sixshelves-blog
Six Shelves
Reading and rambling about every unread book on my shelves.
Not buying any new books until I'm done.
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Trusting your own mind is essential for writing.
Natalie Goldberg, Wild Mind
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reading a book about writing is different from actually getting down and doing writing. I was naïve. I should have remembered that after I read the Tibetan Book of the Dead, I was still afraid to die.
Natalie Goldberg, Wild Mind
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The cat is helping me re-read Natalie Goldberg’s Wild Mind: Living the Writer’s Life so I can figure out how I want to write about it — and also start some of its writing exercises!
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7: How to Be a Person in the World, by Heather Havrilesky — On Finding Advice for Myself
Dear Polly Sarah,
How do I take steps to feel less like this all the fucking time?
‘This’ is, essentially, the elements of my anxious brain trash: How can I be strong enough to deal with my own troubles and also help others? How do I handle jealousy and regret? How do I stop comparing my own worth to other people? How do I stop being so damn hard on myself all the time?
I think anxiety is something I might always live with to some degree. The ways I am sensitive and think about things too much is such a part of me, I would not be me without it. It feeds my empathy. It feeds my art and the ways I see the world. But I want living in this world to be easier on the day to day, and the ways that affects my overall progress through life.
There are things I want to do more of and better: write, read, exercise, organize, love, activate. And yet I go through periods where I spend a great deal of my time worrying about money, with the crippling deathlike grip of debt choking away my focus from anything else. Doing math in my head to make accounts balance against the things I want or need to do, and when they don’t balance, beating myself up over not being able to pay my bills or buy myself a simple thing I need or want.
I recently turned thirty. Older friends have told me that when they reached their thirties, they started caring less about things they obsessed over in their twenties. I want that to be true for me, even as I can feel my body disagreeing with me more than it used to, and I’m worrying about death even more than ever: my own, my family’s, everyone who is living in this backwards world. I feel like we’ve ended up in the wrong timeline. But I also feel like I need to get my shit together at a less irregular pace than I have strived before, because who knows how much time there is left?
How can I be a person in the world when this world is making less and less sense?
Anxiety 101
Dear A101,
You sound more like the room number than course number of a college class—you also sound like maybe you need to go back to therapy.
Listen, A101: I’m you, and you’re me. There isn’t a lot of advice I can give myself that I haven’t already given. But what would Heather Havrilesky say in an Ask Polly column? First, she’d definitely say you need therapy. Then I think she’d remind you of how young you are.
You’ve turned thirty. Thirty! If you’re lucky, that’ll end up being only a third of your life. There are women in your family who’ve lived well into their nineties, or even past one hundred. If you’re not lucky, then that’s all the more reason to wrangle your anxiety into something that you can live with for whatever amount of time you have left.
So what if there were things you would’ve liked to do in your twenties—some of those things probably weren’t going to be as great as you’d hoped anyway. And some of them you still have a chance to do in your thirties. You are capable of publishing more writing. You are capable of nurturing your body into better health. You are capable of getting yourself out of debt, or at least not gasping out from under it every fucking second of your days.
You are capable of being a person in the world. And part of being a person in the world is this: You have to cut yourself some slack. Don’t be so hard on yourself when you aren’t the perfect friend, or girlfriend, or daughter, or writer, or anything. None of us are. Literally no one can be good all the time. But does everyone walk around worrying, or lie in their beds crippled with shame, whenever they’re less than what they wanted to be? Gosh, I don’t think so, or else nothing would ever get done! And we’d all be unpleasant killjoys!
Write it down: I am enough. I am okay. I am stronger than I believe. Believe it.
What are you really worrying about, Anxiety 101? You’re worried about being alone. You’re worried that your boyfriend will leave you, your friends will leave you, your family will die, and you’ll still be a writer who doesn’t write every day and an anxious lonely person who has less than no money to live. You’re worried that you will leave them, that you will follow that escapist impulse in you to just leave when you’ve been hurt and deal with the regrets later. You’re worried that all of this will happen, and you’ll blame yourself for all of it. You couldn’t be smarter, you couldn’t be prettier, you couldn’t be more generous with your time or more in control of your finances. You just weren’t strong enough to stay. You weren’t enough even for yourself.
