Ask Polly: You Are Not Uniquely Fucked
July 16, 2014
I’m 29 and have been through an enormous amount of shit that is
both situation-sp I am not unproud that I’ve
made it this far, considering. I’m in therapy and have been
off and on since I was eight, looking for a way to beat back some
severe depression and find good reasons to keep doing normal people
things that actually feel excruciating. I’m on some meds now
that make me not feel like I’m walking around without any skin, but
I know that’s just about getting level and now I’ve got actual work
to do. I just have no idea where to go or what to do next.
I’m committed to not being a sadsack asshole anymore, and I’ve
learned so much. I’m trying to stay away from both tepid and
unhelpfully intense relationships that remind me of my fucked up
childhood. I’m looking for ways to dive deep and be okay with
metaphorical heat and darkness and actual solitude and uncertainty.
I want so much to hold on to what I like about myself—my bravery,
my depth of feeling, my brutal, nasty intelligence—while also
learning to be an actual regular person who can do things like
enjoy basic times of friends without boozing myself into maudlin
unbearableness, or getting so discouraged at my job that everyone
wonders what I’m even doing there until I get fired. It’s like
I keep figuring this shit out, and then forgetting it
immediately.
I guess, I just can’t find a good middle ground about anything?
When I imagine what my “best life” is, it’s only possible
through a time machine. I don’t want to write, or be a writer,
I want to have already published a barnstorming first novel at
seventeen that made me universally adored and celebrated. I
don’t daydream about meeting a good dude and making it work, I lose
hours imagining having never met the asshole abusers or lukewarm
Mr. All Wrongs. I’m so lonely, because I’m never as kind or
gracious to myself as I am to my friends, but every chance I get to
make a connection, I cock up with try-hard nonsense or totally
losing my shit. I try to make plans, try to remember that good
people with good lives have to work for them, but I almost always
feel like I have missed the boat for any of the normal stuff people
do or enjoy. I want to want things for myself, but can’t follow
through on anything, like I already think that I’ve failed and
should just bow out, or second guess if I really want those things
or can make them work until opportunities have sailed right on
This attitude made more sense, I guess, when my dreams were so
big they were laughable. I’m barreling down the road towards
middle age, the time to become a child prodigy or set myself on the
path to run the world or start an epic hundred-year romance are
gone. I’ve tried to lower my expectations for myself, to
accept that my big dreams, or even normal-sized ones, aren’t in the
cards, but I can’t shake the sense that what I want and what I can
achieve are so far apart that even tiny things feel beyond
Writing to you feels like a cop out, because it seems like
you’ve addressed all of these things before. But seriously, how do
you love yourself? How do you accept your flaws and strengths
and offer your best to others while trusting they will make
allowances for your worst? How do you be a person? I’m
struggling here to make any reasonable plan, or even take a simple
positive step, to being happy and whole.
I know there’s no secret, and I don’t really want to live in a
Jules Verne novel, but seriously, how does someone actually get to
a place where they can combine and use all the good advice they’ve
been given, and just live a life?
Sincerely,
I Need A Meaning I Can Memorize
Dear INAMICM,
It’s funny that I should stumble on your letter today, because
I’m sitting down for the fiftieth time to write an introduction to
a potential Ask Polly book, and I’m pretty sure that I’m going to
fail, yet again, to come up with a clear, coherent message, a
MEANING TO MEMORIZE.
Because you can’t sell a book today without a short, snappy,
memorizable meaning. I’m not sure you can sell anything without a
zippy message attached to it. Literary agents, publishers,
publicists, talent bookers, lifestyle magazine gurus, opinion page
honchos, network executives, TV producers, studio heads, investment
analysts, local politicians, world leaders, archangels, God, Yoda,
Darth Vader? They all want a concise, coherent, provocative,
urgent, necessary, salty-sweet message-nugget, and they want it
delivered from the head of the Great and Powerful Oz, flanked by
flamethrowers aimed at the sky.
At the very least, they’d like you to smile a little more often,
and flat-iron your hair.
Helpful, regular people might say to someone like me (or you!),
someone with enormous expectations and weak follow-through and
brutal, nasty intelligence and a tendency to dive into maudlin
unbearableness, “So, smile more and flat-iron your hair, for fuck’s
sake. What’s the big deal?”
