about his girlfriend to you, his attractive female friend. And what were his complaints about his girlfriend? That she was possessive, and boring.

Attention, Every Single Human Reading This: If you're flirting with someone who's currently attached, and they start to badmouth their partner? That is a giant red flag. Even if the partner in question is verifiably not so great, it's fucking weird for a person to hang out and whine to attractive others, rather than simply, say, dumping said malignant partner and THEN bagging on his/her irredeemable ass with vim and vigor (and with other dickish friends with weird lowercase names).

Once you dump your lame girlfriend or boyfriend, you can feel quite free to bag away. But while you're still attached and/or living with your partner? Bitching and moaning to potential sexytime partners is really poor form. And, if a sexy human you want to sex tells you that their partner is BORING? And possessive? AND THAT'S ALL THEY CAN COME UP WITH? Run away screaming. People who fuck people then tell other people they want to fuck that the people they're currently fucking are super fucking dull? These are bad people.

These are people who just don't like other people. "Jesus, my girlfriend, I swear she breathes in oxygen and breathes out carbon dioxide sometimes," they might as well say. Because when you go to bed with someone and wake up and eat together and go to bed together again and wake up? See, I'm already bored by both of you just writing it down. People get boring. An inescapable fact. PEOPLE. GET. BORING. People of all stripes, from all walks of life, get boring. Boring is not a reason for anything. You say someone you're fucking is boring? The first thing I think is sweet god in heaven YOU my friend are BORING. Stop taking it out on everyone else.

Better yet is POSSESSIVE, as in "My girlfriend, she just gets really possessive, it's a total drag." Gee, that sucks, why does your miserable insecure shrew of a woman have to get all possessive and shit, when she has a guy who's sweet and honest and opens up within minutes about what a jealous little bitch HEY WAIT A MINUTE.

I know you didn't come here for me to bag on you, LFB. I just needed to address the fact that you presented us all with a chilling cautionary tale about the dangers of getting involved with involved people. You're doing many readers a major service just by telling your story, and I mean that in all sincerity.

Those who've read through a lot of the Ask Polly archives may have already noticed that many of the people facing the most hideous and unkind breakups are also the people who were informed by these partners very early on in the relationship that their previous relationships ended when they very suddenly "got bored" with their exes. Or who told them that their exes were totally "boring" and/or "the jealous kind." So. This is a teachable fucking moment.

I just want to add that if you're g-chatting with a guy who already has a girlfriend for hours at a time, that guy is an escapist. He's looking for a fix. There's a fifty percent chance he's using you for a fix without any intention of breaking up with his girlfriend. And there's a fifty percent chance he's setting you up to be a stepping stone out of his current relationship. People in the market for stepping stones typically never leave the market for stepping stones, even after they marry you. They are always on the lookout for an upgrade, no matter what their current circumstances might be. The speed with which they dump you depends entirely on the quality of goods available for perusal while you're together. Saying "You have to break up with her, then be alone for a while, before we can date," and then g-chatting him through the whole process, shouldn't assuage your guilt, because you're making it clear that you're waiting in the wings. Plus, he still has his fix.

And keep in mind: It's all arbitrary, with these bored possessors of the bored and the possessive. Like anxious window shoppers at the mall, they are the most bored and the most possessive of all, twitchily looking for something to possess, something that might render them less dissatisfied, less bored. And like a reverse Midas touch, they instantly render all that they possess bored and possessive. Because they are haunting humans to spend time with. They pretend that they're accepting and loving while inside they're tearing their hair out with boredom. Their demand for companionship dictates that they must play at SEEMING wonderful (Flowers! Adoration!) even as they lay out the next escape route.

So look. Getting dumped by this conspicuous consumer, this deeply afraid and deeply repugnant fuck, it's a beautiful gift. Your ex-friend and coworker is the one who should feel cursed, not you. This guy was a mirage from the very beginning. He was a ghost.

That doesn't change how you feel right now. Right now you're devastated. I'm really sorry that you had to go through this. You feel like you failed at your marriage. But look: You didn't have a marriage. A marriage is two people, working together, telling each other what they need, meeting somewhere in the middle. What you had was someone who pretended, who didn't tell you what he needed. He says "You had your chance. Our marriage was your chance." But he didn't show up, didn't let you know what was going on with him. Hell, he won't even debrief you NOW. Not because he simply refuses to tell you what happened, but because HE HAS NO FUCKING CLUE WHAT HAPPENED. He might as well be a life-sized cardboard cut-out. You might as well have dragged a cardboard cut-out down the aisle.

The fact that you're tempted, for even half a second, to view this experience as a personal failing of yours, an indication that no one will ever love you again, is a testament to the poisonous messages women marinate in during their formative years. It's like you were attacked by a shark, and now you're blaming yourself for being made of meat.

So that's the (somewhat contradictory!) message I have for you: You DID fuck up by getting involved with this cardboard cut-out, this emotional vampire, this conspicuous consumer, this blatantly unjust two-timing weasel. I don't usually say this, but I say it for your benefit, for your future path: Your situation is a clear indication that you have bad judgment when it comes to men. But: You DID NOT fuck up by being you. You weren't eminently rejectable and repugnant in those 14 months you were married. You were just a fucking person, and this guy doesn't want a person, he wants the flicker of promise given off by that woman over there, or that one, or that one, or that one. They all seem so EXCITING by comparison to real people.

I'm being brutally honest with you for a reason. Moving on is going to be very difficult if you're confused about what you're moving on from, and you're confused about your culpability. And YOU are confused for a reason. Because you fell into something and ignored all the red flags and rationalized away your own bad behavior and gave the guy lots of empty hoops to jump through to make yourself feel better. You have to look at that stuff, not because you are BAD and you were the first woman in the world to do these things. Almost every woman alive does ALL OF THESE THINGS at one point or another. (Ideally in high school. SORRY KIDS! HIGH SCHOOL IS HARD, I KNOW.) You have to look at this stuff because you need to be in touch with reality.

Did you hear that? You need to be in touch with reality.

Here is reality: You made some big mistakes. But here's the other side of reality: You are a good person. You are not boring. You are kind and supportive and fun. You are not someone who was destined to get ruthlessly dumped by her first husband. You are not summed up by HIS lazy, unfair, unexplained actions.

Reality will be hard for you, because part of it is harsh: You fucked up. You did. You have to keep in mind, everyone fucks up. You just had no idea you'd bumped into a predator. Maybe you'd never met one before. Forgive yourself. But look clearly at the facts, so this won't happen to you again. Don't allow yourself to get swept away, and don't let yourself off the hook. Open your eyes wide and look at what happened. Look at how you sweet-talked YOURSELF into this. Look at how you let your fantasy get in the way of rational decisions. This makes you exactly like every human being alive. Have compassion for yourself, even as you're facing this.

The other side of reality will eventually soothe you: You are still the same appealing, lovable woman you were before this happened. You are no less lovable than you ever were.

Clearly, you need to enlist your therapist's help in moving away from fantasy, into reality. And once you're firmly grounded in reality, you need to ask yourself: "What do I want for myself? What do I want from my life? Who do I want to be?"

What circumstances, in the future, might make you feel strong and wise and resistant to empty temptations from predators? What kind of a woman will you be in five years? Will you be the kind of woman who's g-chatting with some dude with a supposedly boring girlfriend? Will you still be seduced by the promise of a fantasy?

Or will you be happy with who you are, open to love, but realistic and firmly grounded in the here and now? If that sounds boring, then that tells you something. But reality is far sexier and much more romantic than you think. A fantasy can seem shiny and special from a distance, but when you get closer and closer it tends to shrivel up and die. Reality, on the other hand, gets better and better the deeper you go into it. Once you start to see yourself clearly, and admit that you're not a cardboard cut-out of Fantasy Wife, Eminently Lovable, Worthy of Lifelong Adoration, then you can finally start to breathe.

We are all tempted to be shiny. There are so many shiny women out there. We are taught—and eventually we believe, in our hearts—that shininess is the surest route to love. But aiming for shiny is like living in the dark. "Though he gave me no sign that he was unhappy with our relationship," you wrote, "I'd somehow missed the mark." Though he told you nothing, YOU somehow fucked up. Though he was just a mirage, YOU were the sad rejected woman who didn't please him enough. When you aim for shiny, you become nothing but a reflective surface. At your very best, at your peak shininess, he will only see his own reflection in you.

The most beautiful, loving, poetic souls in the world know that the most beautiful, lovable people in the world are the ones who are a little tarnished, a little scratched. If you want true love in your life, you will stop trying to be a brilliant silver chalice, and you'll aim to be a misshapen pewter cup instead. Something ordinary, that you can pick up and feel and rub between your hands. Something regular and dented and scratched.

This tragic turn in your life gouged a big scratch across you. Own that scratch, the anger and the sadness there. Tell the truth about what it did to you. Because it was a gift, this premature exit from a fantasy world. It was your passage to a better life, lived among real people with heart and substance, where tarnished things are good enough, where you are good enough. You are good enough. You are good enough, right now. You are good enough. You are.

Polly

Heather Havrilesky (aka Polly Esther) was The Awl's existential advice columnist. She's also a regular contributor to The New York Times Magazine, and is the author of the memoir Disaster Preparedness (Riverhead 2011). She blogs here about scratchy pants, personality disorders, and aged cheeses.

Time to face reality: The bad news is, Ask Polly is moving to New York Magazine's The Cut. The good news is, you can read the very first Ask Polly column for The Cut right nowish.

Photo by Mario Sainz Martínez

The post Ask Polly: A Chilling Cautionary Tale About the Dangers of Getting Involved With Attached People appeared first on The Awl.

Hi Polly.

I’m not really sure why I’m writing you. Actually I am. I need to feel ok with being single at 33 while still maintaining hope that I can find a solid, real, lasting relationship. Every time I read one of your columns on this subject, I feel empowered. I apologize for being unoriginal but this stuff is hard and I am at a loss!

I embrace being single. I appreciate being on my own and dictating my own schedule, I do a ton of yoga and look great (might sound conceited but it’s true), I own my own successful business, I own my condo, I save money, I travel and pursue things that are interesting. I have an adorable, silly cat, dammit. I believe strongly that I can’t and won’t settle until it’s RIGHT.

I’m admittedly scared that that conviction will keep me from being in a happy relationship because I’m asking for too much or won’t know “right” when I see it. At the same time, I seem to keep getting hurt. There’s a pattern—I date a guy for a month or two. In the beginning, it’s always him pursuing me hard. And then I let my guard down and start to like him, start to think about a future with him, and then, like clockwork, he backs out. I really don’t understand. I know that you have said over and over that we shouldn’t try to draw some sort of conclusion about rejection, but I am struggling here!

Most recently, I was seeing this guy that I was very interested in. True to form, he worked hard to date me while I was not so sure at first. After about a month and a half, I thought things were going great. I had to go out of town for 10 days, for work and to take care of my mom who’d had major surgery. We texted or called each other every day when I was gone. When I got back, rather than making plans to hang out for an evening, he wanted to stop by for sex on the way to a party that he “had to make an appearance” at. I suggested hanging out another time when we could actually spend time together rather than be rushed. He said he understood but basically I never heard from him again.

Maybe I hurt his feelings? I made it clear that I wanted to see him, just was not really ok with those circumstances. I love sex but I felt like a “layover” (ha, ha) on the way to his obligation or good time. I knew he’d been busy at work but in his shoes, I would have made time, invited him to the party, not gone, something else. Logically I know that this guy did not treat me right, or at least was not “into me” enough to work with me and honor my feelings. Even though he put a lot of time in in the beginning—hanging out every day, calling and texting all the time, telling me how much he liked me, etc., etc. The worst part is that I still really like him! I can’t shake the idea that I was too demanding or inconsiderate.

Am I trying too hard? Not trying hard enough? Do I need to lighten up? Be more blunt? Do I get attached too quickly or not quickly enough? I’m really trying to just be myself and see where it takes me, but these little episodes where I date guys who disappear is messing with me. They make me question how great my single lifestyle really is, question my approach to dating, get my hopes up and let them down. On the other hand, I know I need to be open to risk in order to get what I ultimately want, which is long lasting love. How do I reconcile those two conflicting feelings? I also have this weird idea that if I just get past the first few months, I can make things RIGHT if I like the guy enough. I feel like a failure that I can’t even get to that stage! That has got to be completely wrong but I don’t know how to change that thought process.

Maybe Doing Something Wrong

Dear MDSW,

One of the major pitfalls of being single is trying to apply all of the principles that work in other parts of our lives to the problem of love. It’s natural, of course, that you’d think that the same hard work that you’ve done to start your own business, buy property, and stay fit and healthy would somehow translate to finding the right person. And I don’t even mean that you’re doing that, exactly. I mean that you have some notion of agency and control over how things will go with any given guy. You write, “I have this weird idea that if I just get past the first few months, I can make things RIGHT if I like the guy enough.”

You have to lose the idea that your big challenge is to “get past the first few months.” Like somehow you’ll never MAKE ANYTHING WORK if you can’t CLOSE THE DEAL or at least PREVENT the deal from being prematurely closed during the first few months.

Studying past failures or analyzing the point at which things fell apart, repeatedly, in the past will NOT necessarily tell you anything about what you’re doing wrong. You simply haven’t lucked into finding the right guy yet. That’s all. We can’t overhaul your management style on this and secure more success. You simply have to stay open and play it as it lays.

Personally, I was always great at getting past the first few months. I liked hanging out, shooting the shit, letting the day unfold however, watching football, ordering pizza. All of the lazy things I would never allow myself to do when I was alone, I would do around a boyfriend. I compartmentalized my feelings well enough that a dude would see a very easygoing, witty, anything-goes personality for a long time. A bad bout of PMS might threaten to rock the boat, but then I’d essentially apologize and pretend I didn’t expect to be met emotionally and go back to hang out mode fast enough that I’d cover my tracks.

Eventually, though, I’d start to put on some pressure, plus my façade would break down and I’d start getting intense or weepy or weird at the drop of a hat. Boyfriends would wonder if this was the new normal. I’d wonder whether we were really a good match or not for the first time, but I’d still keep trying to MAKE THINGS RIGHT. I was really good at making a mess and then making things right, basically maintaining the status quo while I got more and more depressed over the dead-end nature of each relationship.

By a year into it, I’d feel pretty dependent. I wouldn’t be putting the same energy into friendships or my career or anything else. I would set everything aside to hang out. Without the dude, I knew I would feel lost and lonely. But the dude was usually looking less and less like my one true love to me by then.

Do you see how much time I used to waste with the wrong guys? You aren’t doing that. Do you know how many times I would’ve been ok with that layover offer? I might’ve made it obvious that I was the perfect person to take along to that party afterwards, but all that means is that I had a bulletproof social pitch at the time, one carefully crafted to appeal to your typical breezy, Mr. Flinchy nowhere man. You have a life, a job, a condo, a cat, friends, travel. You aren’t going to serve up drive-thru sex to a guy who’s on the way somewhere else. The idea that having principles like this, and living your principles, could EVER be construed as demanding or inconsiderate is totally laughable.

It’s also a testament to just how hard it is to be a single woman in your 30s. You have collected data. And as a smart, hard-working woman, you are naturally going to use that data to determine WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU.

You liked this guy. He wasn’t right. He wasn’t right because he missed you and then he wanted to stop in for sex instead of taking you out for a quick bite first, then going by the party, knowing that you’d both be in the mood after. To put it on the table like that, to say “I want to fuck and then leave to do this other thing.” Or even “I want to fuck and then we’ll go to this thing after.” No. Shit, he could’ve said “I need to see you right now!” and come over and things would’ve happened and then he could’ve invited you to the other thing, or you could’ve had dinner or whatever. I’m not saying he should’ve been more coy, but let’s face it, there were plenty of ways he could’ve gotten exactly what he wanted AND not blasted the impression that he might just be in love with you clean out of the water once and for all. Did he care about the impression he was making? Clearly he did not. That’s all the information you need, and it has nothing to do with what YOU did after that.

His disappearance is a moot point. You merely indicated that you weren’t a fuck buddy, and he scrammed. This is how it was going to end. He’s attracted to you, that’s all.

My guess is that lots of guys are attracted to you, so you’re going to have to meet a greater volume of guys just to find a few who are legitimately interested in who you are. It’s not HOW YOU SIFT THROUGH THEM that determines whether this or that dude is truly interested or uninterested. Sadly, you don’t have that much say in the matter. But it’s actually freeing to realize that. You are sifting by staying strong, by not compromising the things that are important to you, and by not being afraid to say “No, thanks” when you get an offer that you ABSOLUTELY CAN AND SHOULD REFUSE. I know it feels like you “messed up” because you really liked this guy. I know that feeling well. But you didn’t change the outcome. If it were me, I would’ve invested two years and thousands of dollars in couples therapy and THEN I would’ve figured out that I was with the wrong guy. God, it makes me tired just thinking about it.

So here’s the bad news: You just have to stay open and know that you’ll find the right guy eventually. You really will. And it won’t be hard to tell if it’s right or not. If it’s super hard to tell? It’s not right.

The taxing thing is that every time we meet someone who’s fucking great, we say, “Is this right? Where should I compromise? What should I say to this? Am I doing that old bad thing I do where I ask for what I want and ruin everything again?” The stakes shouldn’t be raised just because someone seems really smart and funny and nice to look at, and you decide you really are interested, and they work really hard to date you. But they do. In theory, you should be able to say, “I’ll know if this is right if he keeps asking me to dinner and listening and treating me like someone he might really love.” You should be able to remain a little detached, until it’s clear that a guy really does care and doesn’t view you as a conquest. But who can do that? It’s stupid to even expect that of yourself, honestly.

You say guys pursue you really hard at first. Are you clear with them about who you are at that point? I don’t mean “Hey, I want to get married soon” but “This is who I am. You might not be the kind of person who wants someone like that.” Even that sounds strange, I know, but there are these opportunities when you’re dating, to either appear lovely and demure and sweet and to encourage the continued pursuit at all costs, or to be frank about who you are. This is just a stab in the dark, but it’s possible that if you flashed a few flaws a little sooner, you might get a sense what the guy in question is ACTUALLY after: a real human being, or a very attractive woman who WILL SLEEP WITH HIM EVENTUALLY, DAMN IT! I know I sound like a crazy person, suggesting you show your flaws at the very outset. And certainly when you start repelling dudes straight out of the gate, that’s not going to convince you that you’ve got the moves like Jagger.

BUT I have to tell you, there’s some really good swaggery carpe diem feeling that comes from asserting who you are, for better or for worse. You should maybe experiment with it. Hanging back and watching how hard he’ll work to get you can be a crafty maneuver that leads to short-term success, but it’s also a little bit traditional and (somewhat paradoxically) it appeals to a more predatory macho style of dude. It gets all of his CHASE THAT BUNNY RABBIT juices flowing. Useful, I guess, if that’s what you like. But given your smarts and your overall empowered, I Know What I Want deal, the bunny chaser is maybe not your target demographic. You maybe are looking for a sensitive guy who really loves real human women, not bunnies.

I do think, also, that—oh god, now this is really the stuff of shitty women’s magazines and heteronormative nightmare trend pieces—but I think that having it all can be a stumbling block for men, but it’s a stumbling block for the kinds of men you absolutely don’t want in your life. Your general togetherness and attractiveness, when paired with a cautiousness and quietness upfront, is really fluffy bunny ass for a traditional man. When you show your sharp bunny claws, though, this kind of man is going to turn cold and turn tail and run. The magazines will tell you to fluff up your tail and play down your giant brain. I’m going to give you the opposite advice. If I were you, I would try flashing the bunny claws earlier, to see what you’re dealing with. Is this a bunny chaser, or a guy who likes real assertive happy human women? Mutter a few ribald remarks, make your opinion crystal clear, then look the guy frankly in the eye as if to say, “That’s me, buddy. Like it or lump it.” Many, many men with an eye for a princess will get gone real quick-like after that.

And I know, I know, I know that plenty will read this and picture a kind of gauntlet-throwing hot-tempered wretchedness being inserted into a perfectly nice mix. But that’s not what we’re talking about here. I mean, I’m a personal fan of gauntlet-throwing hot-tempered wretchedness, sure, but that’s neither here nor there. MDSW, I think you understand what I mean by borderline bold statements and some advertising of flaws and open eye contact and clear boundaries, paired with interest and kindness. I think you might just figure out that you maybe are a little controlled and stiff around how present yourself at the outset. And I think you might just see that what you want is NOT to make it past the first few months. What you actually want is to fuck things up BEFORE then, so you can move on to the guys who aren’t just engaged in an elaborate chase to get some high-end tail.

So that’s the only thing I’d ask: Are you making it clear from the start that, not only that you are NOT remotely perfect, but you’re not for everyone? You are who you are—assertive, frivolous, angry, effusive, messy, exacting, hopeful—and you want something real. It’s funny because most smart women are ALL of these things. And sometimes just saying so will scare away the guys who want someone who prefers to pretend and stoke the mystery, and will attract the guys who find honestly and flaws and vulnerability and toughness mixed together incredibly romantic. It won’t change who you’re dealing with, it won’t turn Mr. Wrong into Prince Charming. It will simply save you time by clearing out the escapists and macho chasers who aren’t into egalitarian relationships and female complexity and real life.

God bless the bunny chasers. And if you’re a bunny, god bless you, too. I know people who really love that whole picture, for sure. I don’t personally know how to navigate it, so I can’t offer much advice to those who prefer it.

But I don’t think that’s what you want. So I think you should stop focusing on what you’re doing to fuck things up so early, and focus on fucking things up earlier, thereby sorting out the clunkers before you’ve invested your emotions too much.

