Throwback Edition: What if You Already Have All the Answers?
Plus, garbage language, a clarity exercise, and dogs in backpacks
Dearest Readers,
It is a season of change—but then, isn’t it always? I feel quite grounded during this season, but many of my loved ones have been drifting through a sea of shifting circumstances; grad school, marriages, new relationships, new apartments. new careers. With all these changes, indecision is thick in the air. I’ve spent many conversations debating the pros and cons of various situations with friends, trying to help them come to a point of comfort with their choices. All these conversations made me think of an essay I wrote two years back—today’s throwback essay—when I realized I’d lost the ability to trust myself.
This happens the way a child grows; swiftly and quietly, and then quite suddenly. We lose the ability to trust ourselves when life thrusts big decisions in our faces, meaning it will probably happen periodically as time goes on. I’m glad to be in a place of firm standing while a handful of people I love are in the other, squishier place, because it means I can be a more solid foundation to support them through their seasons of change. If you happen to be in that squishy place right now, I hope today’s essay resonates. Remember, you already have all the answers.
I hope you have a lovely weekend. I’ll be spending the day volunteering on a farm upstate tomorrow and spending the evening in a yurt. Saturday is a day of birthday festivities for one of my very best friends, and Sunday morning I leave for an impromptu trip to Tahoe, a place I’ve been dying to visit for years. I’m taking lots of olive leaf extract and vitamin C to prepare my body for the minimal sleep and maximum activity that is to come—it feels like summer, baby! Go for a swim this weekend, or bake some chocolate chip cookies. My dough is in the fridge as we speak.
Until next time,
A Note From the Editor
It started during those never-ending days of the pandemic, early last spring. My mind had too much time to wonder during the weekdays spent alone in my small East Village apartment. Between baking unnecessarily elaborate desserts, whisking stiff peaks in a bowl of egg whites while pacing around my kitchen, roasting full chickens for no one, sticking my head out the window to clap at 7 pm, and going on my much-anticipated mid-day runs, a sort-of-new mental habit began to form: I started second-guessing myself, constantly and without noticing. The expereince was mostly internal, as I didn’t have enough outside contact with the world to verbalize these doubts. And anyway, everyone was going through their own shit so I was not going to dump mine onto anyone else.
Prior to the pandemic—as in, weeks before lockdown—I had made a major decision about what the shape of my life would look like that year. I knew I wanted to be a freelance writer but I had a full-time job, and I figured the only way to be serious as a writer was to take some sort of major leap of faith. I decided I would move to France for the summer, leaving behind my partner, my life, and my job—I’d hoped they would still let me work part-time and remotely, but if not, I was prepared to depart. I don’t know what I thought would happen in France that summer, where I thought my work would come from, for at that point I didn’t have enough writing connections or bylines to garner paid work. Still, I reasoned that if I thrust myself into a position and had no other choice, I would figure out how to make it. I booked my Airbnb and my flights. I told my partner I would be leaving that summer for a few months and I also told my mom, but otherwise, I kept the news to myself. It was, in retrospect, a silly, child-like plan. But it was my plan.
My plan kept me going on my blandest days, for I knew a change was waiting around the corner. Finally, I would be a writer. I was taking a step in some direction, asserting my will into life instead of living passively as I had been, in a career that I knew wasn’t right for me. For the first time in a long time, I felt genuinely proud of myself. I was going to make a decision for myself, one that took a careful blend of ignorance and faith, and the other decisions I had avoided making in my life around that time would naturally iron themselves out on the tail end of this one. I was sure of it.
I don’t need to tell you how this story ends. I was unable to follow through with my France plans as COVID ravaged life and all sense of normalcy, and within a month of lockdown, I couldn’t remember the time when I’d had such luxury to dream too far and wide. In retrospect, I think this is when the trust I had in myself began to erode, rusting around the edges a bit each day. Logically, I knew what happened wasn’t my fault, but I felt like a fool nonetheless. As the pandemic dragged on, I began to question myself relentlessly, often with a dark shadow of cruelty. Am I actually burned out, or am I just being lazy? Is this person just not the one for me, or am I actually just an unlovable wench who will never be happy with anyone? The more I did this, the more lost I felt, until all of the self-knowledge I’d cultivated to that point, through therapy and journaling and lived experiences, drowned in s vicious ocean of questioning. I felt more lost than I had in years, and with that sense of loss came a frustration so ripe and fiery it alarmed me. How could I be on the cusp of 28 years old and still feel like a wanderer? Why did I have nothing figured out, and what had I been doing this whole time?
To blame this entirely on the pandemic would be to shape a false narrative; the pandemic only exacerbated something I’ve identified in myself and in others—the inability to trust intuition. I remember a friend debating aloud whether or not to take a new job earlier this year, leaving behind one that treated him poorly for one that would pay him more and offer up more of the work he wanted to do. To me, the choice seemed obvious, but I watched the inner struggle play out in real time. “Do I actually want a new job, or have I just not been trying hard enough to communicate what I want to my boss?” he wondered aloud. He knew the answer, and yet he questioned and questioned until he’d trapped himself in a mental maze, one impossible to escape. I knew the tactic all too well, I’d been playing the same game with myself for an entire year.