What do we say to that? Because “Smile and flat-iron your hair”
is a meaning we can memorize, right? Just hide your wishy-washy
self behind the fucking curtain, aim the flamethrowers at the sky,
and speak into the Mr. Microphone with the All-Powerful Deity
effect turned on. This is what our skin-deep,dr culture appears
to want from us: distilled three-second tidings. Slap your
long-winded ass in a saucepan on medium heat until the confusion
and the second-guessing burn off, but so do the complexity and the
unanswerable philosophical questions and the soaring but somewhat
vague epiphanies.
Instead of reading like a cry for help, though, your letter
sounds almost like a mission statement. Because, even though you
feel isolated and lonely, even though you’ve drawn circles around
your so-called “bad” behaviors and said, “I need to do less of
this,” even though you’re ready to get on the “right” track and
start feeling happy and “whole,” you also paint a pretty compelling
portrait of how it feels to be a complex person in a world that
embraces forced smiles and simpleton wisdom and bulletproof
solutions, a world that kicks the wishy-washy and the maudlin to
the curb. In some ways, your letter sounds less like “Here are my
many fucking problems” and more like a kind of rallying cry for
complicated, sensitive, brutally smart human beings who crave a
meaning they can memorize but who are also severely allergic to
memorizable meanings.
Likewise, I think I’m struggling to write a general-purpose
introduction that encapsulates the kind of snappy, three-second
messages that signal a saleable product for the same reason I
struggled to tolerate annoying jobs and half-assed relationships
and passive-aggressive friendships when I was your age. I got all
weird and wishy-washy or I cocked up with try-hard nonsense or I
totally lost my shit. I knew that I should smile more and flat-iron
my hair, but even thinking about these things made me want to show
up unshowered and ramble incoherently about all of the reasons
everything in the world was bewildering and wrong. Somehow KNOWING
that there was ONE right answer only made me want to offer up five
hundred wrong answers instead.
Right now, you are the living, breathing manifestation of five
hundred wrong answers. Your letter, if you reread it with the right
spirit of appreciation, is a paean to wrong answers.
But listen, I’m not sure you have a big problem with
follow-through, or long-term commitment, or wholeness. I think your
problem is about introductions, literal and figurative. Regular
life was excruciating up until not so long ago, right? You are just
starting out on a smooth path. You clearly don’t love your career,
and maybe you suspect that your friends, what few friends you might
have, are incapable of understanding you. You haven’t really dated
a man who’s healthy yet. Give yourself a break, because you’re only
twenty-nine years old, and YOU JUST GOT HERE, to a place where
you’re not an unhinged, severely depressed, unstable human
attracting other unhinged, severely depressed, unstable humans.
Also, beginnings are not easy, precisely BECAUSE they demand that
we get behind the goddamn curtain and act like we’re simpler and
less conflicted than we are.
Just as you believe that you should somehow retool yourself to
be more resilient and optimistic and tenacious and THEN life might
be ok (but you are still, somehow, resistant to being retooled), I
imagine that any Ask Polly introduction I write will get
flat-ironed until I don’t recognize it anymore. I might start with
something dark and digressive on the outside with a chewy
optimistic center, but eventually it will be hammered into a less
dark and digressive state.
That’s a problem. Because the real value of this column and the
reason it could only thrive on the weirdo terrain of The Awl, is
that it’s exactly as unwieldy and rambling and flawed as it needs
to be in order to kick up some tiny speck of redemption. Maybe
there are coherent messages along the way (DARE TO BE “THAT WOMAN.”
KICK TEPID MEN TO THE CURB. Or my personal favorite: COME ON HIS
HAMPTON BLOUSE AND MOVE ON), but if you cut straight to that
message, why would you even care? I wouldn’t. Who wants to sound
just like every other little digestible square of upbeat text in
the world, the text of cereal boxes and lifestyle magazines and
yoga retreat pamphlets and TEDx talk summaries and organic tea
Although I do think that we’re stumbling half-blind into an era
of newfound indifference to memorizable messages and the Great and
Powerful in general, it’s hard to know what we should put in place
of the simpleton wisdom and the well-styled gurus. For example, I
just watched five new TV comedies and dramas that will air soon,
and every last pseudo-subversive one of them either features blood
and gore and worms crawling out of eyeballs, or nasty people who
insult each other and talk about masturbation and what’s going to
get them off around the clock like overgrown, angry teenagers (see
also: a real-life version of that TV show “Just ‘Batin'” from
Idiocracy.) Even when culture rejects the zippy, Live Your Best
Life, self-improvement-as-extreme-overachiever-sport messages out
there, the results aren’t all that appealing or meaningful. A few
minutes in, someone smashes someone’s head in with a tire iron or
makes some casual joke about anal sex, and the carnival’s over
before it even started.
