How to Be a Person in the World: Ask Polly's Guide Through the Paradoxes of Modern Life (2016)

VI

The Uncertainty Principle

Making Friends (Out of Nothing at All)

Dear Polly,

I’m in my late twenties. I live with a great boyfriend in a great city and have a great job in a field I am passionate about. I have a good relationship with my family and have had many happy connections with all sorts of folks over my lifetime. And yet somehow I find myself at this moment practically friendless.

It’s so embarrassing even admitting it. Like I have some kind of disease. I somehow feel the need to defend myself by listing all the friends I’ve had to show I’m capable of forming friendships and am not a psychopath or a social pariah. But instead I’ll list the many reasons why I’m currently in the pickle I’m in.

I moved a lot as a child. Because of this, I had to start over socially every time and didn’t grow up alongside my extended family. (When one of my grandparents got sick recently, I even felt awkward calling to wish them well because I knew my aunt, uncle, and cousins were so much more qualified to offer comfort since they live nearby.) Though my reserved nature made this hard on me, I still found tight-knit groups of friends all the way until the end of college. And then, adulthood struck.

Suddenly my friends were dispersed across the entire U.S., and I found myself with nobody to go get a coffee with. And despite many close calls, that’s pretty much how it’s been for the past five years.

Rationally, I know the answer is to take initiative. But my temperament lends itself to forming friendships like the way water might slowly bubble up from a dry creek bed. Over time and with little fanfare, my connection to a person grows until we are bonded in that mysterious way people bond. Maybe modern life doesn’t lend itself to this attachment style. After all, every time, without fail, as soon as something begins to slowly take shape, one of us moves away, and all that potential energy goes “poof.”

For a while I coasted (perhaps too much) in the comfort of long-distance calls and Skyping. But my closest friend from college is now deeply involved in restarting her life on the opposite side of the country. And despite all those wonderful things I mentioned at the beginning of this letter, I am so, so, so deeply lonely. To the point where I question everything I ever hoped for from adulthood. If this is really what being an adult means, I don’t think I want it anymore. Sure, I can pay my bills, but what I really want is someone to go get Arby’s curly fries at 2:00 a.m. with. All my co-workers grew up and went to school and college in the area, meaning they all have extended networks of family and friends built up over a lifetime. God, I want that. I want that friend of the family who’s practically a second mother, that uncle who shows up unannounced, that pack of girlfriends you’ve never celebrated a birthday without.

So in lieu of that lifetime of network building, I’m trying that whole initiative thing in the most pathetic way possible. I made a giant list of ways to make friends. It’s an unwieldy beast and includes meet-ups, running groups, classes, exercise groups, Twitter, etc. But against all this desperate trying pushes the grim reality: Making friends is hard work, and everyone is so busy and not interested. Finding people with common ground is suddenly like climbing a mountain, and most of the things I’m interested in seem to attract the retired, recently divorced, or new moms, all of whom are lovely people but who are themselves just looking for other retired, recently divorced, or new-mom types who have things in common with them. And to everyone else I either come on as too desperate or too reserved. Suddenly that thing that used to come so naturally is broken, and trying to fix it is just making things worse. And when I burn out from all the effort, it hits me hard. I stop trying and I just wallow. I’m in one of those spells right now, recuperating and miserable.

I’m not sure if I need advice or reassurance or what. I feel like Quasimodo in the bell tower. But without a hump, what’s my excuse?

Friendless

Dear Friendless,

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. This is the downside of living in a gigantic country like the U.S.: You move away for college, you move away for work, you move away because you meet a great guy or girl, and one day you wake up and you’re two thousand miles away from anyone who knows you really well. For someone who’s not great at small talk, who can never quite hit that lowest common denominator of casual chattiness, who can never quite manage to burble happily about the weather and the news and those cute shoes and the new restaurant down the block, making brand-new friends sounds about as appealing as a trip to the podiatrist. (If you’ve never been to a podiatrist, please remain in that blissfully ignorant state for as long as you can.)

And if you moved a lot as a kid, you learned to appear satisfied in a crowd, because wandering around asking people to talk to you or play with you is a one-way ticket to the bottom of the social totem pole. “They already have their friends,” you told yourself, and fiddled “contentedly” with something in the corner instead. This might be adaptive as a child, but as an adult it just means you’re throwing up a protective “I DON’T NEED ANYONE, I’M FINE” face to the world.

So the first thing you have to do is accept that despite appearances you’re not all that different from most people your age. The mid- to late twenties are often an apex of friendless desperation. To make matters worse, people feel very self-conscious about their friendlessness at that age, as if everything should’ve fallen into place a long time ago. Considering how often urban, career-focused Americans move around and turn their lives upside down in their twenties, you’d think most of us would know better.

It’s also crucial to remember that even when people “already have their friends” and everything has fallen into place, it can easily fall out of place at any time. Not to mention the many people who look at their existing friendships in their twenties and say, “What the fuck? WHO ARE THESE TERRIBLE PEOPLE?” In fact, my guess is that most people your age are in the same boat, even if it doesn’t look that way from the outside.

Age twenty-eight was a real low point in my friendship trajectory. I had just moved to L.A. with my boyfriend; we lived down the block from each other. I was living alone for the first time, which was amazing, but I tended to revel in this solitude to the point of rarely leaving my apartment. I washed the wood floors a lot and grew nice houseplants. I also worked from home; see also: no work friends to speak of. My boyfriend worked in film production and was sometimes away for weeks at a time. We knew one other couple, and then my boyfriend’s friendship with one of them fell apart. And then a few months later, I broke up with him.

I can handle isolation. I don’t mind it. I can be alone for a stretch. I can call old friends on the phone. But this was crazy. I was basically living and working alone, and I had no one in the entire city of Los Angeles to hang out with. Just going to the corner store felt like an epic journey. I got all bugged out and self-conscious. Like you, I wanted friendships to grow slowly and naturally, and I had no patience for people who seemed too different from me. I was a cross between Winona Ryder in Heathers and E.T.—a jumpy, bug-eyed alien life force with a shitty attitude about everyone and everything.

Aww. Poor me!

But even though I was a socially paralyzed shut-in, I realize now that my standards were also way too fucking high. No one was smart enough or interesting enough for me. No one was perfectly equipped to understand every inch of my tortured soul.

Is there any creature alive with higher, more impossible standards than a twenty-eight-year-old? The only difference between a twenty-eight-year-old woman and a thirty-eight-year-old woman is that one of them tries to hide how few friends she has and the other will e-mail you out of the blue and demand to hang out after meeting you for exactly four seconds in a room full of retired people and divorced people and new moms. The late-thirties woman knows that it’s no big deal to want to make new friends. Maybe it won’t be a life-changing time, or maybe you’ll be acquaintances, or maybe you’ll be vacationing together down the road. It’s worth a shot.

