What If This Were Enough?: Essays

by Heather Havrilesky

More powerful than the outright lies we’re told, though, are the subtler, broader poisons of our culture, how we ingest and metabolize them until they feel like a part of us, yet we still can’t figure out why we’re sick. Some of these poisons lie in the most unexpected places: among our principles and values, in our private hopes and dreams, in our fears and anxieties about how we should be living and what we might never achieve, in our long-held notions of what we do and don’t deserve and what we should and should not accept.

Instead of toggling between victory and defeat, we have to learn to live in the middle, in the gray area, where a real life can unfold on its own time. We have to breathe in reality instead of distracting ourselves around the clock. We have to open our eyes and our hearts to each other. We have to connect with what already is, who we already are, what we already have.

But catching a buzz is not the point at a gathering like this one. In fact, the point is to avoid catching a buzz. Sure, these professional adults once used to drink too much and say the wrong things, when they were much younger. But they’ve accumulated enough experience over the years to realize that the more appropriate thing is to resist such an impulse, to file down their more unsightly edges, to blend in. It’s not that they don’t still have unpopular opinions and bad urges. They’re just mature enough to know these things make people uncomfortable, end friendships, hijack careers.

Obviously, as an advice columnist, I’m often at risk of becoming part of the problem. I tell people to believe in the lives they really want, to set their expectations high and strive tirelessly to achieve their dreams. But I also want to say to them, time after time, that there is no “better version” of you waiting in the future. The best version of you is who you are right here, right now, in this fucked-up, impatient, imperfect, sublime moment. Shut out the noise and enjoy exactly who you are and what you have, right here, right now.