Other than that? You have to be optimistic, be patient, write down everything you’re grateful for every night, and remember that you will look back on this time as one of the most important times of your life. You’ll look back and feel really proud of how you conducted yourself, how strong you stayed in the face of your loneliness, and how much you appreciated what you had. It’s true that you could be in this place for 2 years or 12 years, and even so, you will look back and feel good about it if you play your cards right. It’s amazing to have your own business and your own place and your own cat. You are living the good life, for sure, and while it’s great that you’re open to finding love (which takes its own kind of effort) nothing that happens on that front should undermine how satisfying and hard-won your happiness is right now. You have to believe in your life and romanticize it as much as you can. Remind yourself to feel proud of what you’ve built, and what you’ve overcome, every single day. And feel proud of your flaws and your loneliness and your big heart, too. It’s ok to feel vulnerable about wanting love and not finding it. That vulnerability will lead you to good places, even when it feels like it’ll topple your apple cart. You don’t have to be perfect. Let yourself be a little weird, a little uncertain, a little brash. Let yourself get a little messier. Let your seams show. Be proud of your broken pieces. They’re the best part of you.

Don’t speed through these days to get to the good part. This IS the good part. Savor it.

Polly

Are you trying to savor the good parts, but you can’t do it, thanks to fucking Candy Crush Saga? Write to Polly and spill it.

Heather Havrilesky (aka Polly Esther) is The Awl's existential advice columnist. She's also a regular contributor to The New York Times Magazine, and is the author of the memoir Disaster Preparedness (Riverhead 2011). She blogs here about scratchy pants, personality disorders, and aged cheeses. Photo by Rick and Brenda Beehorst.

Hi Polly.

I’ve been with my current boyfriend for three years. We’re really great together—similar interests, senses of humor, great sex. I love him so much—the only issue is that of our respective backgrounds. He grew up in a tony suburb, went to prep school, then to a very prestigious college, and finally the very prestigious graduate school where we met. I went to public school in a bad neighborhood, put myself through a not-so-prestigious college, made a name for myself in my field, then got into that same prestigious grad school. Our families could not be more different. I didn’t think it would matter so much, but something happened recently that I can’t shake.

My little brother, who has been a fuck up his entire life, has finally gotten it together and joined the Air Force. I’m not super pro-military or anything, but he was on a bad, bad path and now he has a job and structure and it’s been really good for him. When he finished basic training, we (me, my mom, and my boyfriend—our father has long been out of the picture) went to his graduation. I’d never been to one of these things before but it’s a really big deal for the airmen. A lot of them, my brother included, had never really accomplished anything worth celebrating before. My mom basically cried the entire time.

Unfortunately, throughout the day-long graduation, whenever we were alone, my boyfriend would bring the subject back to him. He looked around anxiously when we got there because most of the young men were in uniform. He kept asking me if he thought people knew that he hadn’t served. Then he would go on these weird defensive rants about why he hadn’t served, one of which included some pretty fucked-up ideas about people who don’t go to college. I got pretty annoyed at him for being so self-involved on a day that should have been about celebrating my brother. I didn’t say anything, though, because it was so out of character for him to behave like that.

In the couple of months since this incident, I get so angry whenever I think about it. I brought it up with him once, but he sort of dismissed me, saying that he wasn’t trying to draw attention from my brother. I actually totally believe him about that. I guess the thing that drives me nuts is that this person who has been given every opportunity and celebrated at every turn can’t stand one day when others are being honored and he isn’t. I’m probably being too harsh, but this is the narrative in my head.

This whole incident is bringing up some stuff from earlier in our relationship that I think I’d just brushed aside. When we first met, I honestly resented how easy his life had been compared to mine. I used to tease him for being a prep school kid and eventually he told me that hurt his feelings so I stopped. Since I stopped, we basically never talk about class-related stuff, so I think it appeared that we’d resolved that conflict. In reality, we just stopped talking about anything that would trigger any tension related to class. We also spend way more time with his family. It’s partially because we live closer to them, but also because I’m comfortable in his family’s world of affluent professionals while my boyfriend is just not comfortable spending a lot of time with my family in my old neighborhood. We do have pretty decent communication about other issues—this one just seems to be off limits for some reason.

I do love this man, and we’re starting to talk marriage (we’re both around 30). Can I be with someone long-term who I resent in this one way? Is it possible to love someone without wholly respecting them? Or am I being too hard on him? Ultimately it’s not really his fault that his parents have been able to give him so much. I just really can’t tell if this is something that will blow over in time or an indicator that this relationship isn’t built to last.

Help me Polly!

Confused About Class

Dear CAC,

Honestly, I think you misread your boyfriend’s reaction to your brother’s graduation. I don’t think he was envious of the attention. I think he felt unexpectedly droopy and emasculated in the company of all of those guys in uniform, looking sharp, accompanied by a lot of pomp and circumstance and talk about the incomparable honor of giving your life for your country. No matter how you might feel about the military or our country or the whole notion of having to give up your life at the whim of a potentially misguided leader, as a young man this experience would probably be unexpectedly intense. Your boyfriend is roughly the same age as all of these perceived heroes proudly proclaiming their willingness to die. It was understandably unsettling for him. He didn’t want you to see him as less heroic than those dudes. He didn’t want to see himself that way. He wanted to explain why he thinks those guys aren’t necessarily doing something that’s so honorable. He did this away from the rest of your family. He was trying to get you on his side, looking for your support and understanding. He probably said some dumb things along the way.

Not that I don’t understand why you weren’t aware of the particular folds of his emotional experience. You had your own concerns. This was your brother’s big day. And if your boyfriend blathered on and on about himself the whole time, in front of your family, that would be concerning. But I don’t get that sense. I get the sense that he made a series of discombobulated, defensive comments when you two were alone, and they stuck in your craw and made you wonder if he has any idea at all how totally pampered he’s been, how easy he’s had it, how hard other people have to work just to fucking exist.

I do understand your anger about that. Personally, I would want to explain the big gap between rich and poor, between sailing along and struggling tooth and nail, between floating through college and working really fucking hard in school while holding down two jobs, between sailing into grad school and working a real job first. And I think you should explain those things to him.

But I also think that you have to empathize with him, not only about his feelings around this military graduation but also about his life in general. He was standing there feeling a little bit useless, in spite of his faith in himself and his beliefs about the world. He was feeling like a wilty little grad student among macho men. Men are really fucking sensitive to this kind of thing. Even the kinds of smart, sensitive late-bloomers that most of us favor have these moments of self-doubt where they wonder, “Christ, should I feel embarrassed that I’m not uniformed and heroic like these macho guys? Am I supposed to feel like they’re making good choices and I’m the wimpy dude back home they’re out there protecting?” It’s easy for women to forget how often men compare themselves to each other, and how sensitive they are to feeling somehow less studly in the company of overt machismo.

I know saying that makes me sound like a deluded Camille Paglia type. Throw in a little Greek mythology here and there and voila, six figure book deal. But I do think you’re not opening yourself up to your boyfriend’s experience enough, and you’re not going to have a healthy relationship with him if you can’t stop seeing the first 30 years of his life as a relaxing and leisurely stroll down Easy Street.

Imagine for a second going to your boyfriend’s little sister’s debutante ball. It’s her big night! She struggled with eating disorders in the past, but now she’s doing fine and she just got into a very expensive private college, and she looks just beautiful! Her dad is so proud of her, and her mom is crying big salty tears! What you’re thinking, though, is that these fucks would never ask YOU to wear a white dress, thanks to your zip code of origin. And in spite of the token people of color here and there, these people are obviously racists. Imagine that you stayed up late grading papers the night before, and your tuition fees are overdue, and there you are, surrounded by gorgeous little rich girls who never do anything more taxing than sitting still to get their nails done? And everyone can’t stop talking about how impressive and gorgeous and special they all are?

I know it’s not the same thing. And I know you would keep your mouth shut. But imagine the feelings you might feel. Imagine the things you’d like to say to your boyfriend, in private, after watching him admire the pretty spoiled girls from afar.

Listen to me: Your boyfriend was feeling feelings about that graduation ceremony. That’s all that was about. If you start discounting his feelings routinely just because he’s been a little pampered, your relationship will suffer. Your guy had his own hardships, trust me. You can say to yourself, “What a spoiled little fucker, and he doesn’t even realize it!” But that’s not fair to him. You love this guy. You need to find out more about the things that did challenge him, the situations that did unnerve him and make him feel bad about himself.

I grew up in a perfectly comfortable home in a perfectly nice middle-class urban neighborhood, first as a professor’s kid and then with a divorced working mom. We were usually in debt and I was always expected to scrub toilets, trim bushes, rake leaves, paint doors, empty gutters, pull weeds, whatever. I always had a summer job, starting at age 15. I never had a car. I was definitely jealous of my friends, with their fucking Clinique cosmetics and Esprit sweatshirts and Polo shorts, with their dermatologists and their expensive ballet lessons and their pretty redecorated bedrooms with walls and ceilings they didn’t paint themselves. I loved my friends but I was a real asshole about how spoiled they were. I used my resentment of their wealth as an excuse not to empathize with them. I discounted any suffering they told me they were going through. And some of them had real problems—deeply dysfunctional families, eating disorders, financial support that kept them semi-infantilized until their early 30s. I thought my own problems were somehow more real than theirs, just because they had a lot more money and didn’t have to work as hard as I did.

The truth is, we were ALL privileged. And I was particularly privileged, because I learned the satisfaction of hard work early on in life. I do mean satisfaction. I can’t count the times that setting my feelings aside and doing some really fucking hard work has pulled me out of a funk. Most of what’s good in my life found its way to me because I knew how to work hard without giving up, to work hard at something until I was better and better at it. I’m not a workaholic, not by a long shot. I am a lazy motherfucker. But I do understand and appreciate a concerted, strenuous effort. I don’t mind looking at my work and saying, “That could be better.” It doesn’t scare me that it’ll take MORE HARD WORK to take something from mediocre to great.

People who don’t understand hard work, who don’t appreciate and enjoy it, end up suffering a lot. That is a fact. Your boyfriend has nothing to do with this point I’m making; he’s in grad school, he knows how to work hard. I’m just telling you that there are many, many aspects of struggling that are a real privilege, that put you at an advantage, once you realize your full potential.

I want to challenge you to take more pride in your background. Not angry fuck-you resentment, but real pride. I know you think you have real pride, and you also think I am a fucking pampered piece of shit who doesn’t get it. You’re probably right about that. I still want you to listen to me: Real pride can be angry, sure. But real pride can also allow for difference. Real pride invites the privileged in, warmly, to witness with clear eyes, to share some of the many gorgeous aspects of growing up with nothing. There is ugliness there, but there’s beauty there, too. There are things about your family that might make you feel ashamed, but that should make you feel proud. My grandparents chainsmoked hand-rolled cigarettes and watched “The Family Feud” every fucking night on a couch covered in plastic. At the end of the show, my Carpatho-Rusyn grandfather would shout to my Carpatho-Rusyn grandmother cleaning up in the kitchen, “Dem Greeks, dey won, Ma!”

When I brought my boyfriend to visit my grandparents, was it uncomfortable for him? Of course. He couldn’t mask his emotions, as he spotted the plastic grapes in the little urn on the wall. People who grow up with lots of money often don’t have access to working class people, don’t have access to immigrants. But everyone is provincial in their own way. People who grow up in Manhattan can be hopelessly provincial, hopelessly unaware of the rest of the country, the rest of the world. If your boyfriend isn’t that comfortable around your family, that’s not necessarily snobbery, and if you cast it in that light, you’re being unfair to him and yourself. Some people out there watch “Judge Judy” and speak in double negatives. Shocker. Some people live in neighborhoods that seem scrappy and dangerous to outsiders. He just needs some time to get used to it. You need to insist that he get used to it. If you protect him from it while resenting him for that, if you avoid taking him home, you’ll injure your relationship. Give him the benefit of the doubt. I hate the phrase “It is what it is,” but when it comes to showing people where you came from, it comes in handy. This is how I grew up. It is what it fucking is. Did I choose this? Would I choose it again? Do I hate this? Do I love this? All of the above. It is what it is.

Also? Being a guy is not a walk in the park. The separation from your own feelings you have to achieve just to get by is crazy. Prep school, while it sounds absolutely luxurious to a poor kid, can be an insanely cut-throat, unfriendly place. Kids I know who went away to prep school often came back with completely different personalities, personalities that, quite frankly seemed a little defensive and overly cool, like they’d been traumatized by their exposure to a whole new level of uber cool, pushy rich kids and had emerged far worse for the wear.

That’s my casual observation, nothing more. But you really do need to open your mind and allow that your guy has had a very different experience than you, and not all of it boiled down to him getting his ass wiped by servants armed with extra-soft toilet tissue.

I don’t think you’d feel as angry at him if you’d chosen a time when you WEREN’T mad and explained the very particular folds of your background to him. I think this needs to happen, and you need to do it in a way that doesn’t make him feel defensive about the way he grew up. After you feel like you’ve been heard—and look, you’ve got to warn him, “I need for you to listen very closely to this. I need you to understand all the shit I had to do to get here”—then you’ve got to hear HIM out. You’ve got to ask him all about his upbringing, and you’ve got to be nice about it, really fucking nice, not dismissive and eye-rolly. You’ve got to appreciate the little bits and pieces of his past that feel crumpled or messy, that don’t fit together well, that made him feel sad as a kid.

He sounds like a sensitive person, just like you. Sensitive people don’t have an easy ride, no matter where they are. We will make mountains out of molehills wherever you plant us. And even though it’s easy to be unsympathetic and skeptical of that—and believe me, I can be—it’s still important, if you love him dearly, that you empathize with the challenges he faced and still faces, no matter how small they might seem to you.

It’s probably time to have some tough conversations. Don’t wait until you’re mad. Sit him down when you’re feeling good and look him in the eye and tell him you need to talk about your differences. Be gentle. There is no moral high ground in this conversation. You are simply two different people, with two different stories. He needs to understand that your family is important to you. Remember that it’s never easy to accept and embrace someone’s family, no matter what they’re like. Be respectful of that, but make it clear you feel sensitive about them and protective of them and you don’t really want him making negative comments to you about them moving forward. Just as he didn’t want to be teased about prep school, you don’t want to be teased about your background, and you don’t want him casting aspersions on your family’s choices. You should ask him to rethink the way he talks about people’s life choices when he talks to you and to them, with some acceptance that he may not have all the information he needs to draw conclusions about people from completely different circumstances from his. You should tell him that you’re going to try to do the same thing for him: Not assume that someone is lazy or spoiled, for example, or doesn’t know the meaning of hardship. There are all kinds of hardship out there.

It’s a big challenge, for two people from totally different classes to come together and smoothly navigate the world. It’s also really romantic and interesting and if you approach it with care and sensitivity, you’ll both grow into richer, wiser, more mature people together. You both have a great opportunity to learn a lot. Try to embrace it rather than avoiding it. Try to open your heart and be vulnerable and allow him the same safe space that you need.

It will be a challenge. Lean into the challenge and talk about it a lot, with a generous, accepting spirit, and your love for each other and trust in each other will grow in leaps and bounds.

This isn’t about your boyfriend wanting to be the center of attention. He’s grappling with something bigger than that. He has prejudices, sure, and also fears and insecurities. Let him show you the full scope of who he really is, flaws and all, and dare to show yourself to him. We are not ONLY safe among our own kind, in our own comfort zones. When we believe that, we make our worlds smaller and smaller. Take pride in your path here, and let him have his pride in his path, too. Dare to do this without anger and preemptive, self-protective resentment. Dare to do this with an open heart.

Polly

Are you ashamed of your money? Do you suspect that buying a million copies of Polly’s book might make you feel better? Because you’re right about that. Also? Write to Polly and cry her a river.

Heather Havrilesky (aka Polly Esther) is The Awl's existential advice columnist. She's also a regular contributor to The New York Times Magazine, and is the author of the memoir Disaster Preparedness (Riverhead 2011). She blogs here about scratchy pants, personality disorders, and aged cheeses. Photograph by Teruyoshi Hayashida, from, of course, the incomparable Take Ivy.

Dear Polly,

I want to know how I can make my boyfriend a better listener.

It has happened several times that when I want to talk about something serious (the future, exes, fears, hopes, etc.) my boyfriend often gets distracted. It’s not like he means to hurt me—I think it’s just his nature, and possibly mild ADD—but it does hurt me.

I’m 24 and he will be 30 next year. We both see each other as potential life partners. But how can I be with someone who gets distracted by a squirrel when I’m telling him about my father’s funeral?

That’s the other thing: I have some serious things to tell him. My father was murdered when I was 14. It’s a story I haven’t shared with many people, but if this is the right guy (and by all other accounts, he is) then I want him to know.

My fear is that he will hurt me by not listening correctly. Basically, that he won’t listen well, or that he will be scared off, or will avoid the subject or get distracted or whatever. It has happened many times before and even though I’ve told him this hurts me, not much has changed.

Sometimes I feel like the mom when a serious subject gets brought up: If he gets distracted, I admonish him. Usually I say: Look, right now I just don’t care about buttering my bread roll/wiping crumbs out of my shirt/that castle that we’re about to pass because I’m in the middle of telling you something very important. Or I just say, never mind, you’re not listening. I’ll tell you some other time. He instantly apologizes and promises to change but then the same thing happens again and again. Recently I’ve felt like he’s trying so hard to listen that he’s almost playing a role.

Sometimes I even feel like I’m dragging him down when I keep trying to tell him these dark stories from my past. He’s a very positive, happy-go-lucky guy who comes from a balanced family. I’m a pretty strong, driven and balanced person as well (despise all the fucked up stories) but I need to talk and be heard, damn it. I think that a lot of the time he gets scared of these topics and makes distractions. But I can feel that he cares and wants to support me—just doesn’t know how.

So Polly: am I crazy for trying to change my boyfriend? Are you going to tell me to get a therapist? I realize I will want to get one some day, but I also want to figure out a way to share myself fully with the person I love without getting mad at him every time.

Van Gogh’s Girlfriend

Dear VGG,

I should warn you, this is one of those subjects that lights up every dark corner of my brain, causing me to spin out in a million directions. The hope of getting some small slice of concrete advice from whatever follows here is admittedly very dim, but I will try my best to bring it home. I WILL BRING THIS HOME.

Here we go. Most humans need a good listener in their lives. People want to be heard. Not distractedly half-heard and then interrupted, but heard. The desire to be heard is easily observed in small children, who magically turn into house-destructing demons the second you get on the phone, play Candy Crush, flip through a fucking magazine, etc. Kids who aren’t heard are like dogs who don’t get enough exercise. They will fucking shred the carpet to bits, if you let them.

In contrast, when you devote your full attention to a kid, and he or she suddenly realizes that you are really, truly paying attention, he/she will turn into a bouncy ball of entertaining brilliance. Which is amazing, unless it’s not your kid and/or you dislike kids in general, in which case it’s a fucking pain in the ass and you have to learn to ignore kids better.

Anyway. Same goes for human beings, right? But women, generally speaking (I KNOW YES I’M GENERALIZING I DO THAT), need a GREAT listener. We need to be heard, big time, or we droop and grow wilty.

And then there are smart women with lots to say who are also very sensitive and weird and analytical and incredibly talkative, who ALSO listen very closely. These women are often labeled “a little too intense.” We think way too much, and slice and dice everything under the sun like a Ginsu knife that’s been sharpened one too many times and is now capable of cutting a watermelon in half like it’s made of crepe paper.

And while it’s true that no one REALLY needs a knife that sharp, there we are, the sharpest fucking knives in the motherfucking drawer. I’m not saying we’re geniuses, ok? We’re just sharp sharp sharp and we want to cut and cut and cut until there’s nothing left to cut. We do shut up sometimes. Sometimes we’re downright quiet, and you can’t get us to talk even if you try. But every now and then, we want to bring up tough, tangled, difficult situations and memories and experiences, and we want to slice and dice that shit up and shine a light on this or that and dig deeper and wonder and ponder and maybe even cry some tears over some dusty old loss or some injury or even something bad that happened to someone else.

If this is a suitable description of you, VGG, and of you, reader, then you need to know something (in case you don’t already know it): YOU NEED A CHAMPION LISTENER IN YOUR LIFE.

Women (and ok, men, too) who have big digressive minds and lots of stories, who know how to entertain but also do need to be heard and understood very badly? We need champion listeners. We just do. And listen, a lot of us really do deserve champion listeners, too. Because we ourselves are champion listeners. We’re the ones who people call when they’re going through a tough breakup or divorce. We’re the ones who people lean on when they’re depressed or sick or injured or bereft. This makes the phone our enemies, honestly, because once we’re on the phone we could be on there for fucking EVER. We also have to be careful around email.

But when the shit truly hits the fan for someone? WE ARE THERE. We are there, and you can also depend on us to avoid making it ALL ABOUT US. We’re sensitive, so we try to behave appropriately. It took some work to learn this skill, but we learned it.

And if the people we count on, who are very close to us, don’t listen to us? We get weird. Sometimes half-assed listening makes us talk even more. Sometimes we start blaming people for OTHER, totally unrelated shit, because not being heard freaks us out. Sometimes we mope. Sometimes we start weeping over nothing, day after day. When we’re not heard, the world is off-kilter. A window is ajar and cold wind is pouring in. Our balance is off. We feel sick. We feel wronged. We feel and feel and feel and we have a lot to fucking say about it.