And people past forty? If we get along over the course of an hour’s conversation, we practically move in together. We’ve long since abandoned the dream of 2:00 a.m. curly fries, as well as the luxury of holding out for the exact perfect person to spend time with. We long ago learned to talk to our closest friends on the phone, because they live in Seattle or New York City or fucking Berlin. The rest of the friends we might have in town have kids (if we don’t have kids) or they’re married (if we’re single) or their kids are friends with different kids (if we do have kids), so we have to hang out with whichever motherfuckers happen to have kids in our neighborhood. Our standards are pretty low. Can you carry on a conversation? Is your kid maybe not a complete asshole? COME SIT NEXT TO ME; YOU ARE MY BUDDY.

So the second thing I want you to know is that in order to make very close friends in a natural, organic way, you have to cast a wide net and be accepting and give it time. You can’t use the aggressive, early twentysomething’s tactics, because it poisons the whole process to believe that you’re trying to hunt and trap the perfect BFF. Scrape those curly fries out of your mind. Some of your closest, lifelong friends may not seem like close, lifelong friends for the first five or six years you know them. Seriously. It takes time to figure out who matters, who listens, who tells the truth, who comes through in a pinch, who’s down to earth, who appreciates you and accepts your flaws, who says the right thing at the right time, and who makes sense all around.

I get that in your twenties friendships are intertwined with identity. It can be dangerous to befriend people who are aggressively different from you, honestly, if your boundaries are pretty permeable. It’s natural to want to stay away from people who, when you speak honestly about your experiences, look totally confused or annoyed. But as you get a little older, you know who you are, and you don’t mind knowing people who don’t necessarily get you. Knowing people who don’t get you is good for you, actually. You’re exposed to new things, and you prepare yourself to be a better, more accepting friend, partner, parent, kid, co-worker—everything. I used to limit myself to people who were a lot like me. These days, though, I have friends who are completely different. I have a friend who reads only romance novels. I have a friend who’s a homicide detective for the LAPD. And I just made a brand-new friend, a razor-sharp, unapologetically opinionated Frenchwoman who doesn’t eat meat or dairy. I mean, what a waste of Frenchness, to shun aged cheeses!

I met these people because one friend moved across town, one friend had a baby, and one friend got too busy with work, so I rarely saw them. One day, I woke up and realized that unless I wanted to be a shut-in, I needed to get out there and fucking make it work. I stuck my neck out and struck up conversations and invited people over. Sometimes I felt sort of pathetic doing it, but I did it anyway.

But the more I made new friends, the clearer it was to me that no one is ever really done making new friends, and very few people are averse to it. I used to assume that people “already had their friends,” but that was almost never the case. Even when people seem to be busy and social, they’re often very open to getting to know someone new.

And people don’t stick to their own categories as much as you’d think. You throw a party or start a book club and people show up, they’re curious, they’re into it. You go sing karaoke at a bar or go bowling, and everyone is ready to strike up a conversation. They don’t care if you’re exactly like them. People are friendlier than they seem. It’s strange how I didn’t understand (or care to recognize) that when I was younger. Interesting people know that interesting people come in all shapes, sizes, and ages.

The ultimate goal is not necessarily to make a bunch of friends who are nothing like you but to get out there and try. You can’t be too picky. Open your mind and your heart. Don’t stigmatize yourself for having zero friends now. Everyone I know has gone through what you’re going through a few times over. Even the perfect social life can evaporate into thin air. The greatest friend group can scatter to the winds overnight. People move and get married and die. Sad, but true.

You’ve got to get out of that Alone in My Dorm Room, Listening to Other People Laughing on a Saturday Night mentality. You’re idealizing other people’s lives and friendships because you feel lonely. But the truth is, not that many people are grabbing curly fries at 2:00 a.m., even if they’re besties who live together. Other women’s lives aren’t just one long episode of Broad City.

Do you honestly want an uncle who shows up unannounced? Come on. That guy always drops by at dinnertime, and his perpetual-bachelor shtick is no excuse. And have you ever actually met a pack of girlfriends who’ve never celebrated a single birthday without each other? Because those are the kinds of women who insist you wear a tiara out to the bar, demand that you unwrap your birthday presents in front of thirty-two grown adults, and plan painful baby-shower activities that involve sucking on binkies or wearing adult diapers. Maybe these herds make things magical for the birthday girl/bride/pregnant lady, but everyone else in the room is in agony.

You can’t get a BFF overnight, and you shouldn’t be in the market for that right now anyway. You just need a few people to hang out with every now and then. Mostly, though, you need to practice the art of coming out of your shell, of listening, of making a connection. You can do this with a retiree or a new mom. Maybe it won’t amount to anything, but it’s still good for you. You can simply exchange a few words, learn something. You can simply show up, hold your own space, feel alive, take in the atmosphere, and be prepared to talk if that situation arises.

You can also invite an awkward ensemble of work friends out for dinner. You can call it “Sushi Thursdays” or “Nacho Night” and fucking dork it out, and people will gobble that shit up. You can start a book club that has one shy work friend, one divorced woman from your knitting group, and one friend of your boyfriend’s co-worker in it. You can throw a monthly dinner party and invite people you don’t even love that much, just to get back into the practice of listening and getting to know people and putting yourself out there.

I get that these things sound wrong and stupid and maybe not even possible. But you can choose one thing and do it. The weight of the world doesn’t have to rest on this one thing. When I was your age and friendless in L.A., I started running six miles once a week with a doctor friend of my sister’s who’d just moved there and didn’t know anyone either. The first time he came by my apartment to run, he spotted a copy of Vanity Fair with Matt Damon on the cover and said, without irony, “Matt Damon and Ben Affleck—wouldn’t you just love to know those guys? I’ll bet they’d be really cool to hang out with!”

What could I possibly say to that? I think I went into the kitchen and punched my fist into the wall.

He was a nice guy, though, and after hours of running and talking, we got to be casual friends. He didn’t end up being a lifelong friend, but he reminded me that sometimes just being around people, no matter how different they are, feels good. Sometimes it feels good because they’re totally different from you.

And I think he might’ve even been right about Damon and Affleck. Who knew?

You will not pull a mother figure or an amazing first cousin or a roomful of lifelong girlfriends out of thin air. Most people don’t have those things anyway. We have to fucking make it work instead.

The more you try—without skyrocketing expectations, without circular thoughts that say, “You are a friendless freak!”—the easier it’ll be. The more you do it, the happier you’ll be. Do it now in order to prepare yourself for doing it twenty years from now, because you’ll always have to do it. You don’t just get the big group of buddies and then sleepwalk through the rest of your life. Life isn’t like that.

You have a great life already. You’re not starting from zero. You just have to get out of this ashamed, protective place and know that if you work hard to get your head in the right place, people will be drawn to you. You can’t get discouraged when great friendships don’t appear immediately. You have to keep the faith and keep trying and recognize that it’s good for you, and good for everybody else, too. The world is not filled with favorite uncles dropping by packed birthday parties.

As you get older, you notice that some people do eventually shut the world out, and other people, the ones who really know how to live, open themselves up and keep meeting new people. My mother, who is seventy-three, has always had a small handful of close friends, and she never went out of her way to meet new people. But then she retired, and her boyfriend died, and one of her lifelong friends died, and after that her dog died. Can you fucking imagine? I’ve said it before: Being old is a motherfucker.

