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

by Heather Havrilesky

I want you to think about what it would be like if you ever lost her, how much that would crush you like a bug into the ground, and how much you’d regret your behavior right now. I want you to expect that she will upstage you, accept it, and find a way to enjoy your imperfect day anyway. Because you won’t have another shot at sharing your big day with grace and generosity and kindness.

At your wedding, just be as generous and gracious and kind as you can possibly be. Nothing could be more beautiful than that.

By filling our heads with Shower Fresh–scented fantasy worlds, we not only start to expect too much but we also become easily bored with the real world and its very real magic. Or, we imagine that we can only exist in the real world if we fill our heads with magical distractions. We create relationships that aren’t based on real compatibilities but on the crazy mixed-up tapestries that we ourselves constructed in our overactive minds.

What I mean is that rich tapestries block out the magic of real moments. Rich tapestries block out real people—love interests, but also other people who matter. Rich tapestries compromise friendships, and they block us from our career goals, and they blot out the sun. They train us to think that the only scene that’s full color in our lives is the scene with the dude in it.

You have to train yourself to romanticize a life outside of men and create a tapestry that’s just as rich without a guy in it. That requires a kind of buoyant solitude that isn’t easy to achieve.

But this is also about living in the moment, isn’t it? That’s something we all have to learn to do, whether we’re alone or not. That requires powering down all of the fantastical imagined things we’ll have one day and just soaking in this moment instead.

The world has told you lies about how small you are. You will look back on this time and say, “I had it all, but I didn’t even know it. I was at the center, I could breathe in happiness, I could swim to the moon. I had everything I needed.”

The bigger point: Groups can’t fulfill your every need. Your spouse can’t single-handedly bring you happiness. Your best female friend can’t save you from being alone. Your group of college friends won’t feel perfectly right for you when you’re in a certain mood. There will always be discrepancies between you and your friends where priorities and lifestyle are concerned. So don’t let it prevent you from forging new connections.

I will not lose myself. I can earn money and create art, too.

We have to be self-protective but still vulnerable. Does that sound impossible? Sometimes it is. But here’s how it works: You don’t put yourself in situations where you’re going to cycle through bluster and neediness.

When you’re defensive about your choices, that makes other people less accepting of those choices, too.

But you do have to recognize that people like you—and me, and lots of people out there—will always feel some tension between themselves and the world. We’re tempted to provoke, to deliberately rub people the wrong way. We do this because we’re pissed that the world isn’t kind to us. We’re sick of being treated badly just because we have unusual preferences and strong opinions and we talk a little too much. It’s easier to go against the grain if you’re thick-skinned, but we’re not. We’re sensitive. And nothing is quite as hard as being a sensitive, aggressive weirdo.

It gets easier when you surrender a little, when you let down your defenses. It gets easier when you allow yourself to be vulnerable. You don’t have to make a pitch. You can tell the truth.

Resist the urge to reveal every inch of yourself—or to invite people to your place—immediately. Let them get to know you gradually. Practice sitting still in the presence of someone whose disappointment and lack of interest are becoming palpable. Sit with it instead of trying to convince them otherwise. Sit with it instead of getting defensive or angry.

A lot of people won’t be into you. You will feel the pain of that for your entire life, trust me. You really should accept it and learn to deal with it—not by shutting people out or becoming defensive or rigid, but by (paradoxically!) allowing people space to feel however they happen to feel and making small adjustments to how you move through the world based on what feels good and what doesn’t.

Some people believe that every aggressive sexual act or unwelcome advance adds up to the same thing. My personal feeling is that context and attitude matter a great fucking deal, both in how we define an act and in how quickly we might be expected to “recover” from it.

When you know what you want, you have to keep your heart and your eyes wide open. You have to be willing to fall in love, but you also have to be willing to step back and say, “No way, this is not a good choice for me,” before it’s too late.

This is one of those well-intentioned things that parents get dramatically wrong, over and over again. It doesn’t take overt body shaming, either. All it takes is being a parent who sees a kid’s decisions as a natural extension of his or her own. “I would stop eating right now, so you should, too. I would try my damnedest to be skinnier, so you’d better try your damnedest, too.” It’s like trying to turn your children into an extension of yourself, instead of welcoming the fact that they are completely different and separate and independent.

As a parent, you do have to constantly remind yourself that you are not a god, molding a human in your own image. You are merely supporting whatever your child chooses to become, even if those choices don’t always thrill you. It’s easy enough to embrace and support a toddler who loves dolphins or playing house. It’s harder to accept and appreciate a fully grown human who has her own body and her own ideas.

As women, we often want to bend and adjust and please other people first, and then we find ourselves resenting it.

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.

Your bitterness is caused by the notion that these men form one all-powerful, critical OZ that thinks you’re not good enough. Everything you do during the day backs this up. You are rejectable. Look at how you fuck things up. Look how not cute enough you are. Look how grumpy. Look how not attractive your attitude can be. You have to quiet the bad OZ voices, during the day and at night. Stop pushing back against a phantom. You are not a ghost; this creation of yours is. Maybe it’s an echo of something from your childhood. Maybe it’s just a bad cognitive habit you’ve had for a while.