And if the people around us DO listen to us? If we get really lucky and we find a champion fucking listener out there in the world? Flowers bloom. The sun shines in, bright and strong. Birds sing happy little birdy songs. And—THIS IS IMPORTANT—we really don’t ask for much more than that. That’s the paradox of the digressive talky needy woman (or man). Give us a champion listener, here and there, and we’re good. Warm, dry, comfortable, happy. We will shut up and get ‘er done and take care of people and cook big meals and bring joy to the world.

Now, some big talky talkers in the world don’t look for a champion listener. They just write constantly. They write giant award-winning novels. Donna Tartt, are you listening? Probably not. Genius writer ladies with perfect, shiny bob haircuts and dark turns of mind don’t have time to listen, do they? They take care of fucking business and stay aloof and fabulous. God, how we love and envy the motherfuckers.

But for people like you and me? We have to write things down, non-genius things mostly, AND we have to go out into the world and find good listeners to lean on.

Here’s what happens when we find ok listeners and so-so listeners and pretty good listeners and even good listeners, who maybe don’t want to have really in-depth conversations very often: Trouble. Here’s what happens when we talk to people who SAY they like talking about their feelings but in practice, actually fucking hate it and will turn on us like a pit bull if we try to make them do it: Things get ugly. Here’s what happens when we start sleeping with someone who really doesn’t want to talk to us all that much, and sure as FUCK doesn’t want to hear us go on and on and on about something, even when we think we’re actually sort of uncovering important, smart shit along the way: We feel like shit. Things don’t work out. They might work out for a while, but eventually, things fall apart.

I had a boyfriend once who became distracted any time we were about to have a conversation. The music wasn’t quite right. It was time to make a second drink. The lighting was wrong. It was time to check something online. It was time to make a phone call. I spent LOTS of time sitting with a drink in my hand, watching him do anything in the world but talk to me. We’d even go out to a nice restaurant, and he’d get distracted by the waiter or the conversation at the next table. He always had a very clear reason for not listening, and when I pushed him to try harder, I was being massively insensitive. And when I did manage to get his attention OR I just pushed onward and delivered a monologue about something big and sweeping, that I thought was actually kind of heartfelt and inspired? He would get angry at me.

He may have been a champion listener for anyone else. I don’t know. But he did NOT WANT TO LISTEN TO ME TALK. He wanted me to shut up. It’s incredible how long it took me to wise up and figure that out.

The moral here is that even when you’re in love with someone and you feel reasonably good around them, if there are little signs that they don’t really want you to talk, and you know that you really NEED TO TALK? Then you’re pretty fucked.

I’m not saying that you, specifically, VGG, are fucked OR that your relationship needs to end right this minute. But you and all of the other sharp knives out there who want to fucking cut and slice and dice need to know something: You aren’t just being compulsive and nuts, with all that fucking analysis and talk. People will make you think that you are a lunatic, thanks to the fact that they don’t have a taste for such heaviness and they are, in fact, AFRAID OF IT.

SHARP KNIVES NEED TO KNOW THAT WANTING TO BE HEARD ISN’T A CRIME. If you want to truly be heard—and you’re not that relaxed about spending time with people who don’t like intensity or depth or long conversations about big important things—that doesn’t make you a pain in the fucking ass. That makes you a sharp fucking knife.

So my advice to most sharp knives is hold out for a champion listener. Like fairies or unicorns or dogs with great personalities, you have to BELIEVE in their existence for them to appear to you. If you slog through life dating one crappy listener after another, and you just assume that this is just one of the many ways women (and some men) are punished, brutally and repeatedly, for being made of sugar and spice and piss and vinegar, then you’ll have to simply endure being half-ignored and feeling like a weirdo with way too many ideas and feelings to ever express a small fraction of them. But I would strongly recommend taking a different path. I would strongly recommend BELIEVING that champion listeners exist, BELIEVING that you, as a champion listener, deserve to find one of them. One that looks nice.

You, VGG, don’t want to break up with your boyfriend. You want me to tell you how to train him to be a better listener. This isn’t a skill I seem to possess. You could try to get him into couples’ therapy with you, sure. I have occasionally said to past boyfriends, “I need an hour of your time. Then we can do whatever—watch a basketball game, go to a party, I don’t care. But right now I need to feel like I have your full attention. And I need to do this every now and then, or I start to feel really fucking shitty.”

BUT HONESTLY? Then we’d sit and talk and he’d focus really hard (just like you described, like an actor on a stage who’s pretending to be a sensitive listener) and then after exactly one hour he’d be all “FUCK LET ME OUT OF THIS PRISON!” But I’d STILL feel a little off and we’d go have dinner and he’d talk about light stuff and never return to the subject we discussed earlier and really, I’d still feel hungry for talk, for heavy lifting, for getting to the heart of things. I would ALWAYS HOPE that we could get right down to the fucking nitty gritty, but I’d always feel dissatisfied. Because when your dude doesn’t WANT to get down to brass tacks, when he’ll do anything to avoid doing just that, you’re basically never going to feel like your thirst is quenched.

Eventually, you become someone who talks too much. Because, when you never, ever have someone’s full attention, that’s what ends up happening.

A therapist who’s paid to listen closely to you will help, but he/she won’t solve this problem entirely for you. Nope. People will say “Why are you trying to make your boyfriend your therapist, VGG?” and “Why don’t you turn to your female friends for a good talking session?” But no. Sharp knives can have therapists and lots of amazing friends who listen, but if their partner refuses to listen, and they know they want a partner who understands them (or at least tries to) and listens closely (at least some of the time)? Then therapy and friends don’t magically make it all great. The partner who’s a bad listener can fuck things up.

As a partner, a champion listener is irreplaceable. My husband doesn’t have to work that hard, either. I just need to know that he wants to show up when I have important stuff to hash out. If I weren’t married to a great listener, I know I would be vaguely dissatisfied and pissy and I’d be hell to live with.

Not everyone is a sharp knife, which is probably a good thing. I have destroyed many a relationship over this issue. But now? I bask in gratitude. A huge piece of my happiness comes from aligning myself with someone who loves talking and likes heavy subjects but also has an edge and doesn’t talk about chakras, ever.

In my experience, it is excruciatingly difficult to try to get someone who doesn’t like heaviness to try to grapple with heavy shit. And look, I’ve known THERAPISTS who didn’t like heavy shit and didn’t REALLY like to listen. What people say about what they want and what they actually SHOW YOU that they want are often at odds. You don’t have to feel crazy just because you’re noticing a gap there.

Sharp knives need a lot. It’s OK to need a lot. When you need a lot and you ask for a lot, knowing that you can give it back? You get a lot.

You want a life that is full, VGG. You don’t want to feel lonely. You don’t want to feel ignored. You should try to speak from the heart, to tell him how much you need. Don’t be ashamed. You want to tell someone what you have inside, and you want to know that they’re paying attention. You don’t JUST want them to hear you. YOU WANT THEM TO FEEL YOU.

And to all the other sharp knives out there: If someone tells you that you make it ALL ABOUT YOU all the time, that you’re into drama, and really, you’re just trying to connect, to get to the truth, to share yourself, to hear someone else, to feel them, to let them in? If you know that you listen and you’re a good partner or a good friend, and you know when to shut up, and someone STILL says this to you, despite ample evidence that it’s simply not true? Don’t try harder with that person. When you’re trying to make deep connections in a world that is flinchy and dismissive of deep connections, sometimes you open your heart, and instead of getting love in return, someone will say you’re being a troublemaker.

They just don’t get it. They aren’t for you. Walk away. You have worlds inside you—swirling, colorful, mournful, generous, soaring, hopeful, searing, heartbreaking worlds. You cannot offer just a tiny slice of you. You cannot hold back the flood. You want to share those worlds. You are way too big, too complicated, too glorious and infinitely sad and unspeakably divine. You have to share all of it. Find someone worthy of all of it. Find someone who wants ALL OF IT.

Polly




Are you incapable of listening? Write to Polly today and wait forever for her to write back.

Heather Havrilesky (aka Polly Esther) is The Awl's existential advice columnist. She's also a regular contributor to The New York Times Magazine, and is the author of the memoir Disaster Preparedness (Riverhead 2011). She blogs here about scratchy pants, personality disorders, and aged cheeses. Photo by Jesslee Cuizon.

Dear Polly,

Love your column. Can I throw something at you? Apologies for being vague with certain details.

I’m a 43-year-old woman who has spent my whole life in one industry, got pretty far, and then descended back down the ladder to the place I started from. One day my whole outlook on my career changed and I wanted out. The problem was I didn’t know how to do anything else. I was unconsciously sabotaging job after job but without an exit strategy, so it was a rough few years. 

Finally I ended up at the entry level of my industry, hiding my experience and qualifications so I could be a worker bee. In exchange for giving up a great salary and high pressure 24/7 job, I got over a hundred hours of my week back, and for the first time, started to have a life. Materially, it’s spartan compared to what I had, but I’m at peace and happy way more often than I was before.

Now that my job is so undemanding and I have a lot more time than I’ve had, I’ve gotten back in touch with my childhood dreams and have started to do what I really wanted to do. It’s in arts/entertainment. 

This is where my problem comes in: Having any actual success was far from my mind when I started my new work. I was just happy to finally have the time to be doing what I always wanted to do. 

Things rather rapidly became serious with rather serious people and organizations as soon as I focused and treated my new “work” like real work. I got opportunities other people struggle and train for years to get, and sometimes never do. I am COMPLETELY aware of how incredibly fortunate I am. Friends and peers in the same world can’t believe my rate of progress. I feel like I’m finally on the right track.

But then I just stopped. Hearing about other people’s dreams are the worst, but this dream is my story in a nutshell: I was driving a champagne colored convertible down a gorgeous open highway of gold on my way to Beverly Hills. The road was clear, the sky was blue, I was on my way. Then I just pulled over the car and got out, walked away, and suddenly I was in the bowels of the 42nd Street Subway station. I woke up terrified.

The days are ticking past, and the serious people waiting for me to get on the bus will eventually stop waiting—or else find a replacement.

For the life of me, I cannot figure out why I’m so resistant to finishing what I started. Imposter syndrome, fear of success, all of these things hit really close to home, but I can’t pinpoint why I’m finding it so difficult to reach out and grab the brass ring in front of my face. 

I don’t think it’s stage fright necessarily, because though I won’t say I don’t care what people think, I have an uncanny ability to shut out the world and compartmentalize feelings and memories to the point of amnesia.

Possibly relevant: I grew up in a home where I was invisible when I wasn’t being abused, and none of my accomplishments of any kind garnered the slightest notice. I left home as a teenager and haven’t had contact with anyone in my family since. Over the years I collected family figure substitutes, but I don’t really keep or maintain relationships for very long. The truth is I lack trust in people for anything beyond the superficial. I just think it’s easier to limit my exposure to myself, basically.

This is my shot at my new life, exactly as I always wanted it, but I’m not pulling the trigger. I know all kinds of freedoms are waiting for me at the end of this road, but I can’t take another step toward it.

My procrastination feels sickening. Yet I’m already letting myself play with the idea of mourning my missed opportunities in the future. The reasonable part of me is horrified. When I try to create new synapses and imagine a happy ending for myself, I can’t bear it. 

Got anything for me?

Avoiding The Future

Dear ATF,

Well, you did it. You went and hit me in my own blind spot.

That means I’m not going to give very good advice, probably. But there’s so much to unearth here, and maybe even more to AVOID unearthing—to sidestep, circumnavigate, ignore. This may be one of the big moments in your life when you have to do two different, contradictory things at once: 1) dig for more information about what’s making you so afraid, and 2) set that shit aside most of the time so you can GET ‘ER DONE.

It’s easy enough to draw a line from feeling invisible and never being recognized for anything, to now being afraid that if you ARE recognized for something, it will STILL feel like nothing. You will still be invisible. Or somehow it will kill you. Does being recognized mean dying? Maybe your survival as a kid felt linked to invisibility, and this is why you don’t want relationships and don’t want anyone being close to you or needing you or criticizing you or giving their honest opinion about what’s right or wrong with you. Somehow, whenever other people get involved, the stakes always get too high. You want to stay safe instead. Safe and invisible.

A happy ending—or a happy turn in your path, toward success—would make you visible, and maybe it would also make you responsible for whatever unhappiness might remain. As long as you’re unsuccessful and invisible, you have an excuse for feeling mildly depressed and mildly dissatisfied. So you tell yourself stories about what would be BAD about doing something you really love. You tell yourself that recognition and coexisting with other talented people would be harrowing. You are a fraud, after all. You don’t really deserve to share a room with other smart people. You deserve to remain invisible. IT’S WHO YOU ARE.

I think many of us feel like we should remain partially hidden, and to do otherwise will magically transform us into major league assholes. We’ve seen recognition and wealth ruin other people, or we’ve IMAGINED that it was ruining them. Or we simply didn’t like the choices someone made after he or she became wildly popular or rich—even though, 9 times out of 10, that choice boiled down to bad taste and nothing else. We treated it as a moral, a lesson about success, when there were plenty of tasteless moves and shitty choices in the mix before and after.

BUT—and this is a little freaky, so pay attention—maybe at some level we consider success itself, or wealth, or even happiness, as reflective of bad taste. Maybe we loved the words someone wrote down on a page somewhere, and we weren’t prepared to see the annoying face associated with the brain that produced those words. Maybe we’re just dicks who don’t like that many TYPES of people, and we can only admire someone if we don’t really know what TYPE OF PERSON he or she is. Once we can associate a person with a TYPE, it ruins everything.

But this is all about prejudice. And you know who thinks this way about “types”? People who hate themselves.

So ok, fine, we hate ourselves at some level. What else is new? The new part is that we don’t believe that ANYONE really deserves success or happiness, except for maybe children and puppies and Choire Sicha. We don’t realize that we believe this, of course, because that would be absurd. Instead, we walk around, blindly hating the successful and the happy and favoriting every fucking thing Choire Sicha tweets, without understanding why.

To us, having a little money might be fine, but having lots and lots of money, so much that you can not only gaze at cool stuff but actually PURCHASE IT AND OWN IT? And then other people come over and they go, “Oh shit, your stuff is fucking AWESOME?”

That’s just embarrassing. If I not only craved money, but also had the bad taste to go out and get some? My mother would be appalled. It’s actually a big fear of hers that I might someday stumble on a giant pile of money, because that would instantly render me a big asshole, plus I’d be really unhappy. I think I’ve internalized this warped view to some extent. So instead, I earn just enough to keep my head slightly under water. Perfect.

Why is this starting to sound like a graphic novel?

The point is: Many of us in the world are afraid of doing exactly what we love for money. We might have lots of reasons to do what we love, but we’re also afraid to do it. At first we’re afraid to do it because it seems like a big, stupid risk. How will I pay the rent? Later, we’re afraid to do it because it’s not important enough, or because we’re too old, or because we’re unlikely to succeed and even if we DO succeed, succeeding will turn us into dickheads overnight.

All of the potential pitfalls of success cloud our vision. We get scared and weird and want to hide again.

But THEN: Oops! Someone real in the real world wants to talk to you about your secret shamefully awesome project that reflects just how talented you are? And now you have to have real conversations like it’s a real thing? Oh god, that’s a little tacky. And maybe you have to eat… lunch? At a restaurant that’s nice? And someone might say something about how big this thing you do might be, at which point you’re like FUCK YEAH WHY NOT? But you’re also OH JESUS I CAN’T DELIVER THIS I WILL FAIL and also I DON’T BELONG HERE and also I’M A STRUGGLER, HOW CAN I MAKE THIS A STRUGGLE? And THIS IS GROSS, THIS IS ABOUT SELLING SHIT, AND SELLING SHIT IS EMBARRASSING AND SHAMEFUL.

And then you go home and you think, “That real person just mistook me for another real person, but I’m not a real person. I’m an imposter. I’m invisible.”

And ALL YOU HAVE TO DO to stop feeling conflicted and afraid is shut it all down and return to the status quo of hiding and hesitating. And then, when the idea of following through comes up? You feel a little sick. You can’t possible work on anything. You should, but you can’t. You’re too conflicted. You’re too unsure that this is really for you. Maybe tomorrow. Not today though.

Each day it gets worse. And eventually, you’re already saying, “Well, that was sad, wasn’t it? When I tried to do that thing and then I just STOPPED doing it because it was too real? Or I stopped because I’m a failure, an avoider, a crazy person who can’t really do anything, who deserves to remain invisible?”

BUT LISTEN UP: This is why there are so many simple-minded shitty products in the world, ok? Because simple-minded shitty people, who don’t mind how dumb and lame they are and don’t mind making stupid-ass things and don’t mind earning giant piles of money for them, are the ones who make all the fucking STUFF out there. They make shitty stuff, and then they get to buy the really awesome stuff (which is expensive, because so few people make non-shitty stuff out there). So that’s why you associated awesome stuff with shitty people. And that’s why, when you walk into a place and you say, “Fuck, your stuff is fucking awesome?” You’re actually thinking, “Oh, maybe you’re simple minded and shitty, actually.” EVEN WHEN YOU’RE THE ONE BEING SIMPLE MINDED AND SHITTY AT THAT MOMENT. Striving starts to look like bad taste. Succeeding starts to look unsavory. Envy warps your vision, and you can’t take people at face value anymore. And there’s always a reason not to try.

So basically you’re a neurotic in a cave for the rest of your life, while all the dumb people run around drinking champagne and fucking each other on yachts.

I like this as a graphic novel, a lot. But I don’t like it as the plot of your life. So listen to me, ATF and listen, all of you other weirdos with shitty attitudes about success and money: Let’s stop stigmatizing ambition and start imagining ways of being ambitious and speaking to and collaborating with ambitious people without hating ourselves and everyone else. OK? Because I want to read our stuff and buy our stuff. Yes, we’re already tremendously privileged. Can’t we acknowledge that and become even more privileged and buy a few awesome things and then give most of our money away to people who really need it?

Here’s where I always land: I don’t want anything that much. I like cool t-shirts and really good aged cheese, yes. But money doesn’t seem like a good enough reason to do anything, even when I’m underwater. If money is the real aim, fuck it. So I get confused. Because money is NOT the real aim, ever. The real aim is writing great stuff, that I feel proud of. Money might become involved down the line, but that doesn’t make the whole thing POISONOUS.

The point is, for some reason, your mind is basically looking for any excuse NOT to do the thing you love the most and want to do the most. When your thoughts demand drawings by Chris Ware, you know you’re in trouble.

So at some point, you have to STOP. JUST STOP. You have to stop and say, “I am going to do this thing. That is all. I am going to do it. At long last. No more avoidance. I am going to act. One foot in front of the other. THAT IS ALL.”

Yes, you have permission to enlist a therapist. Yes, you have permission to call a friend or acquaintance or whoever and complain about the lameness of the REAL LIFE HUMANS who do lucrative creative things for a living, those unsavory people who take your talents and harness them and hammer out practical ways to squeeze money out of your work. People will say things to you about your brand, and you might just vomit straight into your hands. Or you’ll be asked to have a social media strategy, of all horse shit things, and it’ll feel like you’ve been asked to pull your pants down in the middle of the high school cafeteria.

You might even picture being way too busy, and having to fly places and talk to people about what you’re doing. Ick. I always picture that. My husband is about to fly to China to give a talk and all I can think is, “Thank god I’m a common hermit and not an accomplished academic, so I don’t have to do shit like that, ever.” He can go out into the world, and I’ll stay here and eat Cadbury creme eggs instead.

But you can’t let fear and avoidance win, ATF. You have to forge ahead. You SIMPLY MUST. This story is not over.

SO: Make a list of concrete tasks that need to be completed. Here, I’ll help. Number one on the list should be “Make a fucking list.” Number two on the list might be, “Call X and tell him everything is moving forward as planned.” Number three on the list might involve sitting your ass down and producing something concrete. List every single thing you need to do in order to forge ahead. Put a date on each task. Tape it on the wall next to your bed. Vow to do two of those things TODAY. TODAY, MOTHERFUCKER!

Day one is crucial. If something else has to slip through the cracks to make Day One a reality, so be it. You’re reading this today, so this is the day you have to do the first two things on the list. OK?

Make the list. Tape it to the wall. Are you done? Is the list on the wall, next to your bed? Good. Now cross “Make a fucking list” off the list.

Now do the second thing. Then cross it off.

Don’t wonder why you feel weird when you actually try to pick up the phone, or try to sit down and get ‘er done. No. DON’T THINK. JUST DO. Don’t call someone to talk about how strange it is that you feel so avoidant about this thing, and maybe it’s because you don’t really feel that good about these sorts of pursuits in general. Most of these types of products are so shitty! Why would YOU want to make something shitty, like all of the other shitty things?!! Or maybe most of them are amazing, way better than anything YOU will ever do.

Shut up and work. If you work hard enough, your thing won’t be shitty. I promise.

But don’t talk about that now. No phone calls. No anything. DO WHAT YOU NEED TO DO RIGHT NOW, TODAY. OK? You don’t have to do everything. Just do something. And tomorrow? Two more pieces of the puzzle. Two more small accomplishable items on the list.

Will you need a therapist once you succeed? Yes. Do you need one now? Clearly. Will you have more avoidant episodes? Yes. Will you give in to those feelings? No. You will get up early in the morning, and go to bed early, and stick to your list.

Here’s another important piece of advice: Don’t run around telling a big story about how you’re doing this thing now and it’s great. You’re really doing it! Yeah! But then when someone wants to hear more about it, you’ll admit that it’s making you super confused and stressed out, because you’re ambivalent about this or that aspect of it. You will want to talk that way—victorious at first, then slowly more and more self-doubting. Instead, try to make your free moments organic, low stress, regular, devoid of analysis. You go on a walk, you take a nap, whatever. Don’t change everything just because you’re moving forward with your thing. Keep working on having the same balanced life you had before. It’s not one or the other. You can exercise and eat well and not be an ambitious ball of nerves.