Step back and take a good listen to that anxious brain trash: Enough for what? Are the people you love good enough? Are you cruel enough to them to think in terms like that? I don’t have all the wisdom, and neither does Polly, but I think the part of my brain that tries to understand the world instead of dwelling on my anxious brain trash knows a thing or three:
You do not have to be good, wrote Mary Oliver.
The people who are happiest in this world—the most connected, beautiful, fulfilled creatures—they are not good all the time. They fuck up, and they keep moving. They forgive themselves.
Dear Forgiveness, I saved a plate for you. Quit milling around the yard and come inside, wrote Richard Siken.
When was the last time you forgave yourself for anything? Who are the people you admire—are they good? Polly is a readily available example of this: You respect this woman’s work and courage and kind brutal honesty so fiercely, it inspires you weekly. But is it good? Is she enough? Those are not words that make sense outside of anxious brain trash. Hell, you’re a writer—reimagine some better language to frame and illuminate your life.
Do not let yourself be led by your own anxious brain trash.
Talk back to it. Speak more kindly to yourself. Practice empathy with yourself above all.
CHERISH YOURSELF, wrote Polly.
Fucking believe it. Fucking be alive, as my autocorrect says.
Let’s take an example: Are you a fucking idiot for not exercising on New Year’s Day and eating a bunch of bread and not finishing this blog post you’ve been trying to finish for weeks?
No. Actually, you slept until two in the afternoon because your body needed it, and it made you and the cat happy, his warm body curled against your stomach under the blanket. You took a walk, evolved a new Pokémon for your Pokédex, and cashed in on a gym that you were still in from the day before. You made bread from scratch with your own two capable hands, plus nourishing soup for you and your boyfriend, and you ate it together while watching The Fellowship of the Ring, because it’s comforting and familiar and makes you cry in a good way. You ate the rest of the bread and finished some good beer, and it made you feel good. You didn’t finish that piece of writing, but you put in a good couple hours of progress, and progress is not nothing. I’d even go so far as to say it is something. It was a good beginning to a new year and a new decade of your life.
You are not an idiot. You are taking baby steps, and baby steps are healthy and good. If babies were this cruel to themselves when they were taking actual baby steps, nobody would ever learn how to walk.
And do you want to know something else? I wrote most of this two months ago.
I’ve been too busy and too afraid to look at it again, so I’ve been thinking it’s incomplete. I've been thinking: What could I possibly write about for this post that would encompass everything Heather Havrilesky’s book evoked in me? I didn’t dare to think that I had maybe finished a new blog post for this book that I’ve felt like I didn’t know how to talk about. But I did! In a moment, I can call this complete and move on to the next book in my backlog of read-but-not-written-about books!
Two months ago feels like a lifetime ago already. Two months ago, not only did we still have a good man as president, but on a personal level, I had not yet: paid off one loan and two credit cards, started going to the gym and yoga a little more often, written two new poems, participated in three protests, gotten a minor concussion, or made some great new friends.
A101, we are capable of progress. How do you be a person in this nonsense world? Care for yourself and the people you love and the world around you. Accept that sometimes you might feel like strangers for awhile, and that's natural. Sometimes you won't know much at all.
But trust in the reality of good things to hold onto, whether it's baking fresh bread, holding your boyfriend’s hand, or making a stranger truly happy with your kindness. Trust in the joy of doing things, of doing something; that feeling of being capable and focused on making something out of nothing.
You are not the first person to experience existential death anxiety. How many fucking artists are there who've created art in the face of the fear of death? Under how much worse circumstances? I know this concussion accident shook you really hard, and you were afraid to even start writing again ever since then, because what if you couldn’t? But we’ve got this, honey. Keep going.