So this is what I have to say to you: Forget easy slogans. Your
tendency to think of yourself as a damaged, sad misfit who might
never fit in or be happy, who needs to be fixed? It’s
understandable, but it needs to change. Even though you had to
identify the extreme duress of your past and locate the ways in
which thes even though you STILL need to be
wary of tepid men and intense overbearing people who will use your
scars to be even though you will probably
ALWAYS, in some tiny corner of your brain, suspect that you’re too
fucked by your circumstances and chemistry and nature to ever be a
regular person in the world with an equal shot at happiness as
everyone else, you also have to, simultaneously, try to let that
stuff go. You have to learn to take all of these ways you bungle
your introductions, with darkness and digressions, and embrace them
Because it’s pretty fucking hard to follow through with things
that start with forced smiles and flat-ironed hair. You have no way
of knowing how good or bad you are at sallying forth from a point
that feels authentic and gratifying and real, whether it’s a job or
a friendship or a love affair. Personally, I’ve been amazed at how
easy I find it to be married to someone who’s actually interested
in me, insane rambling wishy-washiness and all, and I’ve been
surprised at how hard I’m willing to work at a career that feels
meaningful (occasionally!) and offers chances for me to delve into
complex subjects without glossing or reducing or oversimplifying
(sometimes!).
You write, “It’s like I keep figuring this shit out, and then
forgetting it immediately.” That’s not your strange little personal
problem. That’s not what makes you uniquely fucked. That’s a
universal truth, a fundamental dimension of the human condition.
You know who feels that way? You, me and everyone we know. Fucking
OPRAH feels that way, or she’d have fallen asleep while
interviewing Deepak Chopra a long, long time ago.
So: We can all continue to be controlled by the ILLUSION that
this is not how it is for everybody else. We can decide that we
hate our jobs because we are SINGULARLY stubborn and lazy and
bored. We can decide that we quit things because we are UNUSUALLY
unable to deal. We can get angry at ourselves, over and over again,
because we are uncertain and full of longing. Or we can wake up and
notice that this is a common thread of human existence, easily
traceable through history (although perhaps less true of people who
had to, say, wake at dawn and plow the fields, which is why Viktor
Frankl always advocated structuring a depressed person’s day with
lots of hard labor and very little time to reflect).
Did I mention that we’re in conflict with ourselves? We’re in
conflict with ourselves because we want A MEANING WE CAN MEMORIZE,
but we also DISTRUST ALL MEANINGS, memorizable or otherwise. In
other words, we are like Goths in black leather with pretty
highlighted, flat-ironed hair. We are huffing spray paint and
watching Oprah. We are Hannah Montana, skipping and chewing bubble
gum, and we’re also Miley Cyrus, fondling Alan Thicke with a giant
foam hand. We are Julie, cruise director of “The Love Boat,”
smiling and gushing about bingo on the Lido Deck, and we’re also
Khaleesi, Mother of Dragons, growling, “I will answer injustice
with justice!”
We are angry and hopeful and disappointed and we want more. We
also blame ourselves for wanting more, as if we should’ve been
stronger inside than to be molded by a culture that trains us, from
the moment we’re conscious, to want more, more, more. As if we
could simply shut out decades of snappy three-second messages that
remind us, over and over again, of our hunger and our thirst. As if
we could endure a non-stop media barrage of sexy Amazonian humans
with flat-ironed hair who never age, repeatedly saving the day on
our big screens and saving orphaned children in our magazines and
speaking in snappy messages and trading in a five-million-dollar
beach house for a twenty-million-dollar mansion on the Italian
Riviera every few milliseconds. As if we could encounter these
frothy, airbrushed fairy tales for most of our lives and emerge
feeling peaceful and satisfied with our frizzy hair and our
imperfect love lives and our mountains of debt.
Of course you don’t want to write. Who wants to sit and try at
something and rarely get paid for it and possibly fail at it? I
don’t want to do it a lot of the time. We all wish we’d published a
barnstorming first novel at seventeen that made us universally
adored and celebrated. OK, I would’ve been fine with that
happening at age thirty-seven, actually. Age forty-seven would be
ok with me, too.
But I also know that I wouldn’t be completely satisfied with
that. Even if I were to publish a brilliant bestselling novel, I’d
be halfway through the book tour (hating it, like the fucking
ingrate I am), and I’d already be wondering if I’d ever publish
anything half as brilliant as my first novel. I’d already be
plagued by worry over whether I could pull it off all over
And even though there are some people reading this who are
thinking, “OH FUCK YOU PEOPLE, I WOULDN’T BE LIKE THAT AT ALL, I’D
FUCKING ENJOY EVERY MINUTE OF UNEXPECTED LITERARY SUCCESS!” most of
those people would be running in some other form of tiny circle,
worrying about something else, like we all do.