I’m 43, too, by the way. You and I are old enough to do shit just because it’s interesting now. There’s no reason we have to feel like the world splits into two paths, and one involves hiding in poverty and the other involves driving a champagne-colored convertible down a gorgeous open highway of gold. You don’t have to be invisible OR glamorous. You can just be productive and normal and happy. You can do things simply because you haven’t done them before. You can get on a plane and see what China is like without feeling afraid, or feeling like a fraud. You are not either a rock star or a fucking loser who writes stupid songs for no good reason. You are not either a funny person or a failed comedy writer or a megastar of the hit television series SPRAYPAINT HUFFERS. You’re not a hot young woman or a gross old lady. You are a human being who wants to do stuff.

So go do some stuff. Also, ATF? Learn to be vulnerable and lean on people. Learn to let people into your life. Dare to forge intimate friendships. Open your heart. You can do all of this at once. In fact, write STAY VULNERABLE at the top of your list, above everything else. Vulnerability doesn’t have to derail you or hurt you. You can be vulnerable and also forge ahead. You can make things and insist that they not be shitty. (And sometimes you can’t insist on that at first, but you’ll be able to insist on it as you’re more successful.) You can take this one step at a time without freaking out every few seconds, or convincing yourself that you’d rather have nothing.

You can do something without signing on to EVERYTHING. You can do something. Doing something is better than doing nothing. Loving your craft and getting better and better at it? That’s a big part of what makes most people happy. This isn’t just a means to an end; you have to remember that. This is the same thing you’ve always loved doing. This is the same low-key thing that you love. No matter what anyone else says it means, no matter what noise might build up around your craft, it’s still just a craft. It’s just what you love to do. It’s simple. You are better, and happier, when you get to work at something you love. If you need to write that down and tape it to the wall, too, then do it.

And if this thing you’re doing fails? You can try it again. You can try something new after that. There are always things to do, things you will love doing.

Stay vulnerable, ok? But do something. Don’t think. DO.

Now go make that list.

Polly




Do you hate making lists? Write a haiku or limerick to Polly today.

Heather Havrilesky (aka Polly Esther) is The Awl's existential advice columnist. She's also a regular contributor to The New York Times Magazine, and is the author of the memoir Disaster Preparedness (Riverhead 2011). She blogs here about scratchy pants, personality disorders, and aged cheeses.

Photo by Mike Baird

Hi Polly,

Last year my father, who was 56, died suddenly of a heart aneurysm. He took me out for my 24th birthday dinner, and then two days later he was dead. I feel like the past months have been a mess of every emotion possible. I’m a great big ball of pain, and it seems as though grief is the one thing no one will talk about with me. My dad was the parent who showed up for me, who supported me as a writer. We shared so many similarities: a tendency to overthink and undersleep, a need for long intellectual conversations, a deep and sometimes painful sensitivity, and a love of words. My mother has said she can’t understand why I’m so sad and depressed over my dad’s death. It’s a message I’ve gotten before, as though I’m overreacting in my grief. That I need to toughen up and get over it. I’m in therapy, but I worry about how I will ever deal with this. Can you give me any advice?

Signed,

The Daughter Left Behind

Hi TDLB.

Your mother can’t tolerate seeing you unhappy. That’s all. She’s unsettled by it, and worries that you’ll never snap out of it. As a mother I can relate to that very well, and I’m sympathetic to her. She only wants you to be happy.

But—BUT!—there’s a certain kind of childhood to be had, in the company of someone who only wants you to be happy. Think about what that means, the flatness, the scentlessness, sterility of that: I. Only. Want. You. To. Be. Happy.

Here’s what I DON’T want you to be:

Devastated
Confused
Remorseful
Harried
Unnerved
Haunted
Inspired
Embarrassed
Tempted
Nervous
Seduced
Melancholy
Nostalgic
Grateful

Your mother doesn’t want you to struggle, or overthink things. She doesn’t want you to be sensitive, or complicated. She doesn’t want you to honor exactly who you are. She wants you to GET OVER IT so she can feel at peace again. She’s probably a little bit controlling. Just a guess. She’s probably a little bit anxious.

And again, I understand that, and I have empathy for it, as a sometimes-anxious woman with kids. But you have to find a way to set all of her expectations and desires for you aside. You can love her and still do that. You have to find a way to get a little space for yourself, to get a little distance, so you can look back over that distance and say, “This person, my mother, is conflicted and sad in ways that she won’t admit. She wants us to lie together. She will react negatively to ANYTHING that I do that doesn’t feel absolutely safe and controlled and happy and that’s not a direct reflection of what she wants for me.”

Your mother doesn’t want you to be an artist, a writer, an intellect. But that’s what you are, right? That’s what you want and what you believe in. You want the truth—you want to feel what you feel. You want to feel completely, painfully alive, and you know, instinctively, that this includes diving straight into your grief and not coming up to the surface until you feel like you’re ready.

My father also died when he was 56 years old, completely out of the blue, from his first heart attack. He was in great shape, and extremely youthful. He ran or swam every day. He was a professor of economics, prone to bizarre digressions about human nature and spirituality and also prone to aggressive, off-color jokes. He was ruled by his emotions. I don’t want to imply that he and I had the same sort of relationship that you had with your father; my dad could be very difficult, and I was treated more like a sidekick than an equal. But he loved me and he showed it, and when he died, I felt like the center of my life would never return. He and I were both very needy, very raw, and the rest of my family was much more controlled, more skeptical, more reserved, far less prone to starting a fight or leaping into the fray or showing their asses. When he died, I mourned for about four months straight, and then something shifted. I turned something off. I didn’t want to play my role as joker. I was the last remaining emotional wild card in my family, and I felt ashamed of that suddenly, and for the first time, I withdrew. I was 25 years old, and after several years of drifting and drinking too much I got a boyfriend, got a great job, got in shape, and shut all the emotional neediness and messiness out for a while.

Maybe I made a decision to BE HAPPY. I wrote cartoons and that was part of it, too—I stopped drawing attention to myself as much and drew attention to my work instead. I pushed that clown onto the page, and became much more flat and controlled in real life. I dated a child-like artist, somebody who lived like an Unfrozen Caveman, who needed my help. I was strong. But I wasn’t happy, not exactly.

Then I went into therapy and I realized that, two years later, I hadn’t grieved my father’s death nearly enough. Two years of grieving, even if you’re not trying to turn it off most of the time, is NOTHING, when it comes to a parent or a spouse or anyone you’ve lived with for a big part of your life. When it’s someone like your dad, who formed your identity? Of course you feel lost without him. You want him back. That’s a gigantic loss. And it feels like you’re losing part of your childhood, too, when someone important from your childhood disappears. It doesn’t help that your mother doesn’t understand or doesn’t accept what a huge sea change you’re still grappling with.

So: You need to get some distance from your mother and just handle her a little more, probably. Forgive her, talk about her in therapy, try to lean on her, but accept that she’ll probably never get it, or she’ll be too invested in your “getting over” this to get it. (Was she married to your dad when he died? It doesn’t sound like it, but if she was: WHOA.) She isn’t the right person to relate the full force of your emotion to. You know, mothers often can’t fill this role, sadly. Many of us are just too invested in our kids’ survival, and anything we perceive as threatening to that gets the heave-ho, even at the cost of their TRUEST, FULLEST HAPPINESS.

No one else will talk about grief with you? See, this is the bullshit thing about suffering a big loss when you’re so young. I went through this, too. Very few of my friends—and I had lots of friends—were capable of even discussing my dad’s death with me. It made them uncomfortable. That’s how young we were. They were sure they’d say the wrong thing. We were all so self-conscious and inflexible and unaccepting of the immense gulf between different peoples’ experiences. Some people stay that way, too. They try to downplay death, or act like the death of a third cousin and the death of a parent should be tackled with the same blasé toughness. It happens, you get over it. And if you talk about someone else’s death, about how it affected or affects you? That’s self-involved and pathetic.

Not only is this attitude bizarre, insensitive, and pathologically self-protective, but it shuts out the possibility that maybe, just maybe, you don’t know that much about death yet because you’ve never had a close friend or family member die. When you lose someone very close to you, someone who makes up this essential part of your history and your future, your worldview shifts dramatically. You have a palpable feeling that everything and anything good can disappear at any time. I missed my dad a lot. I also felt like everyone I knew was going to start dying. I also hated that my dad wasn’t able to go on living. I wanted him to be alive; I wanted him to feel rain on his face, to eat a great meal, to read something funny, for HIS sake.

After my dad’s death, I felt more anguished AND I felt more alive than I’d ever felt in my life. I felt more grateful than ever. I only wanted honest people in my life, people who could talk about heaviness and melancholy and really savor it instead of feeling uncomfortable. I don’t think I stuck to that. I think I couldn’t handle staying in that space for very long, because it made me feel too raw. So I retreated.

Don’t retreat. You need to find people who will talk about this. Figure out who they are. You’re in therapy now. If your therapist isn’t helping you deal with this that well, then get a new therapist. Or find a grief counselor, too. Or find a therapy group for people mourning a big loss. Look hard at your friends and figure out which ones you can lean on a little more. Someone out there can handle it, I’m sure of that. You just have to figure out who it is.

And you need to write things down. Every day. It’ll help you to understand what shape your pain takes, so it doesn’t take you by surprise, so you can talk yourself out of feeling paralyzed by it.

You also need to exercise every day. Mourning and exercise go very well together. You’re already in a lot of pain. What’s a little more? Fatigue can feel pretty redemptive when you’re sad.

Because mourning is about being alive. That’s something you have to remind yourself of, and maybe you should even take a shot at trying to explain this to your mother. Leaning into your sadness is not REFUSING TO BE HAPPY. Leaning into your sadness, every day, inviting it into your life, getting up and putting on some running shoes and running and walking and running for an hour or two, and crying while you run or walk—that’s reaffirming that you want to keep living. That’s celebrating how much your father meant to you and how he will never disappear from your life, ever. That’s knowing that you will survive this and you’ll carry it with you and it’ll be a big piece of who you are.

Because you don’t ONLY want to be happy. You are not a two-dimensional cartoon cut-out who keeps all pain at bay, at the expense of your very soul. You are not someone who will tell other people to take their own complex, difficult, colorful experiences, experiences that you don’t know anything about, and push them down, store them away, bury them, because it MAKES YOU UNCOMFORTABLE. You are going to feel this crushing loss for as long as you need to feel it, you’re going to feel the full force of it, so that you can also feel:

Devastated
Confused
Remorseful
Harried
Unnerved
Haunted
Inspired
Embarrassed
Tempted
Nervous
Seduced
Melancholy
Nostalgic
Grateful

You ARE going to feel grateful. This is the paradox of mourning. Incredible sadness carries with it an ability to touch the purest strain of joy, to experience an almost ecstatic release, to see an almost blinding, undiluted beauty in everything. Your dad will always be a part of your life. I hated it when people said that kind of thing before my dad died; I thought it was a sad lie told by needy liars. But it’s true.

Two days after my dad died, I called his insurance agent, to cancel his car insurance. The guy had a thick Southern accent. He didn’t get all stiff and weird on the phone, like most people did. He said, “My god. He was just in here the other day. He looked so healthy and young.” It was a very honest response. Then he said, “My dad died when I was 25 years old. That was 25 years ago. I still remember him perfectly, like I just saw him yesterday. I still have dreams about him.” At the time, I thought that sounded incredibly heartbreaking and depressing.

But here it is, almost 20 years later, and I get it. I remember my dad perfectly–his big laugh, his voice singing “Danny Boy” with showy bravado, his teasing tones, his little Muhammad Ali dance. If I turn my back on how important he is, I block my path to joy. I block my ability to bring joy to other people. He is a vital part of my life. And even the sadness I feel about losing him is vital. It makes every color brighter, it makes every single moment of happiness–or longing, or satisfaction, or grace, or melancholy–more real, more palpable, more complete.

Don’t wonder how you will deal with this. You ARE dealing with it. Don’t wonder how you will get over it. You will NEVER get over it. I know that seems heartbreaking and depressing and wrong. Trust me that it’s also gratifying and miraculous and astonishing and endlessly inspiring and important and helpful. Letting this pain in and growing from it will give you strength and resilience that you can pass on to other people in ways you can’t possibly understand now. It’s NOT all about you, not remotely. You are not stuck. You are not wallowing. This is a beautiful, terrible time in your life that you’ll always remember. Don’t turn away from it. Don’t shut it down. Don’t get over it.

Polly

Are stoical motherfuckers always tell you that you’re overreacting? Write to Polly and overreact away!

Heather Havrilesky (aka Polly Esther) is The Awl’s existential advice columnist. She’s also a regular contributor to The New York Times Magazine, and is the author of the memoir Disaster Preparedness (Riverhead 2011). She blogs here about scratchy pants, personality disorders, and aged cheeses. Photo by Brian Smithson.

I teach a Popular Criticism class to MFA students. I don’t actually have an MFA, but I am a professional, full-time writer who has been in this business for almost two decades, and I’ve written for a wide range of impressive print and online publications, the names of which you will hear and think, “Oh fuck, she’s the real deal.” Because I am the real deal. I tell my students that a lot, like when they interrupt me or roll their eyes at something I say because they’re young and only listen when old hippies are digressing about Gilles Deleuze’s notions of high capitalism’s infantilizing commodifications or some such horse shit.

Anyway, since Friday is our last class, and since I’m one of the only writers my students know who earns actual legal tender from her writing—instead of say, free copies of Ploughshares—they’re all dying to know how I do it. In fact, one of my students just sent me an email to that effect: “For the last class, I was wondering if you could give us a breakdown of your day-to-day schedule. How do you juggle all of your contracted assignments with your freelance stuff and everything else you do?”

Now, I’m not going to lie. It’s annoying, to have to take time out of my incredibly busy writing schedule in order to spell it all out for young people, just because they spend most of their daylight hours being urged by hoary old theorists in threadbare sweaters to write experimental fiction that will never sell. But I care deeply about the young—all of them, the world’s young—so of course I am humbled and honored to share the trade secrets embedded in my rigorous daily work schedule. Here we go:

Today, I woke up at 4 a.m. because one of my dogs was making a strange gulping sound. I sat for several minutes listening closely, wide awake, wondering if she wasn’t developing esophageal cancer or some other gruesome ailment that the pricey animal specialty hospital might guilt me into actually treating. I imagined sitting in the posh chill of their giant waiting room, the pricey coffee and tea machine humming away next to me, filling out forms instructing them to never crack my 10-year-old dog’s chest  and do emergency open heart surgery if she starts coding. “Option 1: LET MY DOG DIE.” That’s one I had to check off and sign, over and over again, when my other, eight-year-old dog had an unexplained fever and it cost me $6000 to save her. The vet’s eyes would dart over my forms and the corners of her mouth would pinch slightly, and then she’d treat me like someone who might just yank the IV out of her dog’s leg and twist her neck at any minute, the Jack Bauer of budget-minded dog owners.


Anyway, right about now you’re starting to understand why the morning hours are so potent for a working writer: The mind spills over with expansive concepts and sweeping images that just cry out to be tapped in another scintillating essay or think piece.

Rather than get up and spoil my inspired revelry, though, I know to let these thoughts swirl and churn until they take a more coherent shape. My mind soon shifts to tallying up the costs of college for my stepson, who for some nutty reason applied to a wide range of insanely expensive private colleges on the East Coast. After I marvel over that sum for a while, I try adding together his costs with the costs of sending my two young daughters to college in ten years. Then I think about how we should probably try  to pay off our credit cards and our home equity loan first, and THEN focus on coming up with this mammoth amount for college, and then of course we’ll be retiring right after that but we’ll still have 15 years left on our massive mortgage. “We’re never going to retire,” I think. “We’re going to have to keep working forever and ever and ever. And we can’t turn on the AC this summer. And we have to stop going out to our favorite Mexican restaurant every other week and drinking margaritas, which are an inexcusably expensive indulgence.” Old people problems, LOL.

Then I think about margaritas for a while. I think about how there should really be a breakfast margarita. Breakfast ‘Rita. Breakarita. Sunrise ‘Rita. Maybe with Chia seeds. I think about how I worked at Applebee’s when I was my stepson’s age. And he’s never even had a job. Ever! I think about how weird that is, that he’s never had a job, but he’s applying to colleges that cost $250k, all told. YOLO, I guess.

Then I think about how my black Applebee’s polo shirt always smelled like nachos because I didn’t wash it often enough. See how I was thinking about a smell? That’s how you know I’m a real artist and not some fucking hack who writes light verse for The New Yorker. Artists can conjure a stinky odor using only their raw powers of imagination and long-term memory. That’s also how you know it’s time to write.

By now, it’s 5:30 a.m. I get up and tiptoe past the kids’ rooms, put water on for tea, and swiftly unload the dishwasher. Ahead of the curve, motherfuckers! I high-five myself in my mind. (It’s important, as an artist, to reward yourself whenever you do something right. Your life can’t be all “You suck, work faster, you’re falling behind!”)

By 5:45 a.m., I am sitting down to write. First, though, I need to fire off an email to the editor of my weekly advice column about maybe getting a check soon since it’s May and I haven’t been paid yet this year. “HEY IS THERE A CHECK ON THE WAY FINALLY? LOL! THIS BIG GUY WITH A BASEBALL BAT AT MY FRONT DOOR WANTS TO KNOW! OMG MY KNEES! XXXOOO” Always be super-polite and light-hearted with your editors, and never give them any indication that you’ve been waiting for a check for so long and your credit card balances are getting so high that your pulse starts racing every time you think about it, so much so that you’ve started to soothe yourself by imagining choking the life out of their ineffectual shit faces with your bare hands. Lol.

At 6 a.m., I quit email because that’s what writers do if they want to get some motherfucking writing done. But I have to go on Twitter for a second to favorite a few of my editor’s tweets so he’ll know that I’m not mad or anything. It’s so easy for people to think that you’re full of rage when you’re a woman and a writer and oldish and you never, ever get paid! Ignorant dummies. Then I reply to a youngish writer who just moved to LA and hates her job and hates LA and is panicking. “Remember you’re having an adventure!” I tell her, because she’s young and she probably doesn’t have dogs with health problems yet. So then I end up scrolling through my Twitter feed, probably just to remind myself that all of these other writers don’t have 8,204 followers like I do, because I’m so fucking esteemed and accomplished after having done this for almost two decades. I’m a professional, is the thing. I know my fucking shit. I just keep producing high-quality work. That’s why I have 8,202 followers.

Hold on. Where did those two followers go? Was it the thing I wrote about having an adventure? That probably made me sound really old. I probably shouldn’t be so upbeat or urge people to have adventures. You’re not old yet, guys, but you should remember this for when you get older: DON’T EVER WRITE THINGS THAT IMPLY THAT YOU’RE OLD.

At 6:15 a.m., my five-year-old wakes up. “Can I play on your iPad?” she asks. “That’s not how we start the day,” I reply. “We don’t do dumb things like that to start the day, ever.”

At 6:25 a.m. I am checking out the Twitter page of some teenager who makes YouTube videos about fashion. Someone tell me, how is that a thing? Her profile page bio line says “My viewers are my besties and I love them 5ever.” She has 1.43 million
followers.  I would write something here about how making YouTube videos and assuring 1.43 million strangers that they’re your besties 5ever is probably much more lucrative than, I don’t know, teaching teenagers how to write and recapping “Mad Men” at midnight. But I’m a professional fucking writer and a true artist, not a teenager in leopard print rollerskates. LoL.

At 6:55 a.m., I have to start my 5-year-old’s breathing treatment for her cold and make both kids a kale smoothie so they don’t die of scurvy or rickets. The rest of the morning passes in a blur. 

7:01 a.m. OK, it’s not really a blur at all. But you should never, ever detail your domestic chores or rail off the cute things your kids say unless you’re Louis fucking CK. If you’re a woman, forget it. People will think you’re a mommy blogger, which is bad, because it’s a woman thing. Suffice it to say, there’s lots of screwing little rubbery straws into little cup lids and struggling to keep the dirty laundry piles from mixing with the clean laundry piles. In the end, the kids looked fresh and beautiful and ready for the day and I looked like a bedraggled, angry old whore. Or sex worker. YAAASS! (Is that how you spell it?)

8:45 a.m. Back from dropping off the kids, and ready to write! Except I definitely have to exercise first.  It’s going to be 90 degrees out there today and the dogs need to run and I don’t want to kill them—or worse, maim them and then decline chest-cracking at the billion-dollar emergency dog cancer spa.

I know you think I should skip the exercise, and get straight to work already. That shows how much you know. OK, listen the fuck up for once: If there’s one thing you must do as a highly esteemed professional freelance beggar, it’s exercise. Otherwise you will sit and stew in your schlubby juices all day. You’ll pull up Grantland and read a TV review that’s pure brilliance, delightful and peppy, and you’ll think about the fact that you should’ve been a teenage fashion guru making videos on YouTube but you were born at the wrong fucking time so now you have… 8,201 Twitter followers instead of 1.43 million. And you never actually get paid like that high-fashion fuck does.

9:20 a.m. Leaving house for run with dogs. High-five!

10:20 a.m. Hydration. Crucial. As Al Swearengen from Deadwood once said, “Those that doubt me suck cock by choice.” Actually, not sure if it was Swearengen or that grisly looking dude, what was his name?