And when you finally find the right person for you, it will feel effortless. It will feel right. It won’t be perfect, but it will still be worlds apart from these other relationships you’ve had.

Painting someone as weak or pathetic for feeling hurt or overwhelmed or heartbroken is inexcusable. It’s antihuman. This world is filled with people who think feeling less, being indifferent, makes you strong. Don’t believe that. Be one of the smart, thoughtful people who stands up for sensitive people. When you stand up for sensitive, hurt people, you’re also standing up for vulnerability and authenticity and true love.

Other people will always appear to move with dedication and consequence. How else does a person behave when people are watching? We all pretend that our decisions and accomplishments took us in a straight line forward, decisively moving from one success to the next. We gloss over that year wasted looking at old photos or washing our hardwood floors over and over, wishing that we’d create something of consequence instead. We don’t mention the year we started and stopped three different screenplays or furiously typed out bad poetry at our go-nowhere temp jobs.

This is how it begins. This is when a personality trait becomes a corporate body with rights. You simply resolve to believe in your experience, to make something out of those feelings. You simply decide that the world doesn’t fit you quite right, it’s not that comfortable, and it never will be. And yes, let’s admit that other people sometimes do move with more dedication and consequence, especially compared with those of us who are slowed down by this need to write it down, to turn it into something real. Other people can focus on the bottom line, which is uplifting and uncomplicated. Other people can simply trill, “Great, I’ll be kissable for the holidays!” But because these people have it a little easier than us, because they’re not moving through molasses every few days, because they don’t overthink things or feel crazy emotions they never intended to feel, because they can keep the world at arm’s length and suspend their disbelief and run with the pack and be team players and all of the other stuff that our dim-witted, reductive culture demands, WE GET TO CALL OURSELVES ARTISTS.

Artists are always misfits. Even when you plant them in artist colonies, they feel like the misfits among other misfits. That misfit energy is good.

There is the artist, and then there’s this pragmatic person within you who bails you out when you’re drowning. Don’t let the artist fuck with what the pragmatist is trying to do. But do let the artist take up a lot of space. Let the artist call herself an artist, even to her parents’ skeptical friends. Practice saying it out loud to exactly the people who are the most likely to think you’re a fucking joke.

You’re an artist if you create art, period. You’re a writer if you write. First, you have to claim the title. You can’t work hard until you claim the right. (For women, I think, that’s particularly true.)

Artists, pretentious or not, blustery and swaggery or self-abnegating, need to find their faith in their work all over again, every morning of their lives. You need to ...

You want other things besides your art. But don’t even think about throwing your art aside. Don’t think for a second that it’s a liability, a personality flaw, just an extra thing that you need, that slows you down, that regular people don’t need.

This way station, this troubling pause, this return to nowhere land, is also a victory.

Maybe I’m less likable now than I was then. Maybe in the intervening years, I’ve willed my personality flaws into a corporate body with rights. I don’t have to mumble an apology and feel ashamed of myself. I know that I deserve to take up space.

That was the year I realized I was a bright, burning light, and no fucking insect was going to persuade me to hate myself for it.

This was the year that you really knew that you were an artist, first and foremost. This was the year you committed to what came next.

And somehow, as soon as you stopped waiting, as soon as you started doing things, making things, claiming your own space, speaking up for yourself? That’s when your real life began.

People are so delusional about talent, as if you’re either pure magic or made of nothing. You know which people think that way? Talentless people. Those who strive, who create, who try, who work hard? They know that about 50 percent of talent comes from working your ass off and the other 50 percent comes from cultivating an extreme arrogance around your particular flavors of genius.

As long as you’re walking around saying you don’t have it, then you don’t. And having it is sometimes as easy as saying, “DAMN I’M GOOD,” over and over again.

I don’t think you were made to follow men around, to wait for their cues, and to cower in the presence of creative people. I think you’re doing these things out of habit. You think it’s audacious to stand up for your talents, to boldly proclaim yourself a writer and take the life that you want and tell the life you don’t want to fuck off. Listen, it doesn’t matter if every human on the planet would kill for your job. If you don’t want it, then to hell with it.

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.”

You will work tirelessly and take pride in your tireless work.

Working on your music gives you a sense of purpose and identity and makes you happy. That is the very definition of success. There is nothing else.

Ego rewards and praise are nice, but you can’t carry them with you or ingest them and that positive glow you get from them fades no matter what. You are still just you, a talented artist who wants to create, every day. An artist who wants to work very hard, who wants to exceed yesterday’s high-water mark and create something even more entrancing and seductive and glorious.

So stop waiting for the future to arrive. You are here. You are a success.

So stop it with the self-defeating talk. Start making victorious sounds, and the world will rush in to greet you with more enthusiasm.

Likewise, it’s extremely self-defeating to believe that you have to choose between art and love.

once. I don’t think you should have to sacrifice love for art, or art for love.

Your life is happening now.

You have to make a commitment to your dreams. Don’t let yourself put your dreams second. Don’t let the attitudes of the people you work with, now or later, inform you on how “foolish” or “impractical” your dreams are. You have to keep your dreams safe from skeptics. You have to feed them until they grow into something that can’t be doubted anymore.

Someone should really poll women in their late twenties who live in great cities with great boyfriends and have great careers, because I’ll bet a lot of them are nearly friendless.