How to Rebuild a Life
Advice to Self
I am a single mum responsible for two kids, a dog, and two cats. An “Advice to my Younger Self” article pops up on my feed. I am rebuilding my life and not getting very far, perhaps this is the magic bullet.
The author stands in her well-tailored suit, coiffed hair, arms crossed, brilliant red lipstick highlighting a professional smile. I imagine the four-bedroom, colour-coordinated ranch she cooks dinner in most nights; the impressive portfolio of accomplishments and bank balance to which I know mine pale in comparison.
She attributed her success to things: like stay focused on your goals, practice detachment, fake-it-‘til-you-make-it, and the value of appearances. She talked about long nights and early mornings to make your bosses happy. None of it made a lot of sense to me and two questions stood out:
1. After all this detaching and faking it what, exactly, am I trying to do?
Faking it always seemed like a weird way to be a part of the world if I want to make a meaningful contribution. If I am spending my time pretending that I am something I am not, how do I have a career I enjoy and am able to do my best work at?
In my experience, people who are insecure about their skills tend to be a little tetchy with their co-workers. That was not the kind of career trajectory I wanted.
Also, it seems to me that most of the people talking about being detached had a whole group of people attached to them making sure the laundry’s clean and the bills are paid.
Like, I’m pretty sure even the Dalai Lama’s unshakable detachment would be well-tested as a single mum with two kids under five, a mortgage due, and a boss who thinks joking about boobs is totally appropriate.
2. What is the ‘it’ I am making by faking it? What are the long hours achieving?
The advice is so banal, so generic that it could have applied to building a house (PLEASE don’t fake my electrical) to writing a thesis (reading 100 articles and dozens of books takes long hours) and also say nothing at all.
I also wondered, when do we turn the “faking it” off? And what parts are we faking? Elizabeth Holmes the founder of Theranos, did a whole lot of faking it ‘til you make it, and that did not turn out well.
Authors often don’t include what their goals are beyond the acquisition of money and power, making me curious: aren’t these the tactics of snake-oil salesmen? Our integrity is undermined when we fake it, our ability to get actual, real things accomplished.
What stands out most to me though, is her success looked a lot like all the other successes out there, in what she wrote or how she described her achievements. There was no discernible joy in her brittle smile.
So, would a letter to my past self be any different or would it offer the same banal platitudes? Could I write anything different?
Interrogating the past
I thought about mistakes I’ve made – some of them still make me cringe – and what kind of advice I would pass along to that younger me, now that I am older and wiser, and want to believe there are shortcuts. I wonder if my smile is brittle.
Ultimately, isn’t that what these Dear Younger Me letters are about? Avoiding the things that when you look back, you at least kind of regret and wish you could undo. Or perhaps proving that now we’d be smart enough to avoid pitfalls and fast-track success.
I looked at photos of myself at 19, dropping out of uni and cleaning hotel rooms. At 26, different city with a degree and new plans. Then 31, new country and no plans. Back in Canada, unexpectedly a mum at 35. Through it all, I look at the world we live in now, created in these decades since I turned 19, the broken promises adults were serving from the 1990s.
Giving past me advice is like Boeing engineers telling the Wright brothers how to invent a plane. Every single thing airplane engineers now know only exists because the Wright Brothers didn’t listen to the prevailing advice when they decided to try making a flying thing.
What I remember most is the weight of expectation to somehow figure out this world with arbitrary, contradictory rules. Where people said one thing but did another.
And my age was almost irrelevant, it had more to do with doing new things and being confronted with another situation where I didn’t know the rules of engagement. I didn’t know how to get it right. In many cases I still don’t and most people who meet me do not like me at first: I’m very guarded.
With what I know now, I understand it is because I rarely felt safe and my body was constantly trying to manage emotional overwhelm and insecurity and being scared of what was coming. Then, feeling slightly sick to my stomach vulnerable was the enduring emotion.
I had little confidence, wasn’t even a satellite to cool. I was angry. Angry that adults kept making decisions that seemed to make things worse, and then say that’s ‘just the way it is.” And that anger, coupled with the crappy childhoods many of us had, made sure I had all sorts of avoidance mechanisms:
· Travel
· Food
· Alcohol
· Cynicism
· Political Intransigence
Although I took courses on wine tasting and food pairings, so it wasn’t really a problem (😉)
I recall figuring I might as well make it up as I went along, while also being kind of an a** and a pretty bad judge of character. Some of my results were extraordinary, getting to give a paper in Finland or becoming a mum; ice-swimming in Lapland under a full-moon.
And there are a lot of things I look back on now and say "wow! Glad I got out of that alive!" Things like jumping off roofs to save cats or drinking so much I passed out in a strange town and woke up in the back of a stranger’s van covered in a blanket and a thermos of coffee beside me. (Thanks for the coffee, human.)
I don’t know if I could have conceived of a move to England on my own if I had never run down a highway with a friend. We were escaping the strange guys that had picked us up, we were fruit pickers hitchhiking to the next farm, three days earlier. And then I may never have become a mum.
I found myself, rather than coming up with advice, thinking "How the fuck did I think I could manage that?!”
And also “Thank you sweetheart for being so brave and fierce while your heart was breaking."
What did I learn?
I came to a rather surprising conclusion: All of what I now know only exists because that stubborn eejit just refused to stay down.
What I know was built by that young woman’s drive to live a different life than the ones she saw around her, for something more than where she started. There is no one, correct way through life. There is only the way that I make in relationship to the people who raised me, the community around me, the culture that was baked into my psychological DNA.
Oh! And the desire to be free, for a life that feels good all the way down to my toes.
Not just for the pain to stop, but to feel content in my life from when I wake up in the morning to when I drifted off to sleep at the end of the day.