10:40 a.m. I go to look up that quote, because: fact-checking, hellooo! Every good freelance person fact-checks everything religiously. Clean, error-free copy is how you get the high-end writer gigs, and it’s also how every editor contacts you all the time and asks you to read a 500-page book and write 2000 words for a $300 check you’ll receive four months later. Boo-ya! See, when you’re an acclaimed critic and a fucking pro, you get paid $40k a year to do complicated theme-paper type assignments, instead of paying $40k a year. So there! See ya, wouldn’t wannna be ya!

11:15 a.m. This is lunch time, because I woke up at 4 a.m., remember? And I can’t just eat a few slices of cheese and bread, because that’s not brain fuel. Brain fuel is kale, and you have to chop kale up and then massage it with lemon juice and honey for a long time, so it’s not prickly and bitter, and then you add shallots (also chopped) and pine nuts (toasted). Those that doubt me suck cock by choice. (See how I used that Swearengen line again, as a callback? If you work really hard and write every day for two decades, this kind of stuff will just spring into your mind.)

12:00 p.m. I read an article about South Korea ferry accident. Feel depressed. This is my humanity I’m getting in touch with, so it’s important.

12:30 p.m. I clean up the mess from lunch, still feeling depressed. Feeling feelings is a crucial part of the professional writer’s day. You’ll never write anything worthwhile if you don’t feel your feelings. Also, you always have to clean up your messes, because as the day progresses it gets harder to write, and when you see a big mess in the kitchen that can be super disheartening if you’re already struggling to put words onto the fucking page.

1:05 p.m. Finally time to write! This is when I pull up the piece I’m working on about BuzzFeed and John Updike and the enforced cheer of American pop culture. This piece is the fucking shit, is what I’m thinking as I’m reading it. When it’s ready, it is going to blow some high-falutin’ editor socks clean off.

1:25 p.m  I decide I should really read this Updike biography from cover to cover right now if I want this essay to be worth reading. 

1:55 p.m. I stop myself! Because I’m not writing, and this is my time to write. Remember this one thing, even if you forget everything else: WRITERS WRITE. If you’re not writing, you’re not a fucking writer. I am a writer, so I write every fucking day. So I open the piece and…

1:56 p.m. I realize I have to finish that review of “American Idol” because it’s due this afternoon. And honestly, at first it’s hard to write the review, because that other essay is going to be way better. But then, when I start to write about how J. Lo always says she’s “getting goosies” when she likes someone’s singing? Well, that’s the kind of little detail you just know to include when you’re a former full-time professional TV critic like I am. I’m in the zone, too. THIS IS WHY I WRITE, I tell myself. FOR THIS FEELING RIGHT HERE. I AM FEELING IT TODAY! HIGH-FIVE!

2:23 p.m. Time to go get the kids from school. 

3:30 p.m. The kids are doing their homework now, so you probably think this is a good time to write. WRONG. I’m too tired, and if I try to write AND answer their incessant fucking questions, I’ll start to say things like “Please don’t talk to me,” and “Please shut up,” and “Don’t look at me right now.”  And sure, there are people out there who are thinking, “Christ, Heather, YOU ARE THE REAL DEAL. The world needs more of your fine prose and insights, not less. If you need to tell the kids to fuck off, then do it. If not for them, then for HUMANITY.”

And I do care about humanity. The people of the world matter to me at a deeper level than most, because I’m a true artist and I’m sensitive. But here’s the truth: It bums ME out to tell my kids to fuck off. Weird, right? But I need to be available to them. So I’m playing Candy Crush instead.

3:45 p.m. My 7-year-old asks me a question and I tell her, “I’M ON A TIMED LEVEL, HERE! GIVE ME ONE MINUTE!” and then “NO, STOP TALKING! TIMED LEVEL! A TIMER IS TICKING DOWN! ONE MINUTE ONE MINUTE!”

4:04 p.m. A confession? I fucking hate Candy Crush once you get past the Minty Meadow. It’s too hard, but there’s no skill involved. It’s at once incredibly tedious and taxing, and yet there’s very little reward for it. You try and try and try and try and you work and work and work and you tell the whole goddamn world to go fuck itself, and you know what you have to show for it in the end? A fucking headache. You have the illusion of accomplishment, but really? You aren’t doing shit. You’re pretending that you’re accomplishing something, that’s all.

What do you mean, is that a metaphor?

4:35 p.m. I’m making myself a margarita but it’s not what you think. I’m doing this so I’m not a total jerk when my husband walks in the door. My husband has a real job, FYI. He’s an awesome guy and he also keeps the lights on around here, just in case you were saying to yourself, ‘WTF? How do the fucking lights stay on, because even with her being the real deal and all, she never seems to get paid or anything?” Have to be cheery, for the breadwinner! Booze.

4:55 p.m. I should add that tequila is a very important part of surviving life as a big-deal professional writer. You don’t believe that now, but you will later. I am having some great ideas right now that I would never have without the tequila, and I’m tweeting them all so I don’t forget a thing.

5:19 p.m. OK. I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking “This person is kind of an asshole. If I become a professional writer, I won’t be so discombobulated and distracted and self-hating.” That’s what I used to think about my creative writing teacher in college, who always said depressing things about her life and had uncombed hair and a tote bag filled with crumpled papers. I thought she was old and weird and wishy-washy about the whole world, her kids, everything. But I had coffee with her last year, and I realized that she wasn’t even old back then, and besides, we have so much in common! Anyway, time for another margarita.

6:35 p.m. Husband got home. Hi babe. Mmm so fucking tired. I know, I DO work too hard.

7:15 p.m. Use the washcloth. Stop. Good job. Don’t hit her. You’re right I said “Dummeldore.” OK nighty night. No, don’t even. President? Of a professional organzination? That’s what blowhards do. You’ll have to fly to Dubai or whatever and I’ll have to deal with all the shit. Well, bring home more bacon, then. We need much, much more bacon. Much more. I’m just saying, I’ll be the one dealing with the shit, as always. I only had two of them, that’s not the thing. Margaritas, not kids. What does that mean. You don’t get it. Whatever. Fuck. 

Zzzz. 

4:00 a.m. I’m awake because my husband is snoring in a weird way and I think it must be sleep apnea. What the fuck is sleep apnea? I hope it’s not something that could kill him, or worse, maim him. So now I’m thinking about how fucked we’ll all be if anything happens to any one of us, given how much debt we have to pay off and how many huge piles of cash we’ll need to save our kids from also having giant debts and how we’ll never, ever be able to retire, ever. I think about us working forever and ever and then I think about earthquakes and that ferry disaster again and, right about now you’re probably starting to understand why the morning hours are so promising for a working writer! The mind spills over with vibrant imaginings that just beg to be formed into another scintillating trend piece or capsule review or “Real Housewives of Atlanta” recap!

But this is just how writing professionals do it. We wake up super duper fucking early and we start thinking our big thoughts and then we write. It’s that simple. This is how you get ‘er done, motherfuckers! Those that doubt me suck cock by choice. 

Heather Havrilesky (aka Polly Esther) is The Awl’s existential advice columnist. She’s also a regular contributor to The New York Times Magazine, and is the author of the memoir Disaster Preparedness (Riverhead 2011). She blogs here about scratchy pants, personality disorders, and aged cheeses. Photo by Ed Yourdon.

Dear Polly,

I was with my husband for six years before I found out that he cheated on me with a co-worker—as well as classmates and women at bars. After I divorced him, we didn’t talk for almost six months. Then we were off and on for probably two more years. At a certain point, we were both tired of not working through fights like adults, and he got down on one knee and said he didn’t deserve for me to marry him again, but that he’d do anything to prove it to me if we could spend our lives with each other and not like two people who just spent a lot of time together.

I was still living in our house with his dog and all four cats he’d brought home. (He was/is a very talented veterinarian technician.) After our divorce, I’d gone back to college and gotten a degree in Digital Media & Photography. He wouldn’t come to my grad show because he “didn’t feel comfortable around those people.” So we went to therapy, and she told us that to be together we’d have to support each other the best we could in everything. The next day, he texted me while I was at the gallery and said that he’d packed his things (except his dog—a 100-pound pit bull) and was moving out. If it hadn’t been for the fact I was attached to a safety rope 15 feet in the air removing art from the ceiling, I’d have probably fallen to the concrete. Luckily, I only hit the wall w my back. I left immediately and drove home where my neighbors said he’d been packing since I’d left that morning. I was stunned. Two days later, after no contact, I drive up to our house and he’s sitting on the porch crying. This man does not cry. But I wasn’t having it, so I walked right passed him and he followed me inside. He begged me to take him back, that he felt like I’d leave him when I got my degree. The photos in my show were of him, but he begged, and I said “I love you, you know that, but you can’t live here. I can’t come home to an abandoned house because you feel scared about something you didn’t even ask me about. I’m yours, but until you prove to me that you won’t run, then you can’t stay.” He said he could live with that as long as he knew I loved him. A year goes by and we’re fine, he says he wants to go to the art institute for a degree in audio engineering. He got enrolled, paid his first semester’s tuition and barely passed. He’s not ignorant when it comes to textbook stuff, so I encouraged him to keep trying. Another year goes by, and he had to quit the vet because they couldn’t accommodate his class schedule. But he’d saved money and was finally free to work harder at his classes. Then they raised tuition; he asked if I could help him with it. “Of course,” I said, and I did. He got another job at a vet and everything was going great for him.

I’d started showing in galleries and even got a studio of my own to have shows in. He never came to a single one. But after the shows, he’d be back to adoring me and doing special things together like camping and going on hikes and things we’d only talked about doing. But my studio was struggling—artists trying to show for free and leaving me with everything to clean up after their show. So I closed the studio as far as shows went, but I still did my own work there. He said he had to study and it wasn’t easy getting my own degree so I understood & didn’t hold it against him. I helped him pay for a little over $7,000 towards his tuition and much more, like buying take out and any date we could find time for. We were constantly together.

Then one day—at this point we’d been together for 11 years—my brother said he needed photos taken at a ranch he was trying to promote about five hours away. I said I’d be back in two days unless he wanted to come with me and make a getaway out of it. He had a project to finish so I went to do the photos. In an absolute freak accident, I fell off a bike, dislocated my jaw, shattered a vertebra in my neck and they wanted to put me in a hospital miles from where I wanted to be which was with him. I drove all five hours back and collapsed on my couch unable to move my head or open my mouth. Along the way he was texting me, “I can’t wait to see you, I hope your pretty face isn’t hurt too bad.”

So I’m lying there texting him how much pain I’m in but that I’m back and to please take me to the doctor tomorrow if he could. I even said, “If you have to turn your stuff in I can get my neighbor to take me but I really need you right now. Soup since I can’t chew and a neck rub would be divine.”

I didn’t hear back and since I couldn’t drive or turn my head, I called and asked what was going on. He said he’d call me right back. I opened my email and he’d sent me an email saying that he knew the timing was bad but he didn’t have it in him to “get too involved” in my life right then and that he thinks the guy who lives two doors down from me would be a better person for me than him. He said I’d get over it because I was “very resilient.” He then said that if I objected to this or acted out in any way that he’d ignore it because he wasn’t going to put up with any “childish” behavior. I am still stunned because childish has never been a word I’ve been described as even by my parents.

So I lied in a hospital bed with my jaw wired shut with a titanium disk replacement staring at the ceiling for three months trying to get him out of my mind and crying when friends who came to visit asked where he was.

I got well enough to chew hard food after four more months; got to where I could turn my head to an acceptable degree for driving and could raise my arm past my shoulder. I got a job and moved my studio down the street to a better location. I exercise everyday, pray, meditate, eat right—and not for a second in the two years since then has he answered a phone call or a text or an email. He’s 38 now and I’m 34. We live one exit down the road from each other, go to the same bars, grocery store, parks, everything. Except now he’s dating a 23-year-old vet tech.

Even after all this time, not a single night has gone by that I don’t cry myself to sleep wondering what happened in those hours between “I can’t wait to see you” to “I don’t want to see you ever again.”

I’m in therapy and I just feel pathetic. I’ve tried to go out on dates and it just makes me feel worse. Everyone is saying to go to his place (that I have to pass by twice a day) and face him but I feel like he’d only be mean and make me feel worse. Time is healing nothing and everyone is over it and I still cry everyday.

Please tell me what to do. I’ve traveled to see if I can just move somewhere else where our 11 years aren’t staring me in the face 24 hours a day and I just ended up feeling even worse.

Please help me. My therapist says he’s gone for good and to accept it and let it go, like it’s a piece of paper I can just toss out the window because it’s nothing. But we weren’t nothing.

Please please help me.

Crushed

Dear Crushed,

It’s going to be really hard for me to answer your letter, for a bunch of reasons. And I get a lot of letters, I’m not going to lie. I get 10, sometimes 20 letters a week. There’s a lot of guilt that goes along with not answering a huge percentage of them. Once this guy wrote to me and asked me how to deal with debilitating chronic back pain that made him want to die every single day. Every. Single. Fucking. Day. I could not for the life of me figure out a good way to respond to that guy without sounding like a complete ignorant asshole, but it still haunts me and I haven’t forgotten him. I feel so terrible for him, but every time I try to look into chronic pain treatment, everything I read is just “Wellll, sometimes, we find that acupuncture and visualization and cutting out gluten work, as long as you’re taking enough morphine.” Plus the guy said he’d tried all that stuff, and he was clearly becoming addicted to an absurd amount of pain medication. So I thought about addressing that, but that’s, phew, a tough thing to try to sift through without presuming a lot. Normally I enjoy being presumptuous, but not in this case.

Now stay with me, because we’re going to get to you, I promise. At the time when I got that letter from the chronic debilitating pain guy, I was in the middle of a two-week headache, and I didn’t understand the cause of it. Since then I haven’t had another one, and that one was diagnosed as a tension headache related to bad posture and TMJ and just being a toxic, slouchy, underpaid, overworked 43-year-old gas planet of slow-burn neuroticism. And maybe high credit card balances now manifest themselves as unidentified bright objects on the new super-detailed brain scans. Either that or they might mean something much worse, haw haw haw. Brains, they’re so nutty. The point is, I was in the middle of experiencing a tiny slice of the pain that he felt every day. I knew how it felt to worry that it might never go away. I knew how worrying that it might never go away sometimes felt like KNOWING IT WOULD NEVER GO AWAY.

And knowing it would never go away felt like causing it, the headache, the pain. It felt like being the cause of the pain. It made me feel guilty, that I could take some pain and turn in into permanent pain like that, because that’s how fucked I was, deep down inside.

So I never answered that guy. Do you see what happened there? I believed that I was a poisonous enough gas planet, at some level, that I deserved to be blamed for my own pain. This is where we start with you. You’re living this “Series of Unfortunate Events” kind of Lemony Snicket existence where all of these terrible fucking things happen to you, and they’re all sick and unfair and also probably all your fault.

You being you, you think I’m just being an asshole by saying that they’re all your fault. But no. I’m saying that you BELIEVE that you are fucked enough, deep down inside, that you somehow caused these events to occur to you. When your husband cheated on you repeatedly with whomever, when he didn’t show up for your fucking art shows, when he stayed away from all the stuff that was about YOU, all of that was tolerable because, after all, you partially caused it right? You deserved it. Then, when you had the freak accident, when you were in pain, alone, in hell and he decided THAT was when he needed to resolve to NEVER SEE YOUR FACE AGAIN, all of that must stem from you being the rotten kind of woman who gets her just desserts. Something in you made that stuff happen. Something in you sealed your fate.

You believe that you caused all of those things to occur, somehow, magically. You practically gave birth to this foul man who has no fucking heart, who wouldn’t even bother to come to your aid when you were in the depths of hell. No matter what he JUST HAPPENED TO FIGURE OUT in that exact moment, to not immediately go to you, take you to the hospital, visit you there, and talk you through the fucking break-up after 11 years together? Forget everything else. That’s really outperforming in the world of atrocious assholes.

And THAT guy doesn’t exist, without your poison. Right? That’s the key, base-level, fundamental thing that you believe right now. You CREATED that motherfucker. It’s ALL your fault. ALL OF IT.

So that’s where the inability to move on comes from. You don’t want to face him and have him be mean to you and set you back even more, because looking him in the eyes means facing the fact that you loved this sick person, and married him and accepted him and he’s still out there, this fucking destroyer of everything. You made him and he’s still out there.

There’s this gigantic thing in your life and you can’t turn the page. You think it’s your fault. You’re crying, yes, but you’re also all shut down and defensive. You’re angry and you’re blaming yourself for him, and you’re angry at yourself for crying, and you’re also trying hard to get over it. You are in conflict. You want to be tough, but you cry every day. You want to forget him, but you feel like you created him. You want to place all of the blame and damage on his side of the court, but you also feel like there he is, with his brand new 23-year-old, who is exactly like you 11 years ago. He gets to rewind and start fresh. Maybe you were the problem after all.

These are your doubts. The therapist needs to hear more about them. If your therapist doesn’t get it and you don’t feel really understood, patiently and truly, by someone who is definitely very very smart? Find another therapist. Because your particular situation is very complicated. It seems simple, but it’s not simple at all.

Remember how I had a headache and I couldn’t answer the letter about chronic pain? Well in your case, I knew I HAD to answer your letter, first of all because it’s a great cautionary tale for anyone—man or woman—who is tempted to accept wishy-washy horse-shit behavior from someone who SHOULD be all in. Your situation beautifully encapsulates just how ugly and uglier and ugliest things get when someone who’s afraid to be alone stays and leaves and returns and leaves again and is allowed to continue, on and on. Sure, as long as you’re strong and you’re doing great, that wishy-washy human is going to cling to the hem of your kickass coat. But the second you falter? Sayonara. He wasn’t sure, and then YOUR NEEDING HIM OPENLY SEALED THE DEAL!

I mean, motherFUCK WHAT IS THAT?

So this is the other reason I had to answer your letter. I’m currently feeling a tiny sliver of the kind of pain you feel, because I had an old, tattered friendship fall apart, and another, more important one feels like it’s in crisis, and I’m feeling sad about it. I’m in some kind of an open, honest state lately. I don’t know how to describe it, other than my snappy song and dance with people has dissolved into something a little less…manufactured. Instead of neatly packaging things, retreating, protecting myself with a joke, waving things off, I’m feeling my feelings, maybe more than ever.

I know, I know. That sounds really slow and weak and squishy of me. BRING BACK THE TOXIC GAS PLANET, you’re thinking. Bring back the evil lady ruler in the black zip-up leather jumpsuit, the one William Shatner can’t decide whether to engage in showy stage combat with, or kiss for a long, long time, without tongue. But listen, I can feel things right now. I feel connected to my life in a great way. I’m writing funny shit because I’m enraged and happy and also, often, a teary-eyed pile of squash.

I feel like I’m on new ground, and I feel very vulnerable. And you know what? This makes some people back away slowly, because: YUCK. Feelings. It’s not like I’m calling everyone and crying into the phone. I just have feelings rising off me like steam off asphalt, I think. And some people will only tolerate you if there’s a guarantee that you’ll never, ever openly question anything or say, “Hey, that hurt my feelings.” And now the ambient temperature and pressure have shifted and it’s clear that I might say something weird.

I have lots of old friendships that have ALWAYS been pretty healthy and open and intimate and stable. Those friendships haven’t changed a bit. Those friends, I can talk to and they can talk to me and they already accept that I am who I am.

So that’s reassuring. But you know what my brain does when I can see that someone doesn’t really want ME as a friend, not enough to show up and fucking say what’s up? It says YOU ARE POISONOUS. YOU ARE THE CAUSE. YOU MADE THIS HAPPEN. YOU ARE THE PROBLEM.

So your letter is a challenge for me, because something in the mix with you goes to the heart of where I am. It would be easy enough to just shut this whole process down, too. I’ve done that a million times before. I could close up and tough it out and sally the fuck forth and shrug and say, “WHATEVER MAN” and maybe answer the letter from the girl who wants to fuck her boyfriend’s brother but knows she really shouldn’t. (OK, NEXT WEEK MAYBE.) But I’m not going to do that. I’m making an active choice to stay open. It’s harder to stay open, but it’s also helping me be a better human being.

Here’s what I want to say to you, Crushed: It’s heartbreaking, how little people really show up for each other. It’s heartbreaking, how skin-deep most people want their relationships to be. It’s incredible, how little some people have to give sometimes.

But this isn’t really about blame. Even this heartless ass who’s formed so much of your life isn’t the real point here. I don’t really think you should go talk to him. Write down your feelings. I’m sure you already have. But what will he do if you show up and make a scene? Who wants that? Because even without the wishy washy on and off bullshit, he was going to leave you one day. That was predestined and it has nothing to do with you. He’s terminally desperate and lost, a narcissist who never cared who you were, not really, or he would’ve gone to your shows and enjoyed it when people were excited about YOU. Instead, he was incapable of behaving like a regular human being. Good fucking riddance.

But paradoxically, I want you to think about how much you imagine that you created him, that his poison is your poison, that his shitty story is your story. Because in order to let him go, strangely, you have to look at how much you blame yourself. I blame myself when someone backs away from me. Some piece of me is sure that, in the end, it will just be me, telling everyone FUCK OFF YOU DON’T UNDERSTAND ANYTHING.

When you feel that way? You have to try very hard to stay vulnerable and let people in. Even though you feel so unprotected, so defensive, so angry. “Fuck you, I’m crying every night,” you’re thinking. But you’re also pissed and prideful and you won’t let go of your story. Whenever anyone tells you a specific, very detailed timeline – he did this, so I did this, then he did this – that almost always means that they want you to know JUST HOW MANY TIMES they were innocent and the other person was guilty and bad, and that means that they suspect that THEY CAUSED EVERY FUCKING THING on that timeline.