In a recent episode of my new favorite podcast, Tony Award-winning Broadway star André De Shields said: “I need to stop forgetting and get on the road to remembering what I already know.” It was an insight I didn’t know I knew was true until I heard it affirmed aloud; that we are born knowing everything we need to know, but that it can be difficult to tune out the noise and tune into that quiet voice at our core. Call it intuition, call it God, call it whatever you’d like, but it exists within all of us. Mine used to come to me frequently and with clarity, an internal light switch flipped on. I would know that in a certain meeting, I was going to get praised, or I would know when a loved one was going to share major news on the phone before they even called me. When I was tuned in to my intuition, small pieces of knowledge flowed to me easily, and the bigger stuff was less foggy because I trusted myself instead of constantly beating that voice down with a what-if stick.
Often when we ask a question aloud—should I take this job, should I end this relationship, should I make this move—we already know the answer. We are only asking for affirmation, or because we don’t trust ourselves to know the right way. But what if we already know everything we need to know, as Shields suggest? What if our only job is to quiet our minds often enough to listen, to build or re-build the trust in ourselves so that we don’t always have to look outwards for the answers? Every time I read my journals from five, even ten years ago, I am in awe at the self-knowledge the younger me possessed. I knew from the time I was 19, after my first internship at a shiny PR firm on Park Avenue, that doing work that did not have any real impact on the greater good would leave me feeling unsatisfied. I knew from the time I was in middle school that I loved to write. In both cases, I did not clock that knowledge with any weight.
Years later, as I re-make these discoveries I once knew as an adult, I can only laugh. Imagine where I might have been if I listened to myself back then, if I trusted what I already knew? Or, imagine where I might go if I start remembering what I already know, right now, today? Pulitzer Prize-winning author André Gide once noted,
“Everything that needs to be said has already been said. But since no one was listening, everything must be said again.”
The same logic can be applied to our internal sense of knowing. We only need to keep reminding ourselves what we already know. To quiet the noise in order for the truth to have the chance to show its face. Cheers, my dears, and thanks for reading. Here’s to less second-guessing and more trusting.
Three Pieces of Content Worth Consuming
What Issa Rae Wants. I’m a huge fan of Issa Rae’s Insecure, which is coming up on its final season soon. There’s no other show on TV quite like it, and I was pleased to discover that Rae seems to be just as genuine and hilarious in real life as her character is on the show. An interesting tale of how this 36-year-old star went from a self-produced YouTube series to an HBO show writer and director. I can’t wait to see all of the projects she has coming down the pipe in the coming years.
Modern Zoos Are Not Worth the Moral Cost. I went to the Bronx Zoo relate last year, wildly hungover and spent most of my time watching the gorillas. I'd seen gorillas before, but for some reason, it felt like the first time. There was a whole troop of them, I watched them hold hands, interlacing their human-like fingers, scratch their hands, come right up to the glass and gaze into the depths of my eyes so intentionally I had to look away. My heart sank. I almost threw up. It was the first time I felt a horrible sense of dread: why are we keeping them here? They cannot enjoy this. This piece affirms what we already know; that for the most part, zoos are cruel institutions with a cloak of conservation, their animals captive and depressed often medicated.
Garbage Language. Why Do Corporations Speak the Way They Do? An oldie but goodie, from last summer. I’m a firm believer in the power of words and language, and I often think the way we carelessly attempt to convey what we really mean deserves more thought than our words are given. This is especially true in the corporate setting, where “circle back” and “close the loop” are just the tip of the jargon iceberg. A case for saying what we mean in the office (and elsewhere) instead of using made-up phrases that inflate a false sense of importance.
Perhaps You Should…
Get Clarity
I haven’t shared any exercises of this sort before, but it felt fitting with today’s intro essay. I’ve been doing deep meditation work through this program for about half a year now and have found it transformative, though (full disclosure) it might feel a little hokey if you’re not into this sort of stuff. I started off by trying this clarity exercise at a time when I was feeling lost and mentally cloudy, and if you’re feeling that way, I’d suggest giving this a try.
**Bonus Content** (Dogs in Bags)
My new favorite Instagram account.
A Quote From A Book You Should Read:
“And he listened to me. That was the thing he did, as if he was trying to fill himself up with all the sound he could hear.”
-The Illustrated Man by Ray Bradbury
This newsletter is best served with a side of conversation, so drop your opinions, reflections, and thoughts in the comments below and let’s get to talking.
Or, share the most thought-provoking piece from today’s edition with someone you love, then call them up to discuss, debate, and percolate. As a wise woman once said, “Great minds discuss ideas.”