The only thing you gain as you get older is the ability to look
around you and say, “This is pretty much what I get, and I’m not
going to have this forever. I’d better really enjoy it.” But don’t
get me wrong, I’m not all peaceful and satisfied. I’m just thrilled
to be more peaceful and satisfied than I was ten years ago. I can
go on vacation without getting twitchy. I can hang out with my kids
without playing Candy Crush or impatiently scanning the news,
sometimes.
What I’m trying to tell you is that life is fucking hard and
messy for everyone, and there is no quick way to memorize a little
motto or jingle that will see you through the messiness and the
melancholy. No one will save you. No one will make you feel whole.
I personally knew a guy who published a barnstorming first novel at
seventeen that made him universally adored and celebrated, and his
life has been a rollercoaster of highs and lows since then, just
like the rest of us. I don’t know if he’s happy or sad, but he
definitely never wrote another novel. (That might mean he’s very
happy, mind you. I don’t know. But that first celebrated novel
certainly didn’t solve everything.)
Success at writing rarely adds up to anything you can touch. You
either write because you enjoy writing or (more commonly) you like
how it feels to have written something. These are merely things you
do with yourself. Even if, by some miracle, you become Jennifer
Egan overnight, you still have to face the same question: Do I want
to practice my craft today or not? Can I find meaning here? Does it
feel good to do this, even when I fall short? Can I accept that I
will usually fall short, that it takes a ton of work to gently
massage a bad thing until it becomes a good one?
Because even though you might think you don’t want to work hard
at anything, I think you’re wrong. You worked very, very hard to
get here. Clearly, you enjoy hard work a lot.
Go watch that documentary about Jerry Seinfeld returning to
stand-up comedy after making something like eight hundred million
dollars from his sitcom. Because in the end, even for a megarich
megastar, it’s all about craft. And WHAT is harder than trying to
make a joke funny enough to make a room full of people—PEOPLE
SKEPTICAL ABOUT MILLIONAIRES—laugh? Why would Seinfeld try to do
something THAT DIFFICULT, that embarrassing and possibly
catastrophic? Because the alternative was to retreat to Neverland
and hire a doctor with a fondness for propofol.
If you’re not dodging chemical bombs or walking five miles
through the desert heat to find potable water, you have to wake up
and shut off your bad brain and work. When your work is done, you
have to figure out how to shut off your bad brain and relax. You
have to recognize and accept, in your bones, that accomplishing
everything you’ve ever dreamed of (like Seinfeld) feels a little
bit like never having accomplished anything. You will still have to
inject meaning into your life every day, somehow, some way.
Speaking of “celebrity” profiles, the other day I saw a teaser
for a TV special about that guy who says “Let’s get ready to
rrrrrrumble!” at big events. In the teaser, Rumble Guy describes
that fateful day when he tried out a bunch of different stupid
catchphrases, and landed on the one that was stupid enough that
stupid people might get all frothed up every time they heard it.
Then Rumble Guy’s brother, who is or was his manager, talked about
how they were extremely strategic about building a gigantic fortune
around this one stupid catchphrase. I assume they made sure that NO
ONE ELSE COULD EVER SAY this stupid catchphrase, except for Rumble
Guy. That way Rumble Guy could spend the rest of his life flying
around the country, uttering this one stupid catchphrase, and then
taking home a giant bag of cash.
In contrast to the Seinfeld documentary, this story epitomizes
the absurd Dr. Seuss-like world we inhabit today. Because not only
did Rumble Guy have the gall to trademark his shitty catchphrase,
not only did he have the gall to charge millions for it, but he
also had the gall to sit around in front of the camera and smugly
discuss what a fucking genius he was for coming up with that one
enchantingly idiotic idea—not even an idea, really, but a string of
five pointless words. I don’t mean Rumble Guy is a bad guy. Of
course not. But can you FUCKING IMAGINE being that guy, and happily
riding the fumes of something that stupid for the rest of your
It takes a special kind of a person to do that. And honestly,
when you present me with your string of difficult questions, this
is what I think about. I think about hard work and the ability to
suspend your disbelief, how those two things are really what
constitute follow-through—with love, with your career, with your
friends. You ask me, “How do you love yourself? How do you
accept your flaws and strengths and offer your best to others while
trusting they will make allowances for your worst? How do
you be a person? I’m struggling here to make any reasonable
plan, or even take a simple positive step, to being happy and
whole.” All of these things mostly boil down to hard work and
suspending your disbelief. You have to be a little bit like Jerry
Seinfeld and you have to be a little bit like the Rumble Guy.