But then, one day, she made two new friends in her neighborhood. Now they go walking together every morning. Sometimes one of them says outrageous, unbelievable things. Sometimes the other one repeats herself. They are not perfect. But they walk and check up on each other and make dinner for each other, drinking cocktails on the back patio together on a warm late-summer evening.

This life is not perfect. This world is not a perfect place. Sometimes it’s nice to sip a drink, and repeat yourself, among people who aren’t perfect and don’t expect you to be perfect either. Aim low, open your heart, and let them in.

Polly

I’m Thirty-Eight and Everything Is Awful

Dear Polly,

I think I’m going down a dark hole, and I could use your help.

A few months ago, I realized I’m thirty-eight. And I started to feel very sad and very afraid. That was on top of already feeling very alone.

Some of this started a long time ago. I lost a parent when I was thirteen, and to this day I am a yawning maw of need. But I learned to hide it well; I overachieved myself to the point of being beyond reproach. How anyone could have believed I was actually okay, let alone ready to make Big Life Decisions about college and the like, is beyond me, but they did. I wasn’t. I’ve been kind of adrift ever since then: lonely, and with only superficial direction to my life that has consisted of always making careful, conservative choices in lieu of having goals or a passion. I always thought I would somehow, someday magically break out of that, but I never did.

Twenty-five years later, I feel I’ve missed out on a lot. I’m perpetually single (not by choice, but I’m working on “learning to love the process”), I’ve made many career-based choices that were bad for my personal life (all of which I regret), it’s getting harder to relate to my old friends because their lives have changed and mine hasn’t, and yes, it’s also getting harder to make new friends as I get older. I’ve been to therapy and have learned to recognize some unproductive habits/patterns, but I can’t make up for lost time. I’ve also found out I have a health condition that exacerbates my natural tendency toward anxiety/depression, and I’m treating it.

Speaking of time, boy, would I love to finally find a partner and have a baby. I don’t want to adopt; I want to have a biological baby because it would be related to the parent I lost. I don’t want to do it alone. I also don’t believe it’s going to happen for me, and I’m starting to grieve.

Speaking of grief, I have a small extended family, and they are getting older. None of them live nearby, and the two halves are not in contact with each other. I visit as much as I can, but my job requires a schedule that makes travel difficult, and the nature of the work makes telecommuting impossible on an extended basis. Every time I see them, I feel like it could be the last time.

I’m terribly afraid that I’ll be completely alone in the world someday with no partner, no baby, and no extended family. I’m also terribly afraid that I will never LIVE. Most days I just want to sell all of my things and go live in another country for a while so I can, for the first time ever, do something that has an uncertain outcome. I’m ashamed of the reason why I haven’t done it: I’m afraid I won’t be able to keep saving for retirement, and then what would I do? (More importantly, I’m also afraid I won’t be able to visit my family.)

I’m totally paralyzed by all of this fear. How can I use these feelings to do myself some real good for once?

Fear and (Self-)Loathing in the Midwest

Dear FA(S)LITM,

Reading your letter feels like playing a board game that you can only lose. Every roll of the dice leads to another terrible outcome: Move ahead two spaces and grieve for the baby you never had. Move ahead four spaces and realize you’re too old to meet the man of your dreams. Draw an “Unfortunate Twist of Fate” card: “Aging relative enters hospice! Lose your next two turns and pay $30,000.” Draw a “Not a Chance in Hell” card: “Advance to Lonely Life Abroad. Do not pass Retirement Savings Bonus, do not collect $100,000.”

You are projecting your depressed, anxious, scared past onto your bright and limitless future. I get it (and I’ve been there), but you have GOT to grab the yoke and pull this plane out of a nosedive. Thirty-eight years old and already grieving for the child you’ll never have? Thirty-eight years old and giving up on love, resigning yourself to watch your family fracture and decay without you there, writing off ever living abroad, drawing yourself into a narrower circle each and every day? No. Just NO. You’re too young to live this way.

Now, I understand—oh yes I do!—how life can get really dark right around your age. At forty years old, a close friend of mine died of cancer out of the blue, another almost died, my husband had a scary health problem, and I had to accept that I might not live near my mother before she dies (something I’ve been trying and failing to remedy for almost two decades). Suddenly the rest of my life looked like a slow tumble downward into darkness, punctuated by the deaths of everyone I knew.

And look, it wasn’t like I was imagining all of this darkness! It was based on fact. Hitting age forty means accepting your limitations, your own decline, and the decline of EVERYONE YOU FUCKING KNOW. If you don’t accept it, you’ll feel even worse. This is why we oldish people buy so many books about aging and dying. Because our culture won’t let us admit that we’re going to fall apart slowly and then die, so we have to find ways to face it on our own.

But facing the truth doesn’t have to induce misery. Once you mourn your carefree youth and give yourself some time to adjust to the reality of your adulthood, that’s when happiness begins. You take it all in, and you say, “Holy god, the path ahead looks deeply awful and terrifying to me!” Then you get off your ass and make your life as good as it can possibly be TODAY.

If you can’t manage that, if you’re buried by the darkness, that means you’re probably battling low-grade depression and anxiety and negative self-talk to boot, and you have to tirelessly address those factors until it’s actually possible to be a little optimistic. If I were you, I would redouble my efforts on that front—with healthier habits from top to bottom—while simultaneously encouraging optimism in yourself as much as you can. You have to speak to yourself in a kind way. I know that sounds absurd, but basically you have to say things like “Look at you and your early morning writing! Good job, sunshine!” and “Hey, you fit in a workout and ate a healthy breakfast. Way to take care of yourself!” Dorky but cumulatively more effective than you can imagine. And honestly, I don’t know a better way to battle existential angst and fear than by seizing each day by the throat and forcing it into a shape that feels productive and healthy and on track. You do not sit around bemoaning the big picture, day in and day out. NO. You focus on charging forward, on becoming a better, healthier, more generous, more balanced sort of a person; you call your friends and your family to talk often; you give of yourself; and you resolve to do that again and again, every second of every goddamn day until they come and grab your dead body and shove it into a coffin.

Because, guess what? When you’re over forty, you have to work a hundred times harder to just exist and breathe and feel good. It’s not JUST that you can’t sleep four hours at night or drink way too much. Most of us ALSO can’t eat hamburgers whenever, we can’t stop exercising or we get headaches and feel like death warmed over. We can’t let our Bad Brains take over and ruin everything anymore. We have to feel our feelings, yes, and we also have to push our feelings aside long enough to run five miles.

You’re thirty-eight years old. I know you’re trying to fix a lot of things. But you have time.

Here’s what I would do if I were you, and many will disagree with me: I would focus on finding a great partner. I really would. I think you can whip yourself into a better emotional state and do this at the same time. It will be challenging, but I think if you’re optimistic and in a state of forward motion, you’ll find that rapport with others comes easily. Open your heart and hurl yourself out there and refuse to slice and dice every single date; just cast a wide net and see what happens.

I would also consider having a kid on my own. I would simply look into it, without freaking out. I would gather information.

