21 Pieces of Advice from 2021
Welcome to the fifth annual installment of “Advice from [Year].”
By now, I have a system. Every January, I start a new note on my phone. As the months go on, I type out passing thoughts in the back of an uber, or when my dinner date takes a restroom break, or when I can’t sleep. Usually, I get to December with a handful of coherent musings and I come up with the rest over the last few weeks of the year. But in 2021, my list was basically complete by the end of October.
This was a humbling and fruitful year for me in terms of learning and also in terms of everything!
It’s been nice thinking of my life this way for so many years, though. That is: as if there’s a point to everything. As if all the seemingly disparate incidents of failure and triumph that make up a life, are actually working together for some greater end, and even the petty things — passing frustrations and tiny joys — are part of that larger curriculum.
I don’t know what your year was like, but I hope that between the tiny joys and passing frustration of it all, you caught a glimpse or two of the big picture. Here’s what I learned.
1
Failure is embarrassing. But the best, most interesting people on earth have probably made a few incredible mistakes — fucked up beyond repair, scraped it back together, and carried on the wiser. Life is a lot easier (and more interesting) if you consider that a permission slip.
2
These days, getting caught behind the commentary curve is unfashionable at best and problematic at worst. It’s not surprising that we pretend to understand complicated or unfamiliar topics with a cursory-at-best grasp of the situation. But rushing to an opinion after reading 2 headlines or the review of a book you ordered and didn’t open, only reinforces the expectation that we should all know everything all the time.
I think unselfconscious curiosity is one of the best traits we can cultivate in ourselves and seek out in others. How chic and liberating to say, “I haven’t heard about that, but I’d love to learn more.”
3
It is so unfair that our most formative experiences of heartbreak usually happen when we’re not even fully formed ourselves. It’s not that it gets better as you get older — it gets worse! Because, of course, when you know yourself, the connection is more real and more painful to lose. But one of many silver linings to getting older is that at least when your heart gets broken as an adult, you have more tools at your disposal to fix it, not least of them that deeper understanding of yourself. I guess the lesson here is that bad things keep happening, but we get better at dealing with them, and that’s truly the best we can hope for.
4
You can learn to like martinis.
5
One of the more revealing experiences I’ve had was in my early 20s, when I realized I didn’t like a man I was dating because he liked me too much. At that time in my life, I simply did not trust the judgment of someone who liked me more readily than I liked me. Dark!
The things is: while love is something you have to find with the right people, it is not something you should have to earn, from anyone. Being loved is not a test you must pass, or a reward to prove yourself worthy of.
If you find yourself pursuing relationships, of any kind, where you are constantly working to “earn” approval or affection, ask yourself why.
6
Speak to yourself the way you speak to your friends.
7
Don’t spend time with people who don’t speak to you the way you speak to them.
8
It is also worth considering the way you speak about yourself. We all make cheap self-deprecating jokes now and again, but constantly insulting yourself as a bit does have a cost. You don’t have to be the joke to be funny.
9
I am an early-to-the-airport person. I like the airport, I find it very thrilling! But I also harbor a lifelong fear of missing my flight. Someone who knows me very well once told me, “the best thing that could happen to you is that you miss a flight.” I was incredulous. But reader, I did it. I missed a flight, both literally and metaphorically (in a much larger and more consequential way). And it sucked but it was okay. Sometimes what you imagine is the worst outcome, is actually the best one. Of course, it never feels that way at the time, but it has given me solace in moments of stress or sadness to think, “maybe this will actually be great, in the end.” And sometimes it is. Life is funny that way.
10
The best way to get your landlord to do something is to offer to have someone else do it and then forward them the bill. H/T Brigitte Bishop
11
If you respond to someone’s words with denial or defensiveness, but you eventually realize that you were wrong, you should circle back and let that person know. It’s okay to take someone’s words away and contemplate them until they really sink in, but how are they to know that you heard them, in the end? All they know is how you behaved in the moment. Even if a lot of time has passed, even if you already resolved the issue, you should thank the people who gave you those opportunities to grow, because that’s a gift. “I’m sorry I didn’t hear it at the time, but what you said really stuck with me. Thank you.” That’s a gift, too.
12
Be careful what you belive about yourself, because you’ll be right in the end. For example, if you have believed for many years that you cannot parallel park and refuse to do it for that very reason, then, functionally, no, you cannot parallel park. But, who knows? If you try again when the stakes are low and you’ve got time to kill, you may find that you can, in fact, parallel park. (I can.)
13
“Catch and release” is an approach to fishing and also an approach to life. For me, this approach to life is about learning to trust that there will be more, and healing the small part of me that fears I will never have enough (time, money, space, love).
14
If you use self-loathing as your motivation, you will have a hard time feeling satisfied with your outcomes, no matter how successful.
15
“You don’t make the right choice. You make a choice and then you make it right.” Thank you, Poog.
16
Growing up, I was told very often that I am “too sensitive,” and “so emotional.” (Maybe it wasn’t “very” often, but it was often enough to give me a complex about it and, well, here we are.)
It turns out that if you treat a core part of yourself like a shameful manufacturer’s error, that has an adverse effect on your self-confidence and on your very idea of who you are and what makes you good.
You are not your emotions, for the record. You are simply a vessel for emotions to pass through, like a breeze through a house or a melody through a speaker. You can do a lot of healthy and productive things with those feelings but please don’t shame yourself for having them.
When I started treating my emotions with curiosity and patience, instead of contempt and shame it changed my life, very much for the better.
17
Absolute scam that it is, exercise helps.
18
“How will this action make me feel in 24 hours, 2 weeks, and one year, respectively?” Another way: ask yourself how you ultimately want to feel and work backward from that, always.
19
Self-reflection is good. Personal growth is good. But, beware the slippery slope of endless self-improvement. Are you reading exclusively self-help books? Are you following every therapist/psychologists/~healer~, and miraculously finding new demons to defeat in each sanserif instagram carousel? Curious how that works. Seek help and healing by all means. But give yourself space and time to exist without self-diagnosis, too. You are a person, not a project.
20
I have spent much of my life believing that if I was careful enough, smart enough, good enough…I could prevent bad things from happening to me or the people I love. By that logic, all the bad things I failed to prevent were my fault. Thankfully, that’s horseshit.
Technically we “know” that we can’t outsmart the twists and turns of fate. And yet, many of us try to the point of exhaustion and delusion. Please release yourself from this burden. It won’t work. It will make you miserable, and lonely. Paradoxically, there is much more joy and a strange cammeraderie in accepting that we will all fail, we will all get hurt, and, as they say, no one gets out of life alive.
21
Sometimes you don’t know what you can do until you have to—until you get pushed out of a moving car, or off a cliff, or onto the dancefloor. Once you’re there, you may be surprised to realize your own capability. When you recover from the shock, take good notes. Don’t ever forget the guts you found when you had to. And then keep getting in cars, keep hiking the cliffs, find every dancefloor, I love you.
XX