Because even though one guy gets up in the morning and does
something really challenging and maybe even embarrassing (and then,
yes, eats delicious fucking meals and flies places in his private
jet) and the other guy just mutters five empty words (and also,
yes, eats delicious fucking meals and flies places in his private
jet), both of those guys know how to do something very important:
They know how to shut off the part of their brains that say things
like “Oh my god, I made the world’s best sitcom and maybe I’ll
never create anything that good for the rest of my life!” and also
“Oh my god, I’m just a cheesy dude with a spraytan and a growly
It goes without saying that these people have their problems. We
all do. Do they love themselves? Do they offer their best to
others? Can they make plans? Are they happy and whole? Who the fuck
knows? What the fuck is “whole”? What does happiness look like,
exactly? They do what they do and they don’t question it. Or, they
mute the questions for just long enough to get ‘er done.
THAT SAID, my guess is that you won’t be able to suspend your
disbelief and shut off your bad brain until you let your disbelief
and your bad brain have their time to shine. Again, you are
grappling with introductions, with trying to appear smooth and kind
and not-maudlin and never-brutal. What you really need is space to
be maudlin but not unbearable, brutal but not nasty, dark and
digressive but not self-destructive, rambling and vague but not
impossibly self-involved. You are a good writer and you should
write more, because it will allow you the time and space you need
to let everything out. In my opinion, when you’re complicated and
smart and damaged and sensitive and self-conscious, you can’t just
“accept” your flaws, you have to embrace them.
Embracing your flaws is, paradoxically, closely related to
suspending your disbelief. It’s about rejecting the snappy message
that the world wants snappy messages. It’s about daring to be
fucking “dr” in order to also access “win” and “yaaasss” and the
You will never be the polished, one-dimensional person this
world desires. Let the world have their airbrushed, frothy
sloganeers. You need to make messes and embarrass yourself. When
you stick your neck out and open up and embarrass yourself, lots of
people will find you intolerable, because lots of people don’t like
half-formed, wishy-washy, scattered introductions. The more you
accept that and let your hair down anyway, the less you’ll
compulsively try too hard, hide, drink too much, hate yourself,
cock it all up, etc.
You must stop trying to fix things, and start trying to love
what’s not completely fixed. You must be flawed and scattered, in
as active a way as possible. Your work is to find some place for
flaws and maudlin scatteredness. Find your own craft, and maybe
even find your own messy fucking catchphrase, too.
In fact, maybe snappy messages and catchphrases aren’t so bad
after all. Maybe we hate them because most of them feel so
willfully blind to how it feels to be a person in the world. But
maybe you can cobble together a message that you really believe in.
Maybe you can look at what you fear the most in yourself, and love
that part of you instead. You may not feel love, but you will be
resolved to show yourself love anyway. You will stop using harsh
terms to summarize your glory — your unique, off-kilter glory. Or
maybe you’ll still use harsh terms but you’ll imbue them with
glory, somehow. You’ll appropriate the most soul-sucking messages
that were ever used against you: YOU WILL COME ON THEIR HAMPTON
BLOUSE AND MOVE ON.
Let yourself ramble. Let out the full scope of who you are. Find
your own meaning, and memorize it. Let your meaning be scrappy and
misshapen enough that you can feel love for it. Get up in the
morning and open the window and say:
I AM MAUDLIN AND BRUTAL AND BRAVE.
Say it like you mean it, until you mean it. Suspend your
disbelief. Then get to work. Let your flaws lead you past the
awkward beginnings, past the skin-deep introductions, past the
clumsy trying-too-hard greetings, to the good part, to the bad
part, to the real thing. Just keep moving forward, breathing in and
out, trusting that darkness and digressions will lead you to love,
bright and pure and real. Follow your best intentions and your
worst fears and feel how excruciating it can be, to simply endure
the beating of your tender heart. It hurts, and you’re exhausted.
Look around you: Everything is beautiful, right now. Smudgy and
melancholy and incomplete and unbearably beautiful.
Are you a three-second memorizable message and want to
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
(Riverhead 2011). She blogs
about scratchy pants,
personality disorders, and aged cheeses.
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
about scratchy pants, personality disorders, and aged cheeses.}