I know because I do it, too, whenever, deep down, I suspect that something is about me and my rottenness. I can’t tell the story often enough. “See? See what happened? Can you believe it? Is that nuts? How did I get here? I’m good, right? I’m kind and nice, right? So why am I here?”

YOU KNOW WHAT? SHIT HAPPENS TO PEOPLE WHO ARE GOOD.

It’s not your fault. You are not some toxic cloud that he gets to step out of. It’s hard to feel that way from a hospital bed, when you can barely turn your head one way or the other. It’s hard to feel that way when you look back and ask yourself why you accepted so little, and yet HE’S THE ONE who paints you as some festering crazy volcano, he’s the one who’s the child, telling you not to be childish.

And even your parents wouldn’t describe you as childish? You need to be childish now. That’s why you keep crying. Your soul wants you to finally be a child.

You were so hurt and in need, and he told you to fuck off, even though he KNEW that you were in terrible pain. Let’s be still in this moment, together, and feel how sad that is, without self-protection, without fear, without cynicism and anger. Let’s not feel self-conscious. Let’s just choose not to feel embarrassed and cheesy for a fucking second. Let’s sit still and just feel how unbearably sad it still is—that you got hurt and then you were all alone and it was so embarrassing, so fucking shameful to be all alone with your jaw wired shut, that you were smashed down like a fucking bug. It was too much. And from then on, it was like you created the whole picture. It was like you woke up one day, and you couldn’t tell the story from your soul.

But I am there with you. I’m right there with you, and so is everyone else who’s reading this and understands what the fuck it means to stay open even though it hurts and it’s embarrassing. At this moment, we are on your side. And the spirits of the dead are with you, too, and the leaves on the trees and the clouds and the cool breeze is with you. Listen to me: Your story is not your soul. You cry every fucking day because you want to live. Your tears mean you’re surviving. You want to feel things. You are not giving up on yourself. Giving up would be shutting down, turning everything off, moving on, and sleepwalking into a sad future. This is what sleepwalking looks like: a brand new 23-year-old and an inability to take half a fucking minute to say goodbye to your exwife. God bless and god forgive that sleepwalking man. He’s not worthy of a big-hearted creative soul. You always knew that. And that’s the last time we’re going to refer to him here, because he’s too small. We have bigger and brighter and better horizons. We have the leaves on the trees and the clouds and the cool breeze to consider here.

Let’s pry this shitty story away from your soul, like a sludgy mess of blood and grime and tears and loss. Let’s kick it to pieces. Now all that’s left is your soul, ok? Your soul is bright and sweet and sad. Listen to me. You are going to feel so grateful. Because someone out there is big like you, honest and sensitive and full of life, and good at giving, and good at feeling expansive and good at living. I’m not trying to sell you on a fairy tale. But when you’ve been through something this terrible? Magic happens. Sometimes, someone like you, IF YOU CAN STAY OPEN, ends up attracting the whole world to her doorstep. Because she stayed vulnerable. Because she refused to sleepwalk into a dim, sad future. Because she wanted to take responsibility, even though she wasn’t responsible. Because she was bewildered and alone for a long time, and it changed her.

Your life will be beautiful. You have already come a long way. I want you to be open to people—men and women—who are can be still with you, and listen. You need more REAL friends. You need more listeners. I want you to make sure you don’t hide away with the next dude. You said you were with the sleepwalker “constantly.” Don’t do that next time. You said artists tried to show their work for free and left you to clean up afterwards. Don’t give too much and resent it afterwards. Get a used copy of “Codependent No More.” Read the whole thing. You want to take care of people. Don’t fucking do it, unless it’s an actual child. You like half-interested, wishy-washy types who seem tough. Fuck them. Find someone sweet who really sees you and needs you. To find that person, you have to be sweet and child-like yourself. You have to love yourself, damaged and sad, exactly how you are right now. If someone says go to the hospital, don’t think about being closer to your guy instead. Go to the fucking hospital. You put yourself last. From now on, you are first.

Stand up, walk outside, and feel the air, watch the trees move in the wind. This moment is yours. You matter. You are a bright light and everything you’ve ever wanted will come to you, if you stay open. Build a community and embrace it. Show up for other people. Tell them your sad story and let them learn from your mistakes. Embarrass yourself as much as possible. Be honest with everyone. You already changed a few people by telling your story here, trust me. There is no shame to your story anymore.

The world is waiting for you to step out and finally see ALL THAT YOU OWN. You own the sky and the leaves in the trees. We are all waiting for you to stand up and feel how much love is here for you. Someday soon, you’ll have more love than you know what to do with. Keep crying. All the love in the world will be yours. Your new life is beginning.

Polly

Do you want things, or not want things? Write to Polly and get that settled today.

Heather Havrilesky (aka Polly Esther) is The Awl’s existential advice columnist. She’s also a regular contributor to The New York Times Magazine, and is the author of the memoir Disaster Preparedness (Riverhead 2011). She blogs here about scratchy pants, personality disorders, and aged cheeses.

Photo by CambridgeCanine.com

Dear Polly,

How can I put away the fact that when I got married ~1.5 years ago, my now-estranged mother-in-law’s unchecked borderline personality disorder detracted from the whole event?  

I’m not a wedding person. I never was. My partner, The Boy, and I got married for health insurance after I successfully defended my thesis in 2011. Sounds cold, but we’d been living together for several years at that point and were completely happy continuing our relationship that way. We were both fried from my grad school experience, during which everything up to but not including actual physical assault occurred. I had to play an absolutely horrifying game of being the bait, allowing bad things to happen to me so I could report them. (I’ve been working with a kickass therapist for a few months, and we’ve made massive leaps in slaying those grad school dragons.) After that, I was incapable of planning anything, let alone a wedding, and I was jobless—hence the importance of health insurance. 

Eventually, my rather traditional father was all, “Your grandmother won’t be around forever.” They wanted a Wedding, and ain’t no guilt like Jewish guilt. Also, my grandma is the most amazing person ever, and my family has its weirdness, but at the end of the day, they party hard, and everyone wants everyone else to be happy. So The Boy and I got weddinged.  ~1.5 years later, people are still raving (in a positive way!) about the party.  

The Boy’s therapist suggested a book on growing up in a family with a borderline mother, and it is one long checklist of his whole family’s behavior. The Boy is the fucking champion of the world for handling them all, with whom we maintained a relationship for the sake of interfamilial peace during the wedding prep. It took a very long time for my family to truly believe what The Boy’s family did; I suspect some still don’t entirely grasp how destructive they are. I won’t share the full compilation of The Boy’s family’s horror stories, but they range from simply not showing up at the rehearsal dinner they demanded to trying turn my mom against me, emailing The Boy that I was a manipulative bitch and a horrible person, being ridiculously late for pictures, walking out of our ceremony, and the list goes on. I got good at turning the other cheek, but there’s a part of me that deeply regrets never just starting a brawl and beating the shit out of them. (No, I will never ever actually do that.)

This is a good place to note that I am not by nature a passive person. As a fencer, coaches described me as a consummate fighter (I wasn’t technically pretty to watch, but even when I lost, I would always give my opponent, no matter good they were, a very hard run for their money). After I got out of grad school and epically failed at finding a normal job, I started a company. I’m good at the kind of shit that makes running a tiny tech startup feel perfect: improvising, solving problems, and turning bad stuff into good productive things are my jam.

So, I wasn’t prepared to feel regretful about our wedding. I worked like hell to stay focused on the good bits. We were good at compromise while not giving up on the very meaningful things. For instance, we found an officiant with a joyously pro-love liberal philosophy that gave us warm fuzzies who also happened to be a rabbi, which gave my mom warm fuzzies. They were just problems to solve. The thing that keeps popping up is that throughout, I was afraid that The Boy’s mom was going to take his father’s gun (yes, the man carries a piece on him at all times everywhere they go even if it’s illegal) and shoot me at some point during the ceremony or reception in the name of rescuing her son and being a good mother. I didn’t say anything to anyone at the time. The Boy was managing his own feelings about interacting with them, and I felt like a needy wretched asshole complaining about what I was feeling. My parents would’ve brushed it off, told me I was being silly, and that I needed to get a hold of myself. My friends—well, I just felt like a lunatic, like The Boy’s mom’s crazy was somehow rubbing off on me, so I didn’t talk about it. My solution was to have my dress be something that would be easy for paramedics to cut off and to do my hair in such a way that if I had to run or fight, it would stay out of my face.

The most I can figure out is that I had to compromise on how I presented myself out of fear, and I can’t square that away. Finding a dress was not fun. I just went quietly, by myself, had a dress made (it was lovely and professional and fit perfectly), and I think the incredibly nice talented ladies who made it thought I was a total fucking weirdo because I wasn’t super into it. Now, though, I find myself looking at wedding dresses, and for the first time thinking, “that would look amazing on me,” sans fear, then I feel sad because I already got weddinged (which I didn’t even really want), then I hate that I’m being a soppy moron, since I never looked at wedding dresses with anything other than complete ambivalence (because fuck the patriarchy, yet at the same time, feminism means choice). So why do I suddenly care, and WHY THE FUCK didn’t I say anything at the time? Because my friends who I tell now are all, “Oh, wow… yeah.  Yeah, I could totally see her shooting you,” and according to that book The Boy is reading, borderlines do have complete lapses of morality and kill people, including their own children. I’ve been bargaining with myself, like, “Hey, I get to wear whatever I want for the rest of my life, so fuck that bullshit. Also, I’m alive!” And when The Boy and I have talked about it, he says he thinks about it in terms of having to go through all that wedding-related horror so he could get to a place where he could cut them off, and we get to have a peaceful balanced life together. He’s right, it’s completely true, and so I feel like a selfish whiner because while I’m sitting there thinking, “What about my experience?” he had to actually grow up with these intensely toxic parents.  

So, yeah. Is there a good way to think about all of this so I feel less bad? Do I just need a slap in the face?  

I Might Just Need A Slap In The Face

Dear IMJNASITF,

Weddings are made to be ruined. If your borderline mother-in-law doesn’t ruin your wedding then someone or something else will. Why do brides even wear white, when none of them are actually virgins? Because that way something red or purple or green can get spilled all over their fucking $5000 dresses and ruin the whole day.

I was determined to be low-maintenance about my own wedding. I was 35 years old, not some blushing baby. I got engaged in December, went off the pill immediately (because I figured it would take months for me to get pregnant), and got pregnant immediately. I was glad to be pregnant, but I felt like a severely queasy, perpetually exhausted wreck while I was planning the wedding. I couldn’t plan the menu because everything sounded disgusting. Fish and sauces and meats, and all of it so pointlessly expensive! My brother and I, who live in LA, decided to have our weddings a week apart so our family could fly out once instead of twice in the same year. This meant everyone was a little strung out by my wedding, and many aunts and uncles left town after my brother’s, and missed mine.

But there were countless little missteps and mishaps along the way. I decided at the last minute that I looked like a fat kid in a nightgown in my formerly-elegant-looking empire-waisted gown, so I ran out and bought a pretty terrible gigantic white wedding dress the day before the wedding. It was like some kind of viral infection: out of nowhere, I wanted to look LIKE A BRIDE. A cliché, rotund, queasy bride. My husband’s family gasped when they saw me at the hotel. My husband had somehow forgotten to mention to any of them that I was pregnant, so I had all of these “My god, it’s a shotgun wedding!” looks to navigate for hours. (Yes, my husband is not all rainbows and moonbeams, trust me. He is one spaced out motherfucker with absolutely no sense a lot of the time.)

It was 105 degrees in Palm Desert the day of the wedding. I was wearing a dress the shape and weight of a comforter. The lower half of my body was swimming in a hot tub of sweat. I was in the dysentery phase of my pregnancy. My hairstyle was fucking atrocious, and the three friends I’d enlisted to guard me against atrocious hairstyles left to eat lunch because the stylist was taking too long. So I started crying big, salty tears all over my shitty, caked-on, professional make-up, and my friend’s photographer husband, the one person who’d stuck around, started shooting photos of me crying, probably because he sees himself as a true artist, god bless him and also, fuck him.

The last thing I told my husband before the wedding was, “Make sure the microphone is set up. Don’t try to do this thing without a microphone.” But it was 115 degrees in the sunshine, so they moved the chairs to the shade and the mic cord wouldn’t stretch. About 15 people could hear the ceremony. I looked out at the crowd when I was saying my vows, and the first two rows were crying. The next 7 rows were looking at me like, “Huh?”

At dinner, my mom stood up and said, “Well, my son’s wedding was last week, so we’re all a little tired of weddings.” I laughed out loud, among nervous titters. My husband’s family looked stricken. It was like a scene from The Office. I appreciated the honest dread my mom was feeling, which just goes to show how deeply warped I am or how warped my family is or maybe how warped weddings are in general.

On your wedding day, everything is amazing and also completely fucked. Everyone is incredibly generous and good to you and except for that one person who is so fucking selfish and bad. You are so in love and also so full of fear and dread over the years and years you’ll spend with that dude right there, who is so handsome and special and also one spaced out motherfucker with absolutely no sense.

It’s strange that I’m writing about this right now, because it’s my eighth anniversary TODAY. I seriously just remembered that a few minutes ago for the first time all week. I had to stop and call my husband and remind him, because my brother agreed to babysit the kids last week, and we’re supposed to go out to dinner in about two hours. I have to say, I’m not really in the mood to go out, either. See how it is?

SO: Your wedding sucked in many ways, possibly because you suspected that your mother-in-law might kill you. I would imagine that having even the faintest sensation that someone might kill you could really wreck any old day, let alone a wedding day, and give you severe PTSD to boot. You sound like a very tough sort of a person, so maybe this is what PTSD sounds like, coming from you. Maybe what you’re trying to tell me is, “I am suffering now because I went into survival mode and brushed this off then.” I totally understand that.

I don’t think you need a slap in the face. I think you are someone who needs to be careful not to put things in black and white terms. You need to be careful to be gentle with yourself. I’m even going to tell you that you should try to present yourself in a softer way, so that people realize that you’re pretty sensitive, actually, and not the rough and tumble soldier of fortune that you present to the world, with your swashbuckling and your jousting and your threats of beating people up. Some part of you wants to be treated with more care.

The details of the wedding, through the lens of PTSD or some kind of lesser traumatic reverberation, make perfect sense to me. But when you say stuff like “I wasn’t super into my dress” and “I would’ve done this differently” and “Why didn’t I handle that differently?” and “I wish I could have that day back, and do it all over a different way!”? Well, those things are the things that every single human alive says about their wedding. I think we have to try to separate the trauma from your standard wedding ambivalence, which is universal.

OK, fine. Some people have magical, perfect weddings. They say things like “OH MY GOD, THE WHOLE DAY WAS AMAZING FROM START TO FINISH, I WOULDN’T CHANGE A SINGLE THING!” But those people also say shit like “It’s all good” and “No worries” and “Life’s a beach” and “They grow up so fast, don’t they?” and “I love the Dave Matthews Band soooo much I get chills whenever I hear one of their songs playing.” The rest of us, though, have mixed feelings when we think of our weddings. By my wedding night, I was so relieved and so thankful and so in love with everyone, my husband, the whole world. But as I was getting ready to walk down the aisle? I was thinking, “I cannot fucking believe I had the bad taste to engage in THIS FUCKING HETERONORMATIVE THREE-RING CIRCUS. WHAT THE FUCK WAS I THINKING? WHY? WHY DID I DO THIS TO MYSELF?” When friends wandered in to help me fix my terrible fucking hair and say “Ooo so exciting!” I just grimaced. I was sweating and cramping and I looked like Tracy Turnblad in “Hairspray,” except with panic and queasiness where the bubbly vivacious personality should go. I was hating everything and it was such an EXPENSIVE and PUBLIC way to feel shitty.

And of course we all think we should’ve worn something else! Oh god, anything else. ANYTHING. Of course we should’ve handled every single thing differently. I’ll bet I was awful and embarrassing. I usually am when the stakes get very high.

So let’s try very hard to take that part of things, the built-in ambivalence and the built-in dread and fear and horror, and the catastrophic nature of weddings in general, and let’s separate that from the truly dreadful particulars. Can we do that? Let’s admit that everyone has a semi-disastrous wedding, it’s just a matter of where on the Richter Scale yours happens to fall. OK? There’s something inherently fucked about a wedding, that’s all. Big white dress, write your own stupid vows, be overly jokey or overly earnest or overly typical or overly eclectic or all of the above, serve lukewarm chicken breast stuffed with some shit that is way worse than a bad restaurant would serve but costs $30 a plate? Uch. Terrible mix CDs, terrible DJs, terrible bands, bad weather, accidents, wine stains, shitty hairstyles, ugly bridesmaid dresses that everyone’s really fucking pissed about wearing, selfish friends who do crazy acting-out shit because they’re not the center of everything for one fucking minute of their narcissistic lives? These things are de rigueur. They define the modern nuptial experience.

Murderous mother-in-laws are different. Whether that threat is real or imagined, you felt it. And clearly that experience was influenced strongly by your grad school experience, in which you had to be the bait and basically invite physical assault to prove that it had occurred already. The way you sped over that, glossed right past it, made it tough to understand. I’m sure you have your practical reasons not to want to go into it. But clearly there’s trauma there, and confusion and a desperate need to get some distance, to put it in the past, to make it blurry, to appear tough and beyond the pull of those events. Your experience in grad school and your experience on your wedding day are clearly linked and each one is exacerbating the other.

You need to talk to your therapist about that. This wedding day thing isn’t just coming up JUST because it’s a good story (although you do love a good story). It’s coming up because you sincerely, genuinely want to cry a river over the fear of physical injury there. You don’t think that YOU, a tough woman, a bad ass, should feel so fragile about these things. But you do. Some part of you wants permission to feel fragile and afraid. You want to cry, and be weak. It’s ok to do that, in general AND with a therapist AND with your husband.

So do that. But when it comes to fixating on the WEDDING part of this, the fact that it wasn’t quite right, it wasn’t comfortable, it wasn’t a celebration, it was just nerve racking and terrible? Well, you CAN have another wedding if you want to. But Christ, who wants that? I would encourage you to dig deep into the threat of physical violence and its ill effects on your worldview and your nerves, but leave the wedding-specific regrets aside. The wedding regrets maybe break your heart in retrospect. But you CAN get over our collective heteronormative viral infection, can’t you? Because weddings are totally great and awesome and also totally terrible and horrid at the same time. Anyone with a working brain and the capacity to have mixed feelings agrees.

You’re very good at compartmentalizing, which is usually not a great, healthy thing. Use it to your advantage now, though. Put the wedding stuff, the dress and the not-quite-rightness of it all, and stuff it in a suitcase and throw it off a tall cliff. Weddings, whatever. What can you do? Life’s a fucking beach. They grow up so fast, don’t they? I love the Dave Matthews Band so much I want to staple live crickets to my face right now.

You love The Boy. You married him. Your life is good. Go to your therapist and talk about fear and pain and vulnerability. Learn to cry about this without feeling shame over it. Talk about toughness and bluster and sometimes putting that anger away and just admitting that some things are sad. Some things are just disappointing. Sometimes you don’t want to give your opponents a run for their money. Sometimes you just want to lay down on the ground and look up at the sky and feel sorry for all of it. Some things are just very, very sad.

And some things are fucking exquisite. Some things are miraculous and crazy and meant to be. Eight years ago today, on my wedding day, I married the greatest, most lovable, most patient, most resilient, most spaced out motherfucker with absolutely no sense I’ve ever met. Here’s to imperfect weddings and imperfect spouses and imperfect lives. Here’s to all of our glorious misfirings and messes. What luck, to be here! What incredible, improbable luck.

Polly

Do you want to know precisely whom to marry? Write to Polly and get that settled today.

Heather Havrilesky (aka Polly Esther) is The Awl’s existential advice columnist. She’s also a regular contributor to The New York Times Magazine, and is the author of the memoir Disaster Preparedness (Riverhead 2011). She blogs here about scratchy pants, personality disorders, and aged cheeses.

Photo by Ben Husmann

Hello Polly!

I’m 23 and I feel like I’ve come a pretty long way already. I grew up in an abusive and poor-as-hell home; went to live on my own when I was fifteen; struggled with depression and a terrible relationship; and made (and paid off) a huge amount of debt. All the terrible things happened. ALL OF THEM.

However, I think I did a lot of cool things as well: I raised my sister to be a happy, normal person, and I finished school with really good grades even though I did not know at the time where food would come from and I had to sleep on the smelly couch of the local pot dealer. When the schizophrenic father from hell returned (he had been missing for years) I told him to fuck off. I made peace with my tired, overworked, shy mum and we glued the family back together and we’re all pretty damn happy about it. Since I was kind of a stoner, I pretty much got along with everybody and I made some cool friends who made my hard life way easier and who I loved very much. So, that was my teens, basically.

After I finished school, I moved to a new city to be with my cynical asshole boyfriend who somehow had realized that I was smart and funny and routinely used lines I said in his shitty standup comedy act. I started training to be a nurse. All of my coworkers were boring, or way older then me—plus, asshole boyfriend pretty much scared away anyone I tried to make a connection with—so I went friendless in a big city with a really hard job that I hated. My old friends all moved to new cities and started university, moved in with friends, threw giant insane parties—I couldn’t relate at all. I felt boring, grey, poor. Every time one of them asked me, “So, what’s happening?” I could only say “hard work, stupid boyfriend,” so I stopped saying much and eventually the calls stopped. This part of my life lasted almost three years.