I learned that none of the rules that had worked for our parents worked for us and we were going to have to make them up as we went. I remember the anger and frustration I felt when adults would say stupid shit like it was somehow relevant to what the world was becoming.
So instead, I rolled my eyes and made mistakes, which is how I learned to not do stupid shit later, when the stakes were higher. I had no examples, so I made it up as I went along. It would have been something to have someone just to listen to me rather than instruct me or tell me how to strive harder, I am pretty sure that a lot of young people feel that way today too.
Why? Well, suicide is the leading cause of death for youth aged 16-24. Recent data states one in four young people have considered death by suicide and 50% of youth are not getting the help they need. So whatever it is we’ve been doing the last 30 years, it hasn’t been making things better for anyone.
When I recall the overwhelm as I set out at 18 to find my place in the world, I have a deep and abiding gratitude for who I was, and for all the young people around me, figuring out how to navigate a world set up to destroy us.
You may think destroy is too strong a word, but is it? The goal of our current economic-driven culture isn’t self-realization or even greater: self-transcendence to create a joyful world.
Instead, it is a group of greedy (mostly male) people hoarding our basic needs behind the glorification of mass accumulation of money or stuff so we can never be satisfied. The constant need for gratification from external sources has created an unsustainable present.
What I learned is this: Giving advice to my younger self is the absolute height of patronizing old people. I didn’t like them when I was 25, I certainly don’t like them now that I am 53. Particularly since the challenges we are facing now are just larger versions of the ones we faced when I was younger.
Challenges that adults told me I was too young to understand but now that I am the age they were at the time I see it is less that I didn’t understand and more that adults are just kind of selfish.
I now question whether people who are successful in this current environment are the ones we should be listening to if we are to create a sustainable future. Which makes their advice to younger self lists irrelevant.
So what would I say to myself?
Zero Notes, young Trisha. Thanks for persevering
When looking back at the “lessons for my younger self”, what moments that made us who we are now might be lost because in our old age we have forgotten the thrill of taking a risk?
And what possibilities have we abandoned because we believe we have ‘made it’?
Sometimes I think we ‘give advice to our younger selves” because we think that will heal our present hurts. But what heals our hurts is ensuring no one else ever need endure those same pains again. You grew up poor and without breakfast? Perhaps the first step to peace is donating to free breakfast programs.
One of the things looking back at my life made clear to me is the pain that sometimes came up was often tied to places I felt abandoned or unsafe when I was young.
I remember one evening several years ago, I had dinner with a guy, and he was talking about how hard it can be for young people to leave school and find a job and he wanted to find a way to help them.
I snorted, “It was just as hard to find a job when I left school. No one helped me and I turned out fine.”
I ended up getting really defensive and dinner ended quickly. I totally get why now, but then?, I was insulted he would help these young people.
That’s not entirely true actually. Really, I was deeply hurt that no one had cared enough about me to help me when I needed it, and a small part of me believed that what he was saying in that moment was that these young people had more value than I did. That because he wanted to help others, that made me worth less.
Of course, that is absolutely ridiculous. But if that moment hadn’t happened, I wouldn’t have grown into someone who understood that life is not a destination but a relationship. That signs of our maturity is the willingness to face head on the pain of our lives and then make something better for other people out of it.
There is a belief in my Nation that we are here to leave the world better than we found it, for all our relations, for all our children for seven generations. I am learning that the lessons I want to share with my younger self are in fact calls to action to the person I have become.
Maybe advice with good intentions is what keeps us busy chasing the thing that prevents us from true success. We lose the women we are meant to become so we can be what someone else told us to be.
When I sat with the question of what advice I would give myself, I instead was reminded of all the lessons I had learned from the mistakes that very advice was hoping to correct.
If I had paid attention to those ‘advice to my younger self’ letters from executives I would have lost so many adventures. My kids and I never would have found the secluded swimming hole the summer I refused to cancel our family vacation.
I wouldn’t know the way it feels to know, unequivocally, that when I told my boss “No thanks, I’d rather have dinner at home with my kids” to his invitation to join the executive team at the conference wrap-up dinner, he had literally no frame of reference.
I would have never seen my lids light up with glee when I told them why I was able to come home early. Or realising as I write this that I have become through that, the kind of mum I needed when I was alone.
The Most Important Thing I Learned
When I was young, I didn't need advice, I needed time and love and support to build my own dreams, not someone else’s. No one was offering that.
I needed adults committed to making good decisions in the present to build a safe future for others, not preserving a past ill-suited to anyone’s well-being.
I have become the woman I am because I didn’t know when I started out what I know now. What is remarkable is realising the future is built by how this woman – me – acts now, just as my past is a collection of choices I made. My decisions started getting better when I started putting myself in different places than those where I felt bad or ignored or abandoned.
I didn’t grow up in an environment that made me feel safe and able to thrive. So I learned how to build one.
Which means, any advice I had to younger me about seizing the day is advice I should be listening to now: I need to seize this day and use my voice more loudly against the growing existential crises we face. I need to seize this day, walk in the snow or take a risk and write vulnerable things.
The things that made me uncomfortable about the future as a teenager and as a new mum in my thirties are the same things that concern me now:
· will I/my kids have clean air and water when they are adults?
· who is standing up to the bullies right now?
Younger me needed a safe world to grow up in, so if I want my younger self to look with approval on the woman I have become, and be willing to even listen to me, let alone take any advice I might want to offer, I must act now. Stand up for what I know to be right, not just what is convenient. Educate myself and be involved with the community now.
Any advice I might offer to my younger self, and by extension any young woman today, only matters if I act to ensure the world is here for her to grow into tomorrow.