AskPolly: “My therapist said, ‘Some people are just okay wanting things they know they’ll never have.’ I’d like that … Do you have any suggestions for that first step?”
I’ve always been a very ambitious person and, annoyingly, used to say “My reach must exceed my grasp” a lot. Recently, I’ve realized that parroting this phrase is bullshit because, in fact, I am terrified to have my reach exceed my grasp. I can be ambitious in an abstract way — I am hard-working, apply for jobs, am “productive,” keep moving forward, all of that — but I don’t know how to desire anything that I don’t think is at least somewhat within my grasp. Ambient, aimless desire feels unsafe.
But they require some courage of conviction. Because our culture tells us that we can only create art if we are already artists, stamped and approved by invisible men in black horn-rimmed glasses sipping Pinot Grigio in some loft in Soho. Our culture tells us we can only write if we are already writers, armed with M.F.A.s from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and embraced by The New Yorker and buoyed by a room full of Ivy League graduates, eager to earn their own notarized licenses to write.
So we power down our desires. We start to feel numb. We feel depressed. Nothing is worth doing. We define ourselves as unambitious. Or we view ambition as some kind of escape from desire, and we work ourselves into the ground without feeling a thing. And I loved it more than anything else by far, hands down. I even had a therapist who said to me, “You have to write music.” And I would sit there and cry for a solid hour, thinking about how much I believed in my talent and trusted it like it was my own personal religion and how I wanted music more than anything else. But my shame blocked off my path.
Back to you, MDSA. This is the first