I would not move abroad at this moment. I would leave that as a reward—at, say, age forty-two or so—if you haven’t met anyone great and/or you decide against having a kid and maybe a few relatives die so you’re free and clear.

See how cavalier I’m being? That’s how you need to be about this for a while. You know why? You’re getting older, you want a kid, you want a guy, you’re running out of time, and people die eventually. These are the facts on the ground. They aren’t going to change. Dive in and work with them instead of allowing yourself to fill up with fear and sadness until you’re paralyzed.

In short, there’s an overarching existential dance you have to learn. It’s a combination of accepting your own death and doing the very best to live at your maximum capacity today and every day. You know what you want. That’s the good part. Now you have to walk out the door and get it. If you sit around preemptively mourning the fact that you’ll never get what you want, guess what? YOU WILL NEVER GET WHAT YOU WANT.

Will you get what you want? I don’t know, but if I were you, I would build it into my belief system. I WILL LIVE THE LIFE I WANT. Maybe you’ll have to make adjustments. Maybe you’ll have a kid alone or not have a kid at all. Cross that bridge when you come to it, but resolve to cross it with optimism, marching or dancing a little as you go.

It’s the only way. Don’t lament and worry endlessly. Don’t let yourself spin in circles over your dreary big picture. Resolve to do the best you can with what you have. Resolve to play a board game that you can only win. Every roll of the dice leads to another great outcome: Move ahead two spaces and celebrate the freedom of being child-free by moving to Berlin! Move ahead four spaces and meet your soul mate! Draw an “Amazing Twist of Fate” card: “Aging relative enters hospice! Lose your next four turns and have one of the richest, saddest experiences of your life”! Draw a “You Never Fucking Know” card: “Advance to Incredible New Lease on Life. Collect lasting friendships and companionship from every player”!

I know you’ve got to reprogram yourself from the ground up and that will take a lot of work. I also know that you’re up for the challenge. This is just what people do as they near forty. They finally figure things out, and then they enter the best days of their lives. Join us! It’s not over till it’s over, motherfuckers.

Polly

Don’t Shy Away

Dear Polly,

I’ve never really been good at socializing. As a child, I was nerdy, quiet, and independent. I was happier spending recess following a trail of ants than interacting with classmates. In high school, I was a loner who was utterly confused by the complexity of social interaction. I found the Internet a more rewarding avenue, where small talk was unnecessary and I could easily pick and choose from interesting conversations instead of working with the people I happened to be around in real time.

And so I never really learned. The Internet was my social life for most of my twenties. By an astounding stroke of luck, I met a woman who lived nearby who was amazing and liked me. We fell in love and cohabited for eight years. But my lack of social skills wore on our relationship. We never really communicated, and I was oblivious to the need. What more is there to say than “I love you”? Eventually, she came to interpret this obliviousness as a lack of caring, and she started resenting me. By the time she spoke up, it was too late. A year of couples counseling and hard work on my part yielded nothing; she told me, “I’m afraid you are just not capable of connecting with people.”

I was devastated. Flattened. Erased. But I used it. I changed everything about my life. I made socializing a priority. No degree of awkwardness could ever come close to hurting as much as I already did. I was strangely optimistic. I was free from a relationship that wasn’t working, and I was free from inhibitions that had held me back. I threw myself into it, went out four or five times a week, engaged strangers in small talk, made a lot of friends, picked up an instrument, got asked to join the board of a nonprofit, got invited to parties, threw parties of my own, and put a lot of effort into being interesting and attractive to others. It’s been amazingly rewarding in ways I never knew possible.

And yet there’s still something that’s not working. Despite having lots of friends, I have no close ones. My conversations still feel stilted; they don’t flow. The mechanical nature of small talk is something that can be practiced and learned, but the easy, free-flowing give-and-take that really connects people eludes me entirely. I see people do it; I don’t know how it’s done. And flirting? I don’t even know where to start.

So when I try to date, it’s the same thing every time. I’m reasonably attractive, employed, intelligent, and unafraid of failure. So I start off pretty strong. I get obvious interest when I approach women and try to be engaging. But inevitably, the conversation falls flat after two or three exchanges. Once I run out of “Have you seen this band before?” and “That beer looks good, how is it?” I don’t know what to say. Online dating is no better. With the buffer of a keyboard and time to think, I can be pretty verbose and articulate. (I’m sure you’ve noticed.) So I get a lot of first dates, almost no second dates, and after a year of effort zero third dates.

I’ve seen therapists regarding this issue. Universally, they treat it as anxiety. No one seems to understand that it’s a lack of words and not the fear of saying them. It’s more like writer’s block than stage fright. I have no problem giving lectures, explaining technical issues, asking questions. When it’s obvious that data need to be exchanged for some practical purpose, I can speak all day. But just plain chatting eludes me entirely. How do I know when I should be saying something? What should I say? Anything? How do I choose one thing to say?

I’m really frustrated and losing hope. I need someone to love. I know I have a lot to offer a partner, but I’m getting no takers. I would be okay with this if I knew what to do. If I had exercises I could do that would improve the skills I’m missing. I’m beginning to feel that my ex was right. That I don’t just lack skills, but that I have a fundamental inability to relate to people in a way that makes them want to get close to me. I’ve found that I love people, but I’m terrible at interacting with them. Am I just broken and undatable? Can I be fixed? How?

Too Shy

Dear Too Shy,

First of all, let’s acknowledge that lots of people don’t get third dates these days. Something has gone wrong in the online dating universe lately, and now courting has become this barren landscape of snap judgments, baked by a relentless sun of suspicion and whipped by the prevailing winds of dissatisfaction, until nothing but hostility and disappointment can grow. Instead of looking for areas of connection, people scrutinize each other for flaws.

But people are flawed, the end! You can’t be a people without being flawed. Pretending otherwise and looking for perfection in others is a path of self-hatred and delusion and mutual lifelong bullshitting.

All of this reflects a wider societal shift toward encountering anyone who seems even slightly out of step with the reigning cultural ideal of cool indifference as damaged goods. People who are anxious or pensive or a tiny bit off-kilter are quickly labeled as losers or freaks. People who are shy or conversationally awkward or just out of practice are written off as shut-ins or nerds. The irony is that apathy and vagueness and underexplaining and fading out—attitudes and behaviors that drive the sensitive among us insane—are defined as normal. Remember how people used to say that this or that social scene “is just like high school all over again”? Well, the whole world is high school all over again. We are expected to act like cool kids—light, breezy, disengaged—in every environment. As a culture, we’re unknowingly mimicking carefully scripted sitcom characters, as if they represent some Platonic ideal of humanity. We expect ourselves and each other to move through the world with the bulletproof, professionally slick, faux confidence of comedic sidekicks and superheroes.

And who can navigate the world with such disingenuous suaveness? (1) Deeply insecure humans who’ve worked very, very hard to shield themselves in a high gloss of fake to obscure their doubts about themselves; (2) actors (See also No. 1); and (3) people with layers and layers of hurt and pain that they haven’t explored, who don’t understand themselves, and who don’t give a fuck about anyone but themselves. We are unknowingly privileging insecure pricks, narcissists, actors, liars, and fakes, while regular, humble, gently worn humans get kicked to the curb.