Polly wrote: Life is not about knowing. Life is about feeling your way through the dark. If you say, ‘This should be lighter by now,’ you’re shutting yourself off from your own happiness. So let there be darkness. Get down on your knees, and crawl through the dark. Crawl and say to yourself, 'Holy GOD, it’s dark, but just look at me crawl! I can crawl like a motherfucker.’
Remember when you were an idealistic kid who naively believed that by the time you were old, there would be no more war, we would make contact with alien life, cancer would be cured, and so many more mysteries and problems would be solved? You were ignorant to the complexity and ignorance and greed of the world back then. You believed in things that very likely will not come true (or at least not in your lifetime), but you had hope. Keep a bit of that—you need it now more than ever—but forgive yourself if sometimes you still believe a little too much, or not at all.
The world is letting us down, we are letting each other down, but if we are going to keep going forward, we cannot start by letting ourselves down. You're not dead yet, and neither is the world. Wake up in the morning, wash your face, and remember that you can't do everything, but you can do something. So go do a little bit of something every day. It might not be enough, but you will be taking the best damn baby steps you’ve taken since you first learned how to walk.
Polly Sarah
Previously Read: The Year of Yes by Maria Dahvana Headley
Next Up: Wild Mind by Natalie Goldberg
#how to be a person in the world#ask polly#heather havrilesky#advice column#letters#self-acceptance#book post#books
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Uncertainty and failure might look like the end of the road to you. But uncertainty is a part of life. Facing uncertainty and failure doesn't always make people weaker and weaker until they give up. Sometimes it wakes them up, and it's like they can see the beauty around them for the first time. Sometimes losing everything makes you realize how little you actually need. Sometimes losing everything sends you out into the world to breathe in the air, to pick some flowery weeds, to take in a new day.
Heather Havrilesky, How to Be a Person in the World
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Never use an 'I told you so' attitude to let yourself off the hook from showing up for someone you love. And don't use the 'I don't know what to say' excuse, either, or the 'I'm afraid I'll say something wrong' excuse. You probably will say something wrong. That's okay. JUST SHOW UP. Show up and say, 'God, this sucks. I'm so sorry.' Just keep saying that, and keep showing up.
Heather Havrilesky, How to Be a Person in the World
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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.
Heather Havrilesky, How to Be a Person in the World
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All of this may sound like the stuff of adolescence. But sometimes in our lives we have to dare to try on the other side of things, just to see what fits. Sometimes, when there's a crisis, it means the life we're leading is starting to chafe.
Heather Havrilesky, How to Be a Person in the World
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Every morning, you will wake up and see that life is all about fumbling and accepting that you're fumbling. It's about saying nice things to yourself, even when you're lazy, even when you're lost. It's about giving yourself the love you need in order to try—JUST TRY—so that someday you'll have enough love to give a little to someone else.
Life is not about knowing. Life is about feeling your way through the dark. If you say, 'This should be lighter by now,' you're shutting yourself off from your own happiness. So let there be darkness. Get down on your knees, and crawl through the dark. Crawl and say to yourself, 'Holy GOD, it's dark, but just look at me crawl! I can crawl like a motherfucker.'
Heather Havrilesky, How to Be a Person in the World
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Once you start accepting yourself in your self-talk, you may find yourself feeling overcome, literally bursting into tears. THAT IS A BEAUTIFUL FUCKING THING! Let yourself burst into tears. Say to yourself, 'I am feeling really sad right now, and weak, and lost, and that's not just okay; it's good. It's exactly how I need to feel in this moment. This sadness doesn't make me weak. This is what it feels like not to be wishy-washy. This is me, finding my way in the dark. This is how I'll finally know something, by recognizing how lost I feel, by recognizing how little I know now.
Heather Havrilesky, How to Be a Person in the World
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In addition to seeing a therapist, you should try very hard to notice how you talk to yourself throughout the course of the day. I'm going to guess, based on your letter, that you often tell yourself that you'll never be smart enough or good enough at work. You tell yourself that you are missing something that the smart, successful people at your job have. You tell yourself that you're too wishy-washy to ever be a huge success, to ever be loved and adored by anyone, to ever have close, loving friends. You are inherently flawed in tragic ways. You will never amount to shit.
