How to Be a Person in the World: Ask Polly's Guide Through the Paradoxes of Modern Life

by Heather Havrilesky

Sadly, becoming an adult often requires learning to negotiate with devils.

People who stand up for themselves are magnetic—partly because most people don’t. Whether or not you can feel it yet, you’ve just joined us here, where the once broken and the shamed and the damaged stand together and say, “Other people’s ignorance and casual rejection don’t define me. I know who I am.”

Because tepid is everywhere. Tepid is the air we breathe. Listen to me: We women can’t do anything right. We can’t say what we mean, we can’t be ourselves, we can’t age, we can’t talk about feelings, we can’t fuck up. This is how it feels to be a woman, motherfucker. The world is filled with human beings who want us to shut up and shake our asses—the end.

In order to tell tepid to fuck off once and for all, you MUST recognize that life among those who don’t appreciate or understand you is bullshit. You don’t want to live that way. You don’t want to be badgery and lonely while you’re with someone. You’d rather be alone.

You have to do a lot. And you have to do it all against a backdrop of indifference that, as you get older, curdles into a kind of disgust. But you know what? We have each other. We have worlds within us, you and me. This mean, mean planet still rewards those who can see the depth and beauty of what they carry around inside of themselves. This indifferent landscape will rise up and give you love if you share what you have inside, if you dare to believe in your potential even as people tell you it’s a mirage, if you ignore the ones who are allergic to free-flowing, emotional discourse from you. They are everywhere, and they don’t matter. God bless them.

Instead of digging into the reasons for this state of affairs, instead treating it as your personal fucking responsibility to root out the problem and eradicate it, instead of redoubling your efforts to be more lovable and better, always approaching some infinite ideal of the whip-smart but easygoing professional with a body like a fuck doll, you need to take a good look at yourself and accept what you see. When it comes to love, at least, you must try to stop being or seeming “better.” You need to accept exactly who you are and stop wishing it would change, that you’d be more palatable to the masses.

As long as you aim to please men, you don’t. The second you decide to please yourself, guess what? Everybody wants a slice of that action.

You are going to fall in love with what you have and fall in love with who you are. Do not take the so-called bad or wrong things about you, that boyfriends or men or even women have told you, and try to “get rid” of those things. Put that stuff on the list right next to the stuff you’re proud of. “Cried after hearing the ‘Hugs Are Fun’ song on Yo Gabba Gabba!” “Slipped on the stairs and wondered if my landlord thought I was drunk, then craved a drink.” “Bailed on the dinner party and made mac and cheese out of a box instead, and it was awesome.”

Because once you build your own religion around gratitude and pride in who you are, at your best and at your worst, you’ll feel better than you ever have before. It will only seem natural for people to want to be closer to you.

When you resist your own rawness and pain, you only create more pain for yourself.

You’re so good at being GOOD. But how good are you at being YOU?

Stop being grateful for scraps. Everything good in my life has surged forth from one crucial moment or another when I said, “I am not settling for these scraps anymore. I want more than this for myself.”

When you have been “good” for years—stayed loyal to your husband for a long time, been a helpful partner, fulfilled the demands of your career, showed up for your friends—it’s totally natural for something deep inside you to crave wildness and darkness and things that you haven’t been able to even acknowledge for ages. Your soul might want to let in some of the seemingly BAD emotions: anger and resentment and selfishness. I’m not talking about kicking kittens, either. I’m talking about acknowledging a desire to be alone, to be seen as a separate person, to go to a party without a mate by your side, to make art, to write angry things, to learn a new language, to complain, to dye your hair a new color, to wear tall boots, to play guitar, to tell people to go away, to be a little bigger and pushier than you were before.