17 pieces of good advice from 2017

Last year on the second day of 2017, I tweeted a long thread of “bad advice.” That is: things I had learned that year, and throughout life, but framed The Hard Way. Instead of saying, “call your mom just to talk about nothing sometimes,” it would be, “never call your mother except when you are on the verge of physical and emotional disintegration.”

I phrased it the negative and self-deprecating way because it was funny and suggestive, but also because saying, “call your mom just to talk about nothing sometimes” seemed preachy and deceptively well-informed from a person who had only recently discovered mom-calls about nothing.

Over the course of 2017, and especially in its last six months, I filled a note on my phone with a year’s worth of new, bad advice. I mined my year for bits of growth, foots placed in mouth, and other glorious little blunders, especially the ones with a good laugh at my expense. But as I started assembling them into tweet form, I quickly tired of framing them from the hands of an idiot. I do stupid things all the time, of course, but somehow condensing my year into a series of unforgiving tweets has lost its charm. Whether my friends found any charm in this to begin with, I cannot say!

It’s been a long year and I’m too tired to undermine myself so that I can feel comfortable giving earnest advice (as if those things cancel out). It’s been a long year and somehow I survived with more good advice than bad. So here it is.

Good advice from 2017:

1

You can give people the love and support that you secretly need and wait for them to give it back. Or you can ask for the love and support you need and let people answer you honestly if they don’t have it.

2

Don’t talk about twitter dot com out loud to anyone. Ever!

3

People make big generalizations based on relatively small and unreliable patterns. For example, if you’ve been broken up with three times, you may start to believe, based on only three experiences in your life, that you will always be the one who is broken up with. You may start to think (based on only three experiences in your life) that there are two kinds of people: people who leave and people who stay. You may even subconsciously ascribe a whole lot of virtue to being the type of person who stays.

As it turns out, there are no such categories and we each contain multitudes, including the ability to leave and to stay. And: being the one who leaves isn’t less painful, it just hurts in a different way. In some ways it’s harder, even, because while feeling wronged is an escalator out of the pit of sorrow, feeling that you have wronged someone will take you into the heart of sorrow. I understand I’m one of the last people on earth to learn this one but in my defense I watched a lot of rom coms at an impressionable age.

4

If you’re going to eat crow, the self-righteous kind tastes worst.

5

Day drinking should be in the same category as recreational hallucinogens, and by that I mean: if you suspect you’re going to have a bad time, if you’re with people you don’t know or trust, or if every one of you is just as fucked up as the other, you will have a bad time.

6

Believe yourself the first or second time you check the presentation for typos. Certainly don’t check it “one last time” in the minute before the client arrives. Generally: Don’t look too hard for mistakes you couldn’t fix anyway. That is called torture.

7

Not thinking about it doesn’t mean you’re over it. Thinking about it doesn’t mean you’re not over it.

8

You may think it will be fine to take a red eye and go right to work after you land, but it will not be fine. Ending your vacation with essentially a two-day hangover of exhaustion and neck stiffness is cruel. Prioritize the more expensive flight in your budget and your wellbeing as a concept.

9

If you find yourself explaining how you feel and then immediately explaining why you don’t deserve to feel that way, take a step back. You don’t need to qualify how you feel. You can feel a way that is plainly unfair and absurd but if you deal with it in a healthy, thoughtful way no one gets hurt. You’re not helping anyone by denying the feelings that are complicated, least of all yourself. Let your feelings live.

10

For the last two years I’ve been trying to distill my taste (in everything) to its finest point because I thought adulthood was knowing how you feel about everything. It is not.

This life is so full of variety. There is no virtue in shutting out experimentation and discovery, or in re-ordering the same scented candle every three months. Your tastes should be free to change like the slow, constant redecorating of a home. Donate an old lamp, hang up a new painting. Open the windows and let it all breathe.

11

Furthermore:

1. I think a lot about how publicizing everything we do encourages us to make our tastes presentable in a way we otherwise wouldn’t (I am speaking directly to Spotify private sessions).
2. I also think about how living in a (barf noises) “cultural epicenter,” like New York and the Internet, makes me feel somehow behind on both history and the present. It makes me feel unqualified to have opinions without first getting approval from a vast, diverse cultural body including all of human history and all of twitter dot com.
3. But:

• Nobody has to live in the house of your tastes but you.
• It is unlikely your taste will be prosecuted the way you (I) fear, and;
• If you do meet someone who prosecutes your taste and makes you feel ashamed, maybe un-meet them, because;
• Life is too short to feel bad about what you like, or worse, to pretend you don’t like it at all.

12

“I’m an open book!” is not a dating strategy. It’s not.

13

There are pains in this life that, to varying degrees, diminish with repetition: apologies, waxing, even (some) breakups. There are other pains that you can’t prepare for, that will knock you off your feet. Lean into the ones that get better. You never know when you’ll meet the other kind, but if you avoid life’s small necessary pains, you’ll live with more fear than anyone should, and vastly underestimate how tough you’d be with practice.

14

If your back hurts see a chiropractor. Broadly: Don’t underestimate the most obvious solution.

15

Anxiety sounds like intuition. It sounds like your mom’s voice. It sounds like your best friend’s voice. It sounds like every voice, even yours. Remember that and keep talking back. It gets better.

16

Your friends are right about that man in the mystical way that women are always right about the men they aren’t involved with and often wrong about the ones they are involved with.

17

We, and by “we” I mean the young millennial “we,” are each building ourselves in a different image of adulthood, I think based loosely around the adults we respected or were made to respect as kids. There is, therefore, no singular or superior “adulthood,” only millions of versions absorbed by impressionable minds and projected back into the world later by slightly less impressionable minds. It’s good to remember this, with compassion, when you look at your friends, when you look all around, when you look in the mirror and wonder where the adults are.