18 Pieces of Advice from 2018

This all started two years ago, when I kicked off 2017 with a moderately unhinged Twitter tirade of bad advice — real lessons I learned the hard way throughout my life, but especially in the preceding year.

It was fun but at my expense, so when 2017 came to an end, the whole bad advice thing had lost its charm. It wasn’t a sustainable annual re-cap approach. Instead, as I greeted 2018, I wrote a list of 17 things I learned in 2017.

It made me feel good about the year, myself, and lists. So here we are again.

2018 was a long year but I think all years feel long when you’re standing in the immediate aftermath, trying to make something coherent (like a list) out of it all. Here’s what I’ve got:

1

If you’re going to tell someone how you feel, just say it. Agonizing over the least suggestive wording will dilute the truth and burn the patience of your listener. You can be thoughtful and intentional without losing your voice. It gets easier with practice.

2

Of all the dangerous desires burning deep in your heart, getting bangs is a fairly harmless one to ultimately regret.

3

It’s okay that you didn’t smoke weed in high school.

4

Ignore the size on the tag and buy what fits. This advice is shockingly versatile; most clothing brands and people are slightly off in their own explanations of who and what they are, so just go with what feels true. Of course, this means trying more things on, which is good advice for both clothing and people anyway.

5

Most people are afraid, on some level, in some way, that they are not good enough and most people who feel this way pretend not to. Then you look around at everyone else pretending not to feel inadequate, and wonder if you’re the only person in the world who isn’t good enough.

I haven’t found a fool-proof method for disappearing fear, but calling it what it is, paradoxically, helps. So does asking, earnestly, “What am I afraid of? Why?” When you acknowledge these feelings, you’ll start to see them in nearly everyone else and that will give you compassion for others and for yourself.

6

Slide into the DMs of your longest running crush and see what happens. You may end up looking at the person next to you and thinking, “I cannot believe this happened.”

7

Through diligent research, I have discovered that drinking many different liquors in one night will indeed make your hangover worse. This seemingly becomes truer every year, but the study is ongoing.

8

When the news and ~content~ cycle moves as quickly as it does, participating in the internet world can become a Sisyphean exercise, in which you must consume, process, and comment on absolutely every idea, no matter how fleeting, lest you vanish from the discourse entirely — the horror.

When you feel especially tired by the churn of nowness, try watching or reading something old. Remember that there are many enduringly good things on this earth which you can enjoy at leisure, without obligation to make commentary out of enjoyment. Exhale.

9

Another note about the internet: It’s fun to pick obscure hills to die on because obscurity feels a lot like genius when you’re shouting it to the twitterverse. That is until you wind up all alone on some hill where you’ve promised to die, and no one is there to reassure you of your genius. You don’t need to die like this. Just rest.

10

Food is a primal joy and thus one that shares well. Consider budgeting your appetite and finances to include a “for the table” dish when you eat out in groups. Cacio e Pepe, “for the table.” Pancakes, “for the table.” Later, to-go boxes, “for the table.”

11

Leave them on read. Step into your power. In other words: Many strains of bullshit are not worth a response.

12

People often tie up intelligence with cynicism and hypercriticism, but you will get much further in life if you reject this association. Yes: It’s vulnerable, and by some lights embarrassing to maintain optimism, especially for yourself. But if you can’t cheer for the good stuff, you can’t expect anyone to cheer for you.

13

Post a cute picture of yourself without using your caption as a quasi-apology! There’s simply no need, and these things don’t cancel out anyway.

14

Replace the broken or badly decaying thing that you’ve been meaning to replace for years — a flatiron that started melting in 2014 and has burned you thrice with molten plastic, for example. At this point, you are choosing to suffer. Respect yourself.

15

If you’ve already imagined the worst-case scenario in your head … then it won’t be any worse than that! Plus: You’ve already prepared for the worst by thinking about it! Detach from hypothetical catastrophe. H/T my therapist.

16

Letting someone love you is letting them see you in your entirety, not just the flattering angles. You can trade perfectly composed, 280 character versions of yourself for a while but eventually, you must slap the whole damn anthology on the table and let them read. Perhaps their review is occasionally unflattering — but then it challenges you to become a better person. Perhaps it’s glowing and warms your whole body like a bath of affirmation and security. It will be both but the former is well worth the latter. Besides, you can’t keep up your illusions of smoothness indefinitely, and once you shrug them off, you realize that we’re all just pretending to be cool anyway, most of us unconvincingly.

17

If you have an opportunity, but you don’t feel qualified to take it, try this radical approach: take it.

The way that you become qualified, for anything, is by doing it.

And: Many people who are concerned with their qualifications lock themselves out of well-deserved opportunities they could totally manage, even with a learning curve. Meanwhile, people who are unbothered by qualifications, often out of entitlement, rise to the top because they confidently placed their hats in the ring. Take the leap, tell your friends.

18

When you’ve had your heart broken and your feelings hurt and your work killed and your toes stepped on … you can at once become very aware of all the ways things go wrong, and a little numb to the sensation of rightness. Fight that. Keep asking for rightness from yourself and other people. When it happens, when you feel it, don’t let it pass without basking. A fleeting moment in a crowd of loved ones, the calm in a morning without alarms — enjoy it with perspective. Don’t forget the fight it took to get there. Say to yourself, “Yes, this is so nice. This is so right.”