I decided to blow up the whole damn thing because I was super unhappy and found myself staring at the wall in my bedroom smoking cigarettes and crying one too many times.

During all of this, I had been drawing things whenever I could. I drew and I painted and I glued things together, and even though asshole boyfriend told me all the things that could be improved, I mostly loved the things I made. I got pretty good at it. One day in spring, I told the boyfriend he had to go; he told me that he had wanted to break up anyway, since I was just a sad shadow of a person and also I never did the dishes.

I got a tiny, cheap apartment, stopped going to the hospital to wash sick people and instead started working behind the bar at a cool club. I drew all the time, every day. I got so good I finally decided to do the thing I never thought I could do: I packed together my best work and applied to Very Prestigious Art School for its Very Famous and Good Costume Design Program, which has been my dream since I was 15 years old. They get bazillions of applicants and you have to go there and do two days of creative tests and studio time and intense talks and stuff and I never thought I could do it but I did and they chose me.

I talked to a lot of cool people who are all starting with me this September. I live in Germany, so it’s not unusual to start university at 23 or 24; I clicked with a lot of the other applicants. Now I’m not a poor dirty stoner or an overworked sad nurse’s assistant anymore, but a cool bartender who can draw better than most people, with good taste in movies and music and style and a nice apartment where the dishes are always done and I look fine and—well I don’t know how to be a friend anymore?

It seems since everything has always been on fire, now that things are good I don’t know how to be normal? I have a lot of people I talk to casually once a week or something, but how do I get from that to developing a friendship? I’ve been so busy with saving myself over and over again that I never learned how to be there for friends. I want to be the kind of person that, you know, throws parties and is just a friend, but I feel so different from everybody else. I feel like the dirt of everything is still on me. And people seem to notice that? I sometimes say things that weirds people out and I notice it too late, so most of the time I’m still really quiet. I know I have a lot to give, but I’m so very lonely and I just want someone I can call once in a while just to chat about stuff. But it feels like there is a giant chasm between me and “normal people.” How can I bridge that? How can I feel not dirty and unworthy when talking with people?

I’m sorry if this sounds like the ramblings of a crazy person and I apologize if my English sounds weird or something, English is not my first language. I just feel so lost, which is weird because I’m also the most happy I’ve ever been. It would be the coolest if you had some sort of advice for me. I know you must get a ton of letters. Your writing has really helped me through a lot, so thank you a million times for that.

I wish you the very best.

Friendless Dirty Artist

Dear Friendless Dirty Artist,

If you take just one thing away from my letter and believe it, let it be this: No giant chasm exists between you and other people. The “dirt of everything” is not on you. You are not unworthy. It is very common—more common than you can possibly imagine—for a youngish human being to feel this way, no matter what strange, tumultuous sea of freakjuice that particular human arose from, like a bedraggled Venus on a half-assed halfshell.

Maybe, just maybe, you “weird people out” right now. But that’s only because 1) you’re out of practice in talking lightly with people you don’t know (almost every smart person alive has been there, and will revisit that state repeatedly over the course of a lifetime, thanks to various isolating circumstances) and 2) you are a million times more independent and interesting and tough than most of the people you’re going to run into casually.

I mean, if I were still 23 years old and I found myself talking to a woman who lived independently at age 15 and raised her younger sister? I would be the one who felt unworthy. What could I say? “Yeah, I totally know what you mean about hardship, my hostess shift at Applebee’s was SUPER FUCKING TAXING sometimes, like when the Megaritas were on sale for $4 and I had to remember to mention that AND the Chicken Mexicali special? Whew, that was tough.”

At that age, I might’ve avoided you. But guess what? You would’ve really benefitted from me avoiding you. Because I would’ve been a TERRIBLE fucking friend to someone as tough and talented and interesting as you are. I would’ve half-listened to your troubles (while scanning the room for hot dudes) and waved off your worries (while chugging my sixth pint of beer) and then vomited all over your shoes (without apparent remorse, unnervingly enough).

So thank your lucky stars that some people are going to self-select themselves out of your life right now. DO NOT view these “weirded out” people as people who see clearly that you’re dirty and unworthy and are rejecting you because of it. View them as people who can’t handle real life or real people yet. They have a long, long road to travel. And also? Try to be patient and forgiving of them, if you can. Allow them a light, easygoing place in your life if you have room for casual acquaintances. But don’t tell them everything. Don’t blurt out big truths or dark passages from the past or heavy asides or self-doubting confessions to these people, who don’t want that stuff clogging up their distraction-focused lives, because they can barely grapple with their own twisted, confused, vague “it’s all good” shit yet.

I can personally guarantee you that at ART SCHOOL (cue Hallelujah Chorus!) you will find plenty of people who don’t think you’re TOO WEIRD AND DIRTY AND UNWORTHY for them. I just taught at an art school, and fuck, art school is awesome! It’s filled with weirdos who feel dirty and unworthy in the best possible way. If anything, feeling weird and dirty and unworthy is a wonderful ticket to a fun and exciting social life! I met some of the nicest, smartest, most interesting people at that job. Those were the grad students. I bet the undergrads are a little less tamed and polite, and some of them are probably vicious, freaky, awful, one-uppy hell, just like they were to Claire on “Six Feet Under.” (Best show ever, BTW. Watch it. First season not the greatest, sort of awkward, but then? It is good good good.) I bet some of those student artists walk around and wear that “I’m more punk or more EVS or more YOLO or more whatever the BRAND NEW (but really old) way of being stylishly indifferent is” on their tattoo sleeves.

All you need to do is be nice and keep your eyes wide open and listen and believe in yourself and your talent, no matter what. You will prevail. You will have friends. All of these people are also about to make their first lifelong friends, trust me. They will want to see if you match them. Some of them will be shy and awkward. Some of them will be outgoing and arrogant. Try to give the pretentious children some time to show their true selves to you. Try not to worry about how they’re judging you. We all feel like unworthy dirt, deep down inside.

In fact, it’s very common—BELIEVE IT!—for full-grown, adult-ass human beings who should know better to feel this way. I have felt like a mutant every other day for most of my life. I have often felt that the dirt of everything was crusted onto me, a layer of crazy that would never come clean. Even when I am winning and win-winning and never, ever failing, some grime lingers. Even at the exact moment when it seems I’m finally in step with the other Earthlings (at last!), I fall out of step again. The terrible, beautiful irony of my writing an advice column at all is that I do NOT FEEL all that evolved on most days, or at least some days. Who can tell, really, how many days are RIGHT ON and how many days we enter the self-hating oven and broil in our own juices? Sometimes I think that’s exactly what makes this advice column THE FUCKING BOMB, MOTHERFUCKER! And other times I feel a little ashamed at how I tell innocent humans what to do, and then I can’t even do those things myself, because I fucking suck.

But look, I’m smart and I have good intentions, just like you. I write this stuff because I really love to do it. It makes me feel good, it helps me to revisit what I believe, it reminds me that hope and optimism and connection do make sense, if you can manage to get there organically—if you can open up to what’s around you and accept it and embrace it for what it is, instead of shoving it away and hiding hiding hiding. Writing is part of my practice, if you want to put it in pretentious terms—and who doesn’t? You have a craft, too. You love to draw and make things and you just keep getting better and better. It connects you with something good and real and it reacquaints you with the fact that hard work really does build on itself, and there is a way out of hell, if you work hard enough. I mean GODDAMN YOU’RE IMPRESSIVE, WOMAN!

That’s what people are going to be saying to you a lot, once they really get to know you. But that won’t happen immediately. One of the big mistakes of being young is that you want to get that pat on the head right after you say “Hello, my name is Wingle Wangle.” You have to be patient and not blurt out dark things. You have to listen and focus on others and TRUST that they don’t think you’re unworthy. You have to take a leap of faith and just be in the moment with others. That is all.

So look. You and I, like most other people, work hard at what we do, and try hard not to slip into darkness, and we feel like mutants a lot, despite our best intentions and our angriest self-recriminations. The only real difference between you and me (uh, aside from the tiny fact that you’ve overcome much, much more hardship than I have and didn’t spend your formative years vomiting on other people’s shoes like I did) is that I CHOOSE to believe my own self-generated hype about sixty-five per cent of the time, just because it makes my life much easier and it makes my writing better and it makes me nicer to be around and that way, I get to pour a vat of margaritas into my throat occasionally. I take my little flaws and I say “YES BUT THAT’S EXACTLY WHAT MAKES ME THE BOMB, MOTHERFUCKER!” And some people dislike this, and some people tolerate it, and a few people sort of like it. I take the dirt and the unworthiness and show that shit off like it’s diamonds and lace and silk and all that trash they coveted on “Dynasty.” My wrongness is my swagger. My baggage is my LUXURY LUGGAGE.

Except when it’s not. Some days, my baggage is just heavy and misshapen and sad and dusty, like actual ugly, cheap baggage that you can’t tell apart from everyone else’s ugly, cheap baggage on the conveyor belt at the airport. It’s important to know this. You can resolve to embrace your flaws, and decide that your awkwardness is also your charm, but you’ll still have days when you feel dirty and unworthy.

Everyone will. So this is what I want you to do: Pay attention. Put your focus on yourself into YOUR CRAFT. Take the big truths and the dark passages from the past and the heavy asides and the self-doubting confessions, and pour those into your art, your costumes, your creations, your drawings. You are an artist, after all! (Cue Hallelujah Chorus, again!) Investigate your bleak history (in therapy if possible, and on your own). Look closely at your fears and your darkness, and use them to fuel your passions. You are so lucky, in some ways, to have a past so rich at such a young age. I know, I know. That sounds totally insensitive and ignorant. So the fuck what? There’s luck in damage, for an artist. Some of those artists you meet are going to be seriously fucking jealous, when they dig for something profound and all they can find is Applebee’s Twice-Baked Cheesy Tater Boats. (But don’t discount those envious privileged boobs, either, because shit happened to them, too, they just don’t realize what they’ve got onboard yet.)

Once you pour the darkness into your work to some extent, and study other great artists who’ve done this, and write down your feelings regularly, and mingle with youngish artists of all stripes, THEN you will have a less Sensitive Alien way of moving through the world. Learning NOT to tell everyone everything immediately is a big step. I think I learned that lesson, hmm, about four years ago? It took FOREVER. I have entire friendships now that are fueled by shared good times and shared interests instead of shared troubles and shared confessions. Sounds shallow, sure, but—little known fact!—some shallowness gives a life balance. Light friendships remind you that you CAN simply engage in small talk and go with the flow, if the rest of your life fills your needs, if you have deep connections and you have ways of expressing the dark emotions that come bubbling out of you without warning. I’ve only recently discovered, for example, that if I’m in a spectacularly shitty mood, I can usually write something pretty funny. SHITTY MOOD ENERGY CREATES COMEDY. Who knew?

Use the rough road behind you for inspiration, and you won’t need to stick it into the middle of every conversation. Use the rough road under your feet on any given day for inspiration, and you’ll grow to appreciate your sensitivity and depth of feeling as a gift rather than a curse. Honor yourself and believe in yourself and listen to other people first, and believe me, you will have more friends than you can handle.

There is no chasm. You are not alone. We are all right there with you, feeling wobbly and uncertain. We muddle through and weird each other out, every single day of our lives. It’s ok. We are dragging our luxury luggage all over the planet, scowling at each other like strangers when, in fact, we all match inside. You’re not alone. You don’t have to feel lonely. You’re with us.

Polly

Are you a lonely, tangled vine among flowering perennials? Write to Polly and discuss!

Heather Havrilesky (aka Polly Esther) is The Awl’s existential advice columnist. She’s also a regular contributor to The New York Times Magazine, and is the author of the memoir Disaster Preparedness (Riverhead 2011). She blogs here about scratchy pants, personality disorders, and aged cheeses.

Photo by troy mckaskle

Dear Polly,
 
I have sort of a backwards problem, in that the better things are going in my life, the worse I feel. I know a good bit, or think I do, about why this happens. My mother committed suicide; my brother who tried to; and my father taught me that my sole purpose and value in life was to make them feel better and stop them from killing themselves. When I tried to care about myself and my needs as much as theirs, I was told this made me a terrible person, and no one would ever love me.

So I grew up to be extremely empathetic and supportive and really good at making my life about everyone other than myself. At some point, I realized that living that way was actually not doing me any favors, was pretty self-destructive, and a way I would never want people I care about to live. I tried to change, to put myself first; I went to therapy, and a lot of Al-Anon meetings, and vented a lot of grief and rage at my family, who were damaged beings doing the best they could but were incapable of being truthful about what happened or acknowledging how badly it hurt me. 
 
I have been successful: I have a job I love, am married to a man I love, and am living a life I love in a place I love with a cat I love. And yet, the better things are, the worse I feel: terrified I will lose everything, because I don’t deserve to be happy, because secretly, fundamentally, I am still a terrible person who must be punished for not following the rules, or because that’s what happens when you relax and feel safe—the shit comes down and people die.
 
The net result is that now, despite a lucky, blessed and happy life, I am overcome with crippling anxiety, guilt, and self-doubt. I’m extremely ashamed about this, because it seems ridiculous; I’m scared, because I don’t understand. I have been in so much therapy. I was better. But magically now I’m the age my mother was when she and my brother started really falling apart, and even though life is better than it’s ever been, I’m worse than I’ve been for a long time, maybe ever. I’m losing friends; my work is suffering; I’m pushing my husband away, who sees that I’m falling apart. I want to believe that this is because I’m getting closer to the core of the doubt and guilt and feelings of wrongness and worthlessness that is at the heart of all of this. But when I reach that core, I still don’t seem to know what to do about it. I know I’m not worthless. I even thought I genuinely felt and believed that. But it still seems to be there, and it’s starting to poison my job and my marriage and my friendships… to try to make everything as black as it believes it should be.
 
I know I need to go back into therapy, but I don’t believe it will truly help me, since it had helped me before, and yet here I am again. I don’t need to believe I’m flawless; I’m fine with being flawed. I’m not fine with hating myself, giving myself palpitations from constant fear and anxiety, and worrying I’m going to sabotage everything that matters to me so that I won’t have to deal with the guilt of having what I’m not supposed to / allowed to have, or the agony of being obsessed that I’m going to lose it all at any moment. I have lived with the specter of being a depressed, suicidal failure hanging over me my whole life, and I’d like it to go away. It turns out it’s so fucking hard to kill ghosts. Any ideas?
 
Don’t Deserve Goodness

Dear Don’t Deserve Goodness,

Christ Almighty, do I feel you on this one. The crazy thing about everything being great is that it makes it really easy to PROVE that the problem is you. “Look, everybody. I have everything I ever wanted, and I’m still freaking out. You were right about me, world! Watch how I push people away! Even though I have love now, eventually the truth will out and I’ll show that I’m a terrible person who no one could ever love for very long!”

The challenging thing for you is that you’re talking about this awful legacy, but because you have it pretty good on the surface, you feel like you don’t have a right to be struggling (which exactly matches your experience as a kid, when you didn’t have a right to feel ANYTHING). Fear and anxiety are these really crazy forces that are incredibly difficult to own up to, because our society tends to paint them as pointless worrying and neuroticism and stress, implied to be the fault of the person who’s doing the worrying. Instead of being treated with compassion and understanding, anxious people are more often than not labeled as neurotics or control freaks—particularly when their lives look pretty good from the outside. “Look at what you have. Things SHOULD BE coming up roses for you, so why do you act like you’re fucking dying?”

Basically, it’s tough to put this kind of trouble into words without sounding like a fucking first-world-problems wildebeest that should be shot down where it stands and then butchered and hung up in the smokehouse to make wildebeest jerky that could sustain a far more deserving family of four through a long, cold winter.

People grow up and they get anxious, whether they admit it or not. It happens to the most laid back among us, and it’s an incredibly common affliction. We’ll get to your very daunting specifics in a second, trust me, I just want to start, though, by pointing out that anxiety is very common. And do you know how most people handle the escalating anxiety that comes with moving toward middle age? They drink more, watch more TV, turn off, power down. Others, who have plenty of money and are also determined to STAY OPEN AND STAY AWARE, tend to overachieve in the self-improvement department. They go to $250 therapy sessions three times a week, and then there’s acupuncture and nutritionists and yoga retreats. And even the do-it-yourself websites exhort you to funnel all of that energy into monitoring every single dimension of your life. Make charts to keep track of your exercise, alcohol intake, triggers, bonding time in your significant relationships! To hear some of these type-A gurus tell it, happiness is a fucking sound board that requires a audio engineer to operate. Happiness is a complicated budget that only a certified CPA can understand. Happiness is a symphony orchestra and you have to read complicated time signatures and master 15 different instruments to even touch it.

Obviously I don’t think that naturally anxious/depressed/deeply scarred people should either power everything down (via booze or living at the office or watching five hours of TV every night) or power everything up (via self-help books and charts and constant fucking monitoring). To know a lot of smart, complicated adults is to know a lot of escapists and a lot of social media/booze/TV addicts and a lot of moms who obsess about every dimension of their kids’ development and a lot of hothouse flowers with insanely complicated, expensive needs.

I don’t mean to lump you into any of these categories. I think you’ve got a very specific, very haunting family history that makes you feel particularly damned. If I had a similar story to pair with my volatile chemistry, I would struggle with that MIGHTILY. Instead, I have no clear excuse for my weirdness. I can look at other people with personalities like mine and say, “Well, people like me seem to take a lot of psychotropic drugs, and all I do is eat kale. Why should I feel guilty that I’m so moody?” But I still feel angry at myself when I get moody.

I think that’s close to the heart of this for you, too. You say you’re ok with being flawed, it’s just that you’re not ok with freaking out and pushing people away. The only reason you’re pushing people away is because you’re pretty sure that these FEELINGS YOU’RE FEELING signal that you’re deeply fucked and unlovable and damned for all time. As long as every negative, fearful, anxious, upsetting feeling means that you’re cut from the same cloth as your mother, of course you’re going to battle your feelings, battle yourself, and present those feelings and yourself to others as either FINE GREAT TOTALLY FINE or as inherently fucked and bad and deserving of scorn and alienation and rejection. Some deep, dark piece of you believes that you are not allowed to experience unforeseen bumps in the emotional road and acknowledge them and let them show. You are STILL not allowed to be a full person in the room. You are STILL supposed to be a supporting player. You THINK you’re getting closer to the core, but you’re not letting yourself really go there, because you’re too ashamed of yourself. You’re not giving yourself room to feel things without shame, and your soul is fucking pissed at you for this, and it’s raising hell. It’s saying “YOU NEED SPACE, YOU WILL HAVE SPACE EVEN IF I HAVE TO SET THIS WHOLE LIFE OF YOURS ON FIRE.”

You need therapy. The fact that you say “I had therapy and I thought it worked so why should I go back?” points to the stubbornness and oversimplified nature of your thinking about this whole thing. You’re very impatient with yourself, and THAT is what leads you to push people away. You are unkind to yourself, as if you can snap yourself out of this. And yet, your fears and anxieties grow. You’re regressing. You’re taking on the voice of your father. You’re saying, “FUCK YOU WHY ARE YOU DOING THIS AGAIN? HOW DARE YOU TAKE UP SPACE HERE WHEN EVERYONE ELSE’S NEEDS ARE SUPPOSED TO COME FIRST!” That doesn’t mean you’re going to destroy everything. Mostly, you need to admit that you’re going through something right now. If you don’t acknowledge it and say it out loud and make room for it, you’re going to keep feeling all clenched and confused and angry.

So get a therapist, and say to that therapist: “I’m going through something right now and I need your help.” You may need to take something for anxiety for a while. I’ll bet a lot of people who DO take something for anxiety are probably reading this and thinking “DUDE TAKE SOMETHING FOR ANXIETY ALREADY!” Maybe they’re right, and maybe they’re wrong. You need to see a therapist either way. Don’t put it off.

You also need to sit down with your husband and say to him, “I’m going through something right now. I don’t know what it is, exactly. But it’s big, and I need your help. I really, really need your help.” You have to tell your husband how you feel. He needs to listen and hear you out without telling you to stop feeling the way you feel. Sometimes you really do have to say bleak, bleak shit. Personally, I think it helps to have your partner understand exactly how dark it can get. This is not you “falling apart.” This does not make you weak or bad. This is you connecting with another human being when things are tough. The more you both engage and look at the darkness, and accept that it’s there, the easier it is to see that it doesn’t rule everything or blot out the sun, not really. My husband and I both have our dark times, and the more we talk about them and put them in perspective in each other’s presence, the better we feel. That’s the way it should be.

Again, getting everything you’ve ever wanted is sometimes the fertile soil that allows your worst anxieties to bloom like never before. (Go watch Safe with Julianne Moore if you want to see what happens to damaged people when they have plenty of time and space to go insane.) For someone with a rough past, being in survival mode is sometimes easier than enjoying the luxury of support and care and time and space. If you’re not ENJOYING these things, if you’re just waiting for the shit to come down instead? That must be your fault. You must be sick inside.

And yet? So many people with so much less damage than you feel this way. So: Please forgive yourself straight out of the gate for the fact that you are human. You’re going through something right now. Going back into therapy will support you in your ability to claim this vulnerable space for yourself.