So. I could feed you the basics of casual comedic-sidekick-style flirtation. Or you could take instruction from one of a million self-proclaimed pickup artists. But your central problem will remain. As difficult as these interactions are for you right now, you need to recognize that YOU are not, strictly speaking, the problem. It’s not your responsibility to keep these conversations afloat. The only difference between you and some jackjuice who keeps women interested is that HE rests comfortably in the pauses in the conversation. He doesn’t mind just sitting there, allowing for some dead air, while he stares into the middle distance. He’s not afraid of looking at a date like “Okay, that’s all I’ve got. How about you?” He’s not questioning everything he says every step of the way. So you don’t need a better script. What you need is some practice doing LESS. You need to learn to forget yourself in the moment, to relax and take in the scenery without trying to make everything right. Practice not firing off questions and filling in the gaps. Let a woman think that you’re a little bit reserved sometimes. That’s not a turnoff. Fumbling for the next conversation piece after three dates, that’s a turnoff.

That’s the close-up of your situation. But if you zoom out, there’s a larger problem. The larger problem is that you believe that there’s something wrong with you. And as long as you believe that, you’ll struggle with these situations.

I don’t think there’s anything wrong with you. You’re a little bit awkward, and maybe you haven’t had enough close friendships to know what goes on in other people’s heads and hearts. Maybe you can’t relate to other people that easily. You could hardly be expected to have drilled down into the depths of your long-term girlfriend’s psyche after eight years of mumbling to each other about surface shit. She had built-up resentments by the end, and her feelings faded. It happens.

But I don’t think you need to fundamentally change the way you talk to people just to find someone to love. I do think, though, that you need to understand who you are and know what matters to you before you move forward.

Because even though people are shallow and lots of people prefer scripted fictional heroes to real human beings, they can still be shaken out of it in the presence of someone who is REAL. Your problem is not that you haven’t mastered the conversational skills necessary to maintain someone’s interest. Your problem is that you’ve never forced yourself to define exactly who you are and what you love and how you want to live. You’ve never had to talk about these things passionately. You’ve never dared to lay yourself bare, without apology. Once you can look someone in the eyes and say, “Here’s what really matters to me”? That’s what people find attractive, trust me. They want to be with someone who knows himself and gives a shit. That’s what’s alluring and attractive and irreplaceable, even in this age of smooth make-believe.

Because anyone can master the conversational arts, or flirting, or negging, or acting the part. That’s easy enough to do. That’s like memorizing your multiplication tables. Go ahead and do it if it gets you out of your slump. But understanding yourself at a deeper level is like mastering conceptual math. It’s more gratifying and more interesting—and look, you’re a smart, able-bodied human. You’re up for the challenge, aren’t you?

I think you should stop dating for a while. Focus on yourself instead. Go see a therapist and dig into your earliest memories, what makes you tick, what you want from your life, what you expect from love. Dig in and figure out who you are. Keep a journal and write down your thoughts every morning and every night. Listen to music while you write if that helps you to access your emotions more easily.

While you’re doing this, train your social energies on enriching your friendships. Think about what it would take to have closer friendships with people. Would you have to see each other more often for camaraderie and familiarity to build? Would you need to have lunch or dinner so you could sit across from each other and talk? What if you hosted a weekly poker game with the same people every week, women and men? What if you tried to go out to a movie with a friend once a month? Casual friendships grow into close friendships with repeated exposure, so allow it to happen. Accumulate experience together. As you each open up, trust will build.

I think that for now close friends are the answer—male and female. You need to make some connections that go beyond casual hanging out. You have to allow time for people to reveal themselves to you, and you have to start revealing yourself—first to yourself and then to others. You need to learn what it feels like to be completely relaxed and unguarded in someone else’s company.

Love blooms more easily among people who understand intimacy and trust with close friends. When you can tell a close friend the truth about your feelings and your insecurities and your flaws, when you can make a joke about them and your friend can tease you and you can feel seen and known and understood, that’s—well, it’s a kind of love. Casual friendship is nothing compared with that.

Which of your friendships have potential to blossom that way? What kinds of clubs or group activities might you join that would expose you to people who might interest you?

Meet some new people. Forget the small talk. Practice asking big questions and listening to the answers. Practice NOT filling up the pauses in conversation with empty words. Practice being comfortable with silence. Practice paying less attention to how you’re coming across. Focus on the other person instead. Stay attuned to his emotions, the meaning behind what he says. Does he seem lonely? Does she feel isolated? Does he feel dissatisfied?

Maybe you can’t relate to people that well now, but you will in time. You have to be present, though. You have to forget yourself and take in the layers of experience that are buzzing around you. The smart people around you will tolerate some awkwardness for the sake of knowing someone else who’s smart and interesting. But if you don’t know who you are and what you’re all about, if you’re ashamed and distracted by the nervous noise in your head, you won’t be able to take part in the beauty of the world around you.

So you have some work to do. Luckily, you don’t mind working hard. Get to know yourself well. Get to know other people well. Forget the sitcom characters and the superheroes and realize your full potential as a lovable, sensitive, gently worn human being. Be patient but keep the faith. Because, trust me, eventually, some great woman out there is going to be thrilled to find you.

Polly

I Don’t Know

Dear Polly,

What I get from your column is to be truthful and open and honest with yourself. And find yourself and love yourself. But can I just say this? I don’t know. I don’t fucking know. I just have no idea. I am twenty-five years old and I live in an apartment and it’s good, I guess. I don’t know; I guess it’s good. I go to yoga and that’s good; I guess I like yoga. I think I like yoga. I do. But what do I really like about it? I like how it makes my body feel and look.

I have a job and it’s pretty good, I guess. I don’t know. I guess it’s good. I make money. I’m okay at it. I’m not the best, but I want to be the best, but I can’t be and I won’t be. I’m not smart and good enough…I don’t know. I know I should think I’m smart, but come on. I’m smart, I guess. I don’t know. I see my friends. I fantasize about warm summer nights and beautiful sunsets and buildings against a clear sky on a cold winter evening and magical moments that kind of happen but sorta don’t.

But I don’t know. I answer people with “I don’t know.” I second-guess myself all the time. If you ask me a question I’ll say “I think…” or “Let me double check” or “I don’t know,” because I just don’t know anything. Will I ever know? Will I ever know and be certain about something? Will it ever just click into place and I’ll know? I’ll know it’s right?

I Don’t Know

Dear IDK,

I don’t always know either. Part of what I like about giving people advice is that I never fucking know how I’m going to pull it off. I’m not some kind of swami or guru. I don’t have the answers to everything. Half of the time I sit down and draw a complete blank. But I know that by the end of a few pages, I have to know. I have to or I won’t have a column to send to my editor. I love this job because every goddamn week I have to know something.

I love feeling my way in the dark, grasping into the void for the things that make sense to me. And I love looking back on difficult times in my life when I felt like I didn’t know anything and remembering what that felt like. It makes me feel grateful to do that.