Listen to these messages, and marvel at them. Marvel at how many times a day you tell yourself that you suck. Don't marvel and say, 'Jesus, all of this self-talk about how I suck is EVEN MORE PROOF OF HOW MUCH I SUCK!' No. Marvel that you do this, and marvel that so many other people do this around the clock, for their entire lives.
Heather Havrilesky, How to Be a Person in the World
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I also didn't trust myself, because I was mad at myself all the time. Everything I did was some kind of fuckup. I woke up too late. My hair looked like shit. My face was breaking out. I wasn't lovable. I left a mess in the kitchen the night before. I hadn't exercised for a few days. These things were all my fault. The bad voice in my head said, 'Oh my god. What are you doing now? Come on, get your shit together!'
These terrible cognitive habits essentially coached me into never feeling my feelings. Any feeling that came up meant that I was weak and stupid. 'You're seriously going to cry about your kitchen being a mess? What a pathetic person you are!' my head would say when I started to feel sorry for myself. Even though, thanks to therapy, I'd gone through brief periods of trying to welcome in emotions without judgment, I couldn't manage to do it regularly. If I felt very angry or very sad, that could only mean that I was about to scare away my boyfriend and my family and whatever remaining friends I had. I didn't believe that anyone would ever love me as long as I let my emotions out and felt vulnerable.
Heather Havrilesky, How to Be a Person in the World
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No one seemed to know what I should do about anything. They all said stuff like 'Well, how do you feel about it?' Sometimes I would tell them what I thought about things, and then I'd just get lost in a long analysis of my thoughts, and everyone would end up feeling bored and annoyed, myself included. My aunt once said to me, 'You just told me what you think. Now tell me how you feel.' I said, 'How I feel? Is there a difference?' She told me yes, there's a big difference. So I thought about how I felt for a minute. I didn't know how I felt, though. I didn't know how I felt about anything.
Heather Havrilesky, How to Be a Person in the World
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Love blooms more easily among people who understand intimacy and trust with close friends. When you can tell a close friend the truth about your feelings and your insecurities and your flaws, when you can make a joke about them and your friend can tease you and you can feel seen and known and understood, that's—well, it's a kind of love. Casual friendship is nothing compared with that.
Heather Havrilesky, How to Be a Person in the World
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All of this reflects a wider societal shift toward encountering anyone who seems even slightly out of step with the reigning cultural ideal of cool indifference as damaged goods. People who are anxious or pensive or a tiny bit off-kilter are quickly labeled as losers or freaks. People who are shy or conversationally awkward or just out of practice are written off as shut-ins or nerds. The irony is that apathy and vagueness and underexplaining and fading out—attitudes and behaviors that drive the sensitive among us insane—are defined as normal. Remember how people used to say that this or that social scene 'is just like high school all over again'? Well, the whole world is high school all over again. We are expected to act like cool kids—light, breezy, disengaged—in every environment. As a culture, we're unknowingly mimicking carefully scripted sitcom characters, as if they represent some Platonic ideal of humanity. We expect ourselves and each other to move through the world with the bulletproof, professionally slick, faux confidence of comedic sidekicks and superheroes.
Heather Havrilesky, How to Be a Person in the World
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You have to speak to yourself in a kind way. I know that sounds absurd, but basically you have to say things like 'Look at you and your early morning writing! Good job, sunshine!' and 'Hey, you fit in a workout and ate a healthy breakfast. Way to take care of yourself!' Dorky but cumulatively more effective than you can imagine. And honestly, I don't know a better way to battle existential angst and fear than by seizing each day by the throat and forcing it into a shape that feels productive and healthy and on track.
Heather Havrilesky, How to Be a Person in the World
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This life is not perfect. This world is not a perfect place. Sometimes it's nice to sip a drink, and repeat yourself, among people who aren't perfect and don't expect you to be perfect either. Aim low, open your heart, and let them in.
Heather Havrilesky, How to Be a Person in the World
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