And when you’re pretty sure you’re terrible at some core level, you really need to pat yourself on the back often. For example: My mom was just visiting for a while and I was around my family A LOT this past week. I did not act like a giant asshole during that time. The one day I felt really angry, I went on a four-mile run and came back feeling ok again. But the first part of my run was just like this cartoon with me saying “MOTHERFUCKER! MOTHERFUCKER! MOTHERFUCKER!” with every step. And in between steps, I was thinking, “Why am I so angry over such small shit? Why do I have to be such a fucking first-world-problems wildebeest? The years roll by, and look, I’m still just a big baby!”

But why should I beat myself up for my feelings, when I handled myself perfectly well all week? We feel what we feel. What the fuck are you gonna do? It’s so easy to believe that there’s a moral to this story. “THIS PROVES THAT YOU’RE TERRIBLE! YOU SUCK! YOU’RE UNLOVABLE!” But that’s bullshit.

Maybe you’re in the habit of telling one story—“I went through the fire and emerged, triumphant!”—that doesn’t feel quite right anymore. Maybe you want to adjust your story, in order to make more room for reality, for mood swings, for challenging days, for challenging years. Maybe the new story is “I am so happy with what I have, but I’m still struggling with how to be happy.” Maybe the new story is, “I love my life, but I don’t know how to feel all of this sadness I have inside.” Sadness and happiness do not exist on different planets. They go hand in hand. Learning to feel sadness without shame is a pretty crucial prerequisite for happiness. The story doesn’t have to be, “I should be happy but I’m miserable.” You don’t deserve to be wildebeest jerky. You just need a few adjustments, to your habits, your life, your support systems, and your story. But in order to make those adjustments, you have to take the fact that you’re going through something RIGHT NOW—something BIG!—very very seriously.

Being alive is amazing. It’s also a huge challenge. Having a quick mind that latches onto everything and anything and runs with it, when paired with unpredictable fucking chemistry, is not a smooth ride, ever. The more you can accept that a rocky ride does NOT mean that you’re a mutant, the better. It doesn’t mean you need to map out a detailed plan and make 15 Excel charts to address every dimension of HOW YOU FAIL YOURSELF EVERY FUCKING DAY OF YOUR SORRY LIFE. It also doesn’t mean that simply saying “I’M FLAWED, OK?” is enough. This is about your feelings.

Your feelings do not make you some kind of deadly poison in human form that will send everyone running away from you. In fact, I’d like to know a little bit more about these friends that are backing away. Do they understand that you’re working through something? Are you vulnerable with them? Are they allergic to heaviness? Be sure to separate the supportive friends who were a little curt with you from the scaredy cats. Don’t lump them all together. And separate your weepy moments from your cussing-people-out moments. Not the same thing, at all. Do you have friends who can tolerate weeping? Can your husband tolerate it? Because if he can’t, maybe you need to drag him into therapy, too. I’d also like to know HOW you push your husband and other people away. When you start to feel like lashing out, you need to try to switch gears and really push yourself to reach the crying phase, to get to the vulnerable part of the picture. You should explain to your husband that this is a challenge for you, and that TEARS ARE ACTUALLY A SUCCESS. If you’re sitting there saying “Fuck off, you don’t get it” and thinking, “No one fucking gets it!” but you’re refusing to look at the fact that a layer of “OH FUCK I AM SO ROTTEN I HATE ME” is underneath it all? Then you have to dig deeper and let yourself feel some sadness, and you have to let people in. Don’t assume they can’t handle it. Let them in.

It’s frightening to stay open and stay vulnerable instead of escaping. That’s why so many people choose escape. Feelings are really fucking hard, particularly when you’ve always been told that they make you unlovable.

Keep feeling. Accept that it will get ugly. Stand up for your right to feel. Feel and feel and feel and you will get more and more beautiful. Those who don’t see that clearly can’t see clearly at all. You are going through something. That’s all. You’re dark now. This is how you’re going to let in the light. Believe it, and so will everyone else. Love yourself for it, and so will everyone else. BE PROUD of this fear and sadness, because it will lead you to sustainable happiness and love. Be patient with yourself, and you’ll come out on the other side of this stronger than ever. Your vulnerability is courageous.

Polly

Are you sugar coated on the outside and a pulsing ball of darkness on the inside? Write to Polly and discuss!

Heather Havrilesky (aka Polly Esther) is The Awl’s existential advice columnist. She’s also a regular contributor to The New York Times Magazine, and is the author of the memoir Disaster Preparedness (Riverhead 2011). She blogs here about scratchy pants, personality disorders, and aged cheeses.

Photo by flowcomm

Hi Polly.

I don’t even know where to start, because for some reason I’m HORRIBLE at articulating my emotions. I feel like as soon as I have an “epiphany,” it only opens up the door to another warehouse of issues to sift through. I’m so exhausted and worn out from an entire lifetime of extreme neuroticism and self-consciousness, and I need some clarity.

You seem to always have some advice that I can apply to my own life, so I have been wanting to write to you for a while. But I can’t decide what to ask advice for since I really could use help in all areas of my life, and I do mean ALL. Let’s see if I can get close to an actual question.

I’m recently married to the love of my life. From the day we met, I knew he was different than everyone else. He is an artist like myself, extremely unique, kind, up for an adventure, and patient. I’ve learned a lot about enjoying life and having fun from him. Lately though, I feel like he is no longer trying to impress me the way he used to. Not too long ago, he was bearing an equal part of all the “to dos,” and doing small and thoughtful things for me. Now, he doesn’t help me at all around the house (but does really well in helping to DESTROY the space like a drunk bear raiding a campsite before falling asleep early), and is often lost in his thoughts. We don’t talk as much as we used to, and physically he’s letting himself go as well. I think he is a little depressed and bored. I suspect he is down because 1) he hates his day job, which leaves him very little mind time to get inspired to make his art, and 2) he is going through an early thirties existential crisis, as am I. I am being as understanding as I can because I currently do not have a job so I have more time to do the stuff that needs to be done at home—but I hate the reality that I’m slowly becoming a traditional housewife.

Anyway, I was thinking that if I ask for some advice about my own issues, maybe in turn I can inspire him somehow. I don’t want to resent him because I want to be sure that I’m not contributing to the problem by nagging or being a hypocrite. I suspect that I may be rubbing off on him a little bit, or even projecting.

I had to recently be brutally honest with myself and admit that I have a gigantic fear within me. I’m always doubting who I am and what I should be doing. I used to be—when I was a small child—very outgoing and charming. But I was brought up to be obedient and self-abnegating, and that’s what I became, as well as shy and awkward. At the same time I was scolded for those things. My problems or emotions were often dismissed and ridiculed, everyone else’s desires always came before mine, and all the family’s problems were blamed on me anytime I attempted to speak up for myself. I’m talking about full-on, “Your dad is leaving me because of YOU and your shitty attitude.” I was gaslighted like a motherfucker, so I know why I am like I am, but how do I stop?? I could provide more detail, but I can sum it all up by saying that for as long as I can remember, I’ve been too serious, depressive, and really took it hard when I made any mistake or when someone didn’t like or “get” me, which makes it hard to let go and develop my talents naturally, with a sense of fun. Also, I was always very angry and resentful deep inside for not fitting in anywhere, but always also felt the need to find my true self amid the noise. I did not enjoy being a child. At all. I didn’t know what “child-like enthusiasm and wonder” was until I met my now husband.

I sort of hate myself for it because the number one character trait that I admire in anyone is the ability to be themselves, unapologetically, but it’s very hard for me to change.

I feel like I’m constantly fighting myself and I don’t know how to listen to my own heart. For example, I knew I didn’t fit into the status seeking, “this company is my life,” corporate-climbing world, but I tried anyway, and felt like an idiotic loser for not being interested enough to be able to play the game (especially since so many other uninteresting and not even particularly brilliant people were able to figure it out).

I have many interests and can’t decide how to focus my energies, though I do believe I am intelligent and more than capable. I constantly sabotage myself and say, smoke a joint to calm the anxiety of knowing I will paint something and nine times out of ten, hate it. Then I get nothing done, and hate myself for being weak.

I also have a big problem with comparing myself to others, and jealousy. This was absolutely the hardest thing to admit to myself because it’s just pathetic. I’m figuratively in a glass room, watching and being jealous of everyone living their lives, watching them grow and develop while I waste time, and feeling that I’ll be trapped as a longing voyeur forever, too paralyzed by fear (or something) to figure out how to just walk out of the wide open doorway. I’m keeping myself prisoner, because it doesn’t feel natural to believe in myself and go forth with enthusiasm and trust that I will figure it out. It makes me so mad at myself for holding myself back, but since I AM myself, I don’t know how to smash the part of me keeping me trapped. I simply can’t get a grasp on embracing my uniqueness and also recognizing which changes I truly should make to make my life more productive, happy, and successful.

When I met my husband, I was the happiest and free-est I have ever felt.  I had never been more excited about life. But I know that’s also the serotonin and whatnot of the honeymoon period. I do believe though, that we can get back to that, but even if we don’t, at least I can learn to be more whole and strong. That has to be better than the self-doubting scaredy puss I am today. He understands me and gives me a lot of love, but I don’t think this is something he can help me with.

What can I do? I already go to therapy, but like many relationships in our lives, I feel this one has run its course, and I need someone to tell me what to DO, not to just listen to me whine all the time. Can you give me some insight? I feel like I will be this way forever! I want to know where to focus, what to pay attention to, what to block, and how to stop caring so fucking much about how I’m presenting myself. I want FREEDOM, goddamn it!

Sincerely,

Ugh Times Infinity

Dear Ugh,

When kids first learn to swim, they always think they’re going to drown because they want to keep their faces and mouths out of the water. Their eyes are right there, an inch above the surface of the water, so the whole exercise feels like a battle to stay alive. It’s very inefficient, trying to keep your head up while you swim. There’s no dog-paddling in the fucking Olympics, because dog paddling is slow and torturous and no one who can swim well would ever use such a shitty stroke.

Once a kid learns to put his or her face down into the water, though, the whole swimming thing goes from a terrible, frightening battle to a relaxing process of discovery. Suddenly your body feels buoyant and graceful. Whereas the surface of the water feels violent and unnerving, under the water things are calm and quiet and gorgeous. You can look around, dive deeper, return to the surface. Suddenly, you have choices. Suddenly, you are free.

Right now you’re dog paddling—you’re fighting off your feelings, mostly with your circular thoughts—and you’re wondering why you’re so exhausted and angry. Meanwhile, other people you know are disappearing under the water, and emerging looking more relaxed and happier, but you just stay pissed off and tired. You try to solve the problem, mostly by thinking about it until you feel terrible. You blame yourself. You wonder if your husband’s suffering is also your fault. (You were to blame for everything when you were young, after all. Why not now?)

You write: “I’m always doubting who I am and what I should be doing. I used to be—when I was a small child—very outgoing and charming. But I was brought up to be obedient and self-abnegating, and that’s what I became, as well as shy and awkward. At the same time I was scolded for those things.”

You were taught to control everything that you felt, in other words. And then you were taught to second-guess those controlling behaviors, so even the act of self-discipline felt discouraging and disheartening to you. You weren’t permitted to have your own joyful experiences, and then you were chastised for not being joyful enough. (This is the parenting style of people who fucking hate themselves, by the way.)

Lines from your letter sound just like Pink Floyd lyrics for a reason. It’s sadly very common, this feeling that we were beaten back like weeds and we lost something important along the way. Roger Waters describes dog-paddling like this:

“When I was a child I had a fever
My hands swelled just like two balloons,
Now I have that feeling once again
I can’t explain, you would not understand
This is not how I am.”

The dog paddling of neuroticism feels like isolation, like longing, like struggling against something impossible. “I’m not like this! I’m really not!” Something is wrong, something was wrong, something will always be wrong. You were outgoing and charming. You were redirected towards obedience, and even that was not OK. You had something to say, you were hushed. You became grumpy, and your shitty attitude was to blame for your dad leaving. Now you’ve got that feeling once again, that you might be to blame for your husband leaving you, eventually.

“I can’t explain. You would not understand. This is not how I am.”

This is the heartbreak of “Comfortably Numb,” when this moment of longing—which could be full and rich and gorgeous—instead gets bottle up, thrown away, disowned. I WAS HAPPY BEFORE, AND THEN I GOT SICK. That reflection itself is an opportunity, a door that opens – you’ve learned something real and true about yourself. But then, the door closes: I CAN’T EXPLAIN. YOU WOULDN’T FUCKING GET IT.

And what comes next? What ends the early thirties crisis, you ask? Settling, numbness, resolving not to try to explain, assuming that no one will understand. So tired of dog paddling, so tired of struggling against the surface of the water, all splashy exhausting violence with so little reward.

Many people stop trying to understand their feelings at around your age. It’s wearing them out too much. Like you, every time they have “an epiphany,’ it only opens up the door to another warehouse of issues to sift through.” So they choose to feel LESS instead.

“There is no pain, you are receding,
A distant ship smoke on the horizon.”

This is where you are. You can 1) keep dog-paddling and become a certified neurotic, always exhausted, always angry. Or you can 2) turn it all off, power down, and give up on trying, because it’s too hard. Or, you can 3) dive down under the water and feel your way through this and see everything you have, everything you’re made of, everything you’re NOT made of, everything you love, everything you want to embrace and enjoy about being alive right now.

Dog-paddling is not serving you very well. You’re trying to prove that this is not who you are. There’s no flow, no grace, no gliding. You’re monitoring your husband too closely, wondering when he’ll notice that you’re the cause of everything bad. Stop looking at him. He’s working and he’s trying to make art and he needs a little space to manage that balance. Manage your expectations and make yourself heard, but be very concise and back off. Allow him his own time and space to grow. Looming over him with your unhappiness and your scolding will never, ever help, not even a little bit. You are hyper-aware of him, and right now, as far as I can tell, he’s not a problem in your life unless you make him one.

You’re not going to arrive at that moment of truth underwater if you keep looking at him. Likewise, you can’t sit and watch other apparently graceful swimmers and wonder why you’re not them. I know you know this. But watching them glide will make you sink like a stone. Outward success means nothing unless you’re at peace with yourself. Don’t assume they’re all doing great just because they look like they are.

The trouble here lies in both your bad habits and in your poorly formed identity. Your identity until now has depended on how other people see you. Starting today, you have to feel your way towards an identity that makes sense to you and you alone. Your moments of freedom, of possibility, of feeling in touch with yourself, have been blotted out by your anxiety and neediness and struggle to blame yourself and NOT blame yourself and blame yourself all over again.

You need to learn how to feel what you feel without anxious color commentary. If your therapy sessions are nothing but anxious color commentary with no feeling, that means your therapist isn’t pushing you to go deeper into your feelings. That may mean you need a new therapist. Or it may mean that you need to talk to your therapist about your perception that the process is stalling out.

Outside of therapy, I think you need to find some way to welcome and accept your feelings instead of always retreating into circular thinking and solutions and self-doubt and self-blame. You can do this by yourself. Forget all interpretation. Put some headphones on, turn on some music, and give yourself a moment, as a gift. Not a moment to straighten up. Not a moment to fix something. Not a moment to wonder if your husband really cares. Not a moment to wonder what other people have that you don’t have. A moment to put your face in the water and swim under the surface, alone.

Let yourself feel something without thinking. Picture an outgoing, charming child who was told to stop. Stop. Stop. Stop. Until there was nothing left.

Crying is putting your face in the water.

Put your face in the water. This is not about your husband. This is not about what other people think of you. This is not about how you stack up. This is not about whining. This is not about smoking a joint in order to calm your anxiety in order to paint. This is not about becoming more productive. This is not about becoming someone stronger and better and more lovable. This is not about looking for an epiphany.

Dip under the surface. Water filters the light in the strangest ways. Pay attention. Sounds change under water. Yelling and splashing above the surface comes through in a warped arc to your ears. Your clumsy body feels like a smooth fish underwater.

Swim through the raw pain of mourning what you could’ve been, a different kind of a person, a charming, outgrowing child who grew into a charming, outgoing woman. But you were stopped in your tracks. Let that injustice surround you, thick as water.

Stay there, surrounded by feeling. Don’t clean up. Don’t fix anything. Don’t rush to funnel the smallest bit of inspiration into SOMETHING SOME PAINTING SOME PROOF YOU’RE MAKING PROGRESS YOU’RE GETTING BETTER.

Make no progress. Analyze nothing. Stay with your feelings.

And even now you’re thinking, “BUT WHAT DO I—I MEAN—WHAT SHOULD I—I DON’T GET—“ Don’t think. There is no careful plan to follow. This is where your freedom will begin: Learning to feel what you feel without judgment.

It will take tremendous practice and effort to do this. You might consider getting a CD of Eckhart Tolle (I know, Christ Almighty, Pink Floyd and Eckhart Tolle, DID YOU WANDER INTO THE WRONG SULFUROUS POOL AT ESALEN?) I don’t love most meditation CDs but I do love Tolle’s philosophical German weirdo routine, which is all about allowing yourself space to feel without WAITING, without EXPECTATIONS, without WANTING MORE.

You have to learn to give value to your experience. You haven’t valued your own experience since you were very small. You can’t think your way to this. You have to feel your way there.

What will come out of you dedicating yourself to just this—feeling over thinking, experiencing the moment instead of worrying and planning and fixing all the time? I don’t know. Maybe you’ll discover that you want to work part-time and paint part-time, to make your painting time feel more like a luxury you give yourself instead of feeling like this huge gulf of failure that you dog-paddle through every day. Maybe you’ll discover how YOU feel about your husband (not how he “really” feels about you or thinks about you), and you’ll want to walk right up and kiss his face and be still with him for a minute.

You CAN explain. He WILL understand. That’s what love is. Daring to explain. Daring to be understood. “To Do” lists and conflicts and bad habits tend to fix themselves when you open up to each other without fear.

Likewise, fear tends to recede when you look straight at your fears and feel those fears without interpretation. Sometimes just noticing fear—without trying to control it, without trying to analyze it—can make that fear just another rich dimension of your rich, rich, life.

So look: This terrible tidal wave of insecurity you’re feeling is actually a pathway to a new kind of happiness for you. You’ve been beating back your insecurity. Other people are repelled by that. It’s a defensive, self-protective, angry state. It’s a state of conflict. It’s an unaware state—violent, unhinged, sinking fast. If you stop and admit your insecurities to yourself and allow them to exist, you will draw people to you. That doesn’t mean that attracting people is THE GOAL. That doesn’t mean that you’re walking around saying, “Oh look at face, I’m breaking out. Listen to my stutter. See how awkward I am?” You allow your feelings to be, even if you hear a soundtrack that tells you, “You are bad, you are to blame, you are weak.” You listen to this soundtrack and feel how it weighs down your heart. You feel it, and these judgments, this noise, starts to seem more and more arbitrary.

In the past, you would paddle faster. Now, you will simply listen. You will become more and more accustomed to seizing your own moments of peace, of richness, of fear, of inspiration, of sadness, of longing. Owning your longing and sadness feels good. It feeds your soul, owning the whole kaleidoscope within you.

Maybe eventually you’ll write down your thoughts and feelings. Maybe you’ll talk about it. Maybe you’ll go on an afternoon walk alone, every single day. Maybe you will stand up and stretch your arms above your head, and then smile to yourself and put on water for tea. Maybe you’ll think about birds, how they dart around between trees and fly into windows. They’re so small and fragile and busy.

There will be pain, and calm. Everything will be slow and sad and beautiful. You will marvel over how brave you are.

This is where you begin. Lean into what you feel, without shame, without worry. Being yourself without apology depends on accepting and embracing your feelings. Freedom and following your heart depend on promising yourself that you will be good to yourself, that you will care for and love yourself no matter what, that you will stop picking up where your parents left off and treating yourself like a bad child who’s fucking up EVERYTHING. You’ll have to do this every day, in order to make it a habit. You’ll have to stop dog-paddling every single day and say, “No, I’m doing things a new way now. I’m giving myself some time to feel my way, to enjoy the moment.” That means that every single time you notice that you’re rushing, and you’re angry at yourself, you slow down and ask yourself how to do the same thing with less thought and more feeling and more deep breaths. Happiness is not getting somewhere faster. Happiness is enjoying the process. If you don’t enjoy the process, you might as well not be headed anywhere, because you won’t enjoy getting there, either.

You say you want to decide where to devote your energies. Don’t decide anything, just see where your energies lead you. You say you want to get some lost feeling back with your husband. Find your own feeling and then share a little of that with him. You say you want to be free. YOU ARE ALREADY FREE.

You’re probably going to find my answer frustratingly vague. But if you invite your feelings in and allow yourself to be hurt and needy and elated and confused without judgment, a giant rush of gratitude and sensuality and happiness will surge in you and then, slowly, the pragmatic struggles of your life will feel far less thorny and impossible. Slowly. But you have to devote yourself to this practice, which is all about believing in your independent experience and your place in this world. It’s all about replacing “Stop. Stop. Stop.” with “Welcome!”

Turn off your mind and open your eyes. Stop repeating that same old story, and look around you. You are already free. This moment, in your messy apartment, in the heat, among your half-finished paintings, in the unnerving dusk, with the accumulated disappointments of years and years and years, puddling around you? This moment is yours, and it’s pure and miraculous and sad and sweet. Swim, slowly, calmly, through this sad, sweet moment, through this sad, sweet infinity. You are already free.

Polly

Do you doggy paddle but want to learn how to do a butterfly stroke and eat fourteen thousand pancakes a day like Michael Phelps? Write to Polly and discuss!

Heather Havrilesky (aka Polly Esther) is The Awl’s existential advice columnist. She’s also a regular contributor to The New York Times Magazine, and is the author of the memoir Disaster Preparedness (Riverhead 2011). She blogs here about scratchy pants, personality disorders, and aged cheeses.

Photo by Jon Page