Because I was like you for more than a decade. I wasn’t sure about anything. I had friends whom I liked just fine and a job I liked most of the time. I used to say that I felt grateful for my job, but I didn’t really feel grateful; I just knew that I should feel grateful for it. I had a boyfriend who was nice; I thought I was probably lucky to have him. I didn’t always feel lucky, though. So I got a new boyfriend, and I felt a little bit luckier, but I still didn’t really know.

I wasn’t sure what the future held for me. I used to say that I wasn’t very ambitious. I knew I wanted to have a house and some kids, but just having a house and some kids sounded pretty terrible, really. I loved my new boyfriend, but I wasn’t sure he’d make a very good husband. Being married to him sounded pretty terrible, too. But maybe that was just me being negative. I wasn’t sure.

I asked other people’s opinions a lot back then. No one seemed to know what I should do about anything. They all said stuff like “Well, how do you feel about it?” Sometimes I would tell them what I thought about things, and then I’d just get lost in a long analysis of my thoughts, and everyone would end up feeling bored and annoyed, myself included. My aunt once said to me, “You just told me what you think. Now tell me how you feel.” I said, “How I feel? Is there a difference?” She told me yes, there’s a big difference. So I thought about how I felt for a minute. I didn’t know how I felt, though. I didn’t know how I felt about anything.

The closest things that felt like feelings to me were more like longings: I wanted a grassy backyard with a comfortable lounge chair in it. I wanted to sip a cold beer and eat raw oysters and watch the sunset. I wanted to feel loved and safe. I wanted to be beautiful, to be surrounded by beautiful things. I wanted to feel proud of myself.

So I get where you’re coming from. When I look back now, I see someone who felt plenty of things but never really trusted her own feelings to guide her: I would daydream about meeting a better boyfriend, but I wouldn’t dump my not-all-that-great one. I would be plagued by the feeling that I was wasting my time at my job, but I wouldn’t quit. I would blow off my friends when I felt wronged by them, but I wouldn’t tell them when they neglected me or hurt my feelings.

I didn’t feel my feelings that much, because I was worried that if I did, I would fall apart and I’d quit my job and I’d dump my boyfriend and I’d be totally depressed. I didn’t trust myself to fix things in my own life, and I was afraid of being alone. I wanted to avoid making any rash decisions about anything, because that way at least I would feel safe and secure and nothing would have to change.

I also didn’t trust myself, because I was mad at myself all the time. Everything I did was some kind of fuckup. I woke up too late. My hair looked like shit. My face was breaking out. I wasn’t lovable. I left a mess in the kitchen the night before. I hadn’t exercised for a few days. These things were all my fault. The bad voice in my head said, “Oh my god. What are you doing now? Come on, get your shit together!”

These terrible cognitive habits essentially coached me into never feeling my feelings. Any feeling that came up meant that I was weak and stupid. “You’re seriously going to cry about your kitchen being a mess? What a pathetic person you are!” my head would say when I started to feel sorry for myself. Even though, thanks to therapy, I’d gone through brief periods of trying to welcome in emotions without judgment, I couldn’t manage to do it regularly. If I felt very angry or very sad, that could only mean that I was about to scare away my boyfriend and my family and whatever remaining friends I had. I didn’t believe that anyone would ever love me as long as I let my emotions out and felt vulnerable.

So I was in a defensive, self-attacking stance for a long time. That’s where I think your particular kind of wishy-washy, ambivalent “I don’t know” comes from, IDK. It comes from negative self-talk, and it comes from having powered down your emotions, either in the wake of some trauma or just as a result of having chided yourself for having emotions at all for many years. Maybe emotions weren’t welcome in your family. Or maybe at some point, you subconsciously latched onto the belief that your emotions were the enemy and they would fuck up your entire life if you didn’t put a lid on them.

Lots of people believe that, and there are a wide range of negative side effects that flow forth from that belief. “I don’t know” might seem like a relatively minor side effect, but I think it might mean that you’re mildly depressed.

Don’t take the word “mildly” mildly here! Being mildly depressed can fuck with your life on every level. It keeps you from feeling great at work or feeling exhilarated after a great yoga class. It turns you into someone who’s always peering into someone else’s windows, wondering why the people inside seem so passionate and happy and thrilled, wondering if they’re just simpleminded or stupid, wondering if they grew up in happier homes so they’re not damned to shuffle around in a haze of uncertainty the way that you are.

In order to KNOW—and yes, I definitely think things will click into place and you will know something at some point—you have to excavate a little. You have to see a therapist and dig for the reasons why you’ve stopped feeling your own feelings, happiness and sadness and sweetness and anger alike. You also have to train yourself not to give yourself a hard time about every goddamn thing under the sun.

In addition to seeing a therapist, you should try very hard to notice how you talk to yourself throughout the course of the day. I’m going to guess, based on your letter, that you often tell yourself that you’ll never be smart enough or good enough at work. You tell yourself that you are missing something that the smart, successful people at your job have. You tell yourself that you’re too wishy-washy to ever be a huge success, to ever be loved and adored by anyone, to ever have close, loving friends. You are inherently flawed in tragic ways. You will never amount to shit.

Listen to these messages, and marvel at them. Marvel at how many times a day you tell yourself that you suck. Don’t marvel and say, “Jesus, all of this self-talk about how I suck is EVEN MORE PROOF OF HOW MUCH I SUCK!” No. Marvel that you do this, and marvel that so many other people do this around the clock, for their entire lives.

You’ll be staring at one source of your wishy-washiness. You’ll be taking it in. Don’t stop! Keep noticing. And after a few weeks of noticing, when you hear that voice that says, “Oh my god, you fucking idiot,” in your head, follow it up with another voice. “Am I an idiot just because I didn’t do the dishes? Or do I not want to do the dishes. Is that really a crime?”

Likewise, when you are at yoga class, pay attention. Do you tell yourself that you’re mediocre at yoga the whole time? Or do you look inside for your feelings. Do you do a stretch and think, “Christ, this hurts! I am so inflexible still!” Or do you think, “I am here, trying. I am a person who tries. I do what I fucking can. It’s okay to just try.”

Once you start accepting yourself in your self-talk, you may find yourself feeling overcome, literally bursting into tears. THAT IS A BEAUTIFUL FUCKING THING! Let yourself burst into tears. Say to yourself, “I am feeling really sad right now, and weak, and lost, and that’s not just okay; it’s good. It’s exactly how I need to feel in this moment. This sadness doesn’t make me weak. This is what it feels like not to be wishy-washy. This is me, finding my way in the dark. This is how I’ll finally know something, by recognizing how lost I feel, by recognizing how little I know now.”

It sounds paradoxical, but uncertainty and vulnerability are your guides through this soggy life you’re living. Leaning into your not knowing will bring you more knowledge and wisdom and understanding than you ever dreamed of.

But even once you know a lot, and everything clicks into place, and you feel like you’re on the right path and you really feel for the people around you and for the life you’ve created, you’ll still have to remind yourself that you are vulnerable and unsure at your core. You’ll still need to welcome in your so-called negative emotions when they come rushing at you. If they never come rushing at you, don’t be afraid to go looking for them.

You’ll go looking for them so you don’t ever power everything down again, or shut people out again, or feel wishy-washy and angry at yourself and not good enough again.

The bottom line is that being truthful and open and honest with yourself means letting in those scary emotions and noticing the angry self-talk and embracing all of it. That turmoil, that fear, that anger, that self-hatred, and that sadness will be your guide. It will—very slowly, the more you embrace it—guide you to who you are and what you love. Follow your uncertainty and fear into the darkness, accept that the darkness will always be a part of you, and recognize that that’s where you’ll find your passions. Then you’ll finally KNOW.

And sometimes you won’t know, too. But it won’t feel the same as the “I don’t know” that haunts you now. It will be a new kind of “I don’t know” that helps you close your eyes, to feel how good it is to be alive, to feel how good it is to just breathe. It’s an “I don’t know” that also says to you, “I am just a person, and I don’t have any answers. I will never have all of the answers. My job is simply to try.” You don’t need a fantasy (sunset, true love, giant piles of cash). You don’t need to be surer of your talents.

Every morning, you will wake up and see that life is all about fumbling and accepting that you’re fumbling. It’s about saying nice things to yourself, even when you’re lazy, even when you’re lost. It’s about giving yourself the love you need in order to try—JUST TRY—so that someday you’ll have enough love to give a little to someone else.

Life is not about knowing. Life is about feeling your way through the dark. If you say, “This should be lighter by now,” you’re shutting yourself off from your own happiness. So let there be darkness. Get down on your knees, and crawl through the dark. Crawl and say to yourself, “Holy GOD, it’s dark, but just look at me crawl! I can crawl like a motherfucker.”

Polly

Career or Baby?

Dear Polly,

I am a twenty-seven-year-old woman happily married for the last two years, living in a great home. I’ve been actively building the life I’ve always dreamed of, but I have a steady corporate job at a bank, which I feel absolutely nothing for. What’s worse, my manager retired and I hate my new boss, so my easy, secure job is now the seventh circle of hell. Every day, I dread walking into my building and feel like a total failure who is wasting away her life with every passing heartbeat.

Now I only want to start a family. But I feel that if I do, I will never go back to work, nor will I figure out what I want to do with myself careerwise. I’m looking for a new job at the same company, but my heart isn’t in it, because I’m not interested in the industry and I’d still be an anonymous and invisible employee of an enormous corporation. But I’m afraid of leaving because this job has great benefits, especially when it comes to maternity leave. I would leave for a “dream job,” but I have no idea what that is. My real dream is to be the parent who works from home or for herself.

As far as careers go, I can see myself as an interior designer, or in the hospitality industry, or maybe as some kind of broadcast journalist. I am creative, and I love to write. I often consider going back to school for broadcast journalism (a four-year program), but I will surely be pregnant by/before graduation. And then what, the degree goes on hold while I build my family? I read a lot about women and careers and feel that by now I should have a job I can “lean in” to so that when I bow out and become a parent, I have a good career foundation established. I also feel that if I want to have any semblance of a career while juggling family, I should probably be pregnant yesterday so that I’ll only be in my forties when my kids are eighteen. I have considered starting a small business I could handle part-time, but I can’t invest the time since I only have evenings and weekends to get anything done.

I feel plagued by all the things I should be doing with my career life before getting pregnant. Should I move on to a different, less-shitty corporate job, then get pregnant? Should I take the time to really figure out what I want to do for work, then pursue it fully? Should I quit my job to set up a small side business before I’m pregnant or invest in this venture only on evenings and weekends? Should I just get pregnant soon-ish, roll the dice, see where the career chips fall?

My husband works for small companies, and we rely on my job for the banking perks and job security, but he’s supportive of anything I wish to do. He just wants me to decide and to commit. I have no idea what to decide, and I am so scared of committing. I have asked this same question to my friends, peers, elders, and family. Everyone’s answer varies: (1) Don’t get pregnant while you hate your job, you’ll be so hormonal and emotional, and pregnancy is supposed to be a happy time; (2) get pregnant while you’re at this job, and milk it for all it’s worth; (3) quit your job altogether, and find out what you want to do.

No one understands the variables—that we cannot afford to lose my job, that I need to work here until I have something new, that I don’t actually give a fuck about finding something new, because I don’t want to work, I want to be at home with babies. I feel like it’s a crime to say this out loud. I feel judged and judge myself harshly when I say this. I am a smart and capable woman who should have a meaningful career, and if I don’t, I’m not a smart, capable woman; I’m just a parent. I feel so much pressure to be the career woman who has it all, I worry that by having a family I’ll never have a career, and I feel plagued by the fact that I don’t honestly care enough about building a career, because all I want is to make a beautiful home and raise a beautiful family with my beautiful husband. But then, in ten years, maybe I will regret not having been more career focused.

All I do is imagine other women’s lives and wonder how they managed it all. More than anything, I am paralyzed by fear. I can’t even address what pregnancy and childbearing themselves would mean to my marriage, my body, my house, my mental health. I wish I did not have to multitask or juggle all this. I wish I was allowed to just be a woman who wants to get pregnant, I wish I could trust myself to figure it all out, I wish I could stop judging myself, I wish I had even an inkling as to which to choose—career or baby?

Help!

Career or Baby

Dear Career or Baby,

It looks like you’ve unknowingly stumbled on the mantra of the working mother. Akin to Bill Murray’s nihilistic rallying cry of “It just doesn’t matter!” from Meatballs, the working mother repeats to herself, over and over, “There is no satisfactory solution!” It’s one part “There’s no place like home!” and two parts “There’s no milk in the fridge, and I’m on deadline!”

At this very minute, in fact, my husband is across the country at a conference, and I am sitting next to a pile of ten books I need to read for various assignments. My kids are at a friend’s house, but they’ll be home soon, and they wrote “park” and “tee party” on the calendar for the day. See? There is no satisfactory solution. Go to the park and have a tea party and worry about work the whole time, or make the kids play by themselves all afternoon and feel like a neglectful mother? As a working parent, you often feel like you have to choose between neglecting your career or spending too little time with your kids. You’re always burning the candle at both ends, pissing into the wind, and robbing the cat to pay the dog.

But—casting aside the feminist layers of this issue for a moment—this state of affairs is not impossible and terrible and lamentable, necessarily. It’s simply WHAT IT FEELS LIKE TO HAVE IT ALL.

Because having it all, by its very nature, implies that you have a lot more than you can handle. Who can handle “it all,” anyway? “ALL” IS A WHOLE FUCKING HELL OF A LOT. If you have some kids and a career and you don’t have big piles of cash and a staff of five, you’re going to be busier and more conflicted than you’ve ever been before. Okay, even with the money and the staff, you’ll be busy and conflicted.

So why not just say fuck the career and have the baby? Why not just say to hell with kids and pursue a career you love instead? Why try to have “it all” at all? Here’s why: Because having a great career is the best and having babies is fucking incredible and having both is AMAZING, and no, I’m not kidding, not even a little bit.

Choose both. Choose the career, AND choose the baby. Don’t put off one for the other. Choose both now and later, and accept that you’ll be juggling for years no matter what you do. Even if you never have a career, you’re going to feel like you’re juggling. Parents juggle. Why not juggle things you love? Sure, you’ll have to work hard and make some sacrifices. Accept it and move forward.

Because even though you keep saying you “don’t want to work,” you “just want to have beautiful babies,” I read that as the temporary sentiment of someone who’s trapped in a job she hates. I know plenty of happy housewives, but they’re naturally low-key people for the most part, not people who send rambling three-page letters to advice columnists. Based on the racing, anxious rhythms of your letter, I really don’t think you fit the happy-housewife profile. I think you’re imagining that “downshifting” to raise beautiful babies is a little bit like an extended vacation, a little breast-feeding and cooing and one gorgeous photo op after another. If your husband and maybe an in-law are around after the baby is born (strongly recommend!), your maternity leave will feel luxurious and relaxing. But day-to-day life at home alone with an infant is a particular kind of challenge, one that, based on my personal observations, suits maybe one out of ten women well. I love babies a lot, but I need a little bit of time each day to think and write and be alone and get shit done. It’s easy enough to get obsessed with having babies when you love your husband, love your house, hate your job, and don’t know what else you’d want to do instead. But I would strongly recommend that you not make the choice to have a baby sooner simply because it offers the best one-way ticket away from corporate purgatory.

You need to address your career situation separately instead of throwing it into the mix of having kids. You already know for a fact that you don’t want a job in corporate banking. That’s never going to change. I would make a plan to quit within the next year. I would make a plan to save money and scale back your spending. I would commit to exercising once a day, to keep your spirits up and tackle your anxious nature. I would put your ideas about your new career on paper. I would talk to people who do what you want to do for a living. I would take action, and yes, maybe dedicate nights and weekends to figuring it out.

Okay, and what is this horseshit about keeping your job for the banking perks? The fact that you even put those words to paper tells me that you aren’t seeing clearly. Do you want to wake up five years from now and say to yourself, “Well, I was miserable for a long time, but fuck, those banking perks were really something”?

You have to stay calm and practical, and you have to move forward, one step at a time. You know what you want already: You want a career, you want a baby, and you want a job you can do from home. You also mention broadcast journalism, but honestly that particular route sounds like a stressful crapshoot for you given your strong desire to have a family soon. Four years of school and then you’re either a local anchor or you’re traveling for stories, or else you’re sitting at home with babies, looking at your degree on the wall? (This is obviously my personal take on it, but most people won’t give you any kind of opinion on a job you might want to do, so I’m going to step up to the plate and Be That Asshole.) This doesn’t sound like a good fit for you given your current desire for a good work/life balance, nor does it sound like some kind of lifelong dream you’ll die if you don’t pursue. If it is, then disregard everything I’ve written here, and fucking go for it.

It’s understandable but also a big mistake to read fifteen thousand articles about How Women Can’t Have It All and then think yourself into a deep dark hole over how you’ll ever pull it off. In this case—and so many others—fixating on the Big Picture will only drag you under. The hysteria around these choices is off the charts. People will say, “Oh, lots of parents regret having kids; they just don’t tell you about it.” Or, “Working women are miserable,” or “Kids with working mothers are anxious and unhappy,” or “Kids will destroy your career,” or “If you can’t give your children every ounce of your energy, you shouldn’t have kids at all,” or “You can’t be a real artist and have kids,” and all kinds of other completely black-and-white, fearful, conflicted nonsense. I’m not inside other people’s heads, but the close friends I have who are in good marriages (like yours) and have kids AND engaging careers are some of the happiest people I know.

So, listen, you’ll deal with problems as they come up. The problems come up every day, and the problems change every millisecond. Babies and toddlers are two different species of animal, and schoolkids are in some ways more high maintenance than either. There will be countless challenges along the way, and there will be plenty of solutions, too. Some of them might even feel satisfactory for a second or two.

Another thing: Being pregnant makes you irritable and ambitious at the same time. Use that energy to fuel your new business. Once you stop feeling hungover around the clock, you’re going to want to conquer new terrain and strangle anyone who tells you to “relax.” During my first pregnancy, I channeled this energy into writing scathing TV reviews. During my second pregnancy, I wrote a book; I couldn’t sleep, so I woke up at 4:00 in the morning and wrote. I know this vision is just as idealistic and misleading as any other and every story is different. But I just want you to know that I, personally, was amazed at how much more energetic I was as a pregnant lady. I often said to my husband, “Whatever this drug is, I wish I could take it FOREVER.” (Then I probably said something like, “Go get me some nachos, or I’ll bust in your kneecaps with this tire iron.”)

Save now to hire a nanny if your husband can’t take paternity leave. And don’t say, “Women have been dealing with infants on their own for centuries.” Women have been treated like chattel for centuries, too. Living in a village full of women is a far cry from haunting a house in the suburbs with an adorable little alien who turns into a screaming banshee for mysterious reasons every few hours. Find a way to get help. Find a way. LOTS of help. The biggest mistake new mothers make is telling themselves, “I should be able to handle this all by myself.” Bullshit. You should do what you need to do to take care of yourself and not send yourself off a fucking cliff emotionally. Babies have no use for parents whose nerves are frayed to the point of no return, and babies are biologically designed to fray nerves like a motherfucker because it guarantees that their needs will get met.

So, look, I could write an entire book on this subject—a terrible, highly subjective book. Most parents could. All I want to tell you is that you can have a baby and have a career and yes, I think it’s very smart to want both and to go for both. Should you wait to have the baby? Maybe set up the business and get it going first, yes. I wouldn’t wait that long—either to quit or to start your business or to have babies. I don’t think you should get overly strategic about the timing of kids. It’s great to have a good marriage and know what you want when you’re young and full of steam. But for those who aren’t there yet, I’m forty-five and I have a seven-year-old, and that’s great, too. My husband and I both have established, flexible careers, and that makes parenting feel much less exhausting and lonely. There are advantages and disadvantages to every timeline.

Bottom line: I was fearful, but throwing my energy into both my kids and my career turned out so much better than I ever thought it would. I became much more focused and ambitious after I had kids. I valued my time more. I used my time more wisely. All of the time I used to spend questioning myself and worrying about the big picture is now spent doing dishes and folding little dresses. A lot of the working mothers I know feel the same way.

You’re smart and ambitious, and you’re sensitive to feeling like you’re wasting your time. You sound like someone who will need to work at least part-time for the rest of your life, particularly once you find something that you really enjoy. Don’t confuse your current lame job with the feeling of working at something that feels gratifying to you, where you complete projects from start to finish instead of just punching a clock every day. Imagine a full life, and be true to that vision. Defend it. And put fear aside. You have one person with a steady job in the house. Don’t panic. Look closely at your budget, and make it work. (And go read The Two-Income Trap while you’re at it.)

You can have it all. You may have to adjust the particulars of “IT,” but trust me, “ALL” is what you want. It’s exhausting and it’s a balancing act and it’s way too much for anyone to handle, ever. That’s also what’s so gratifying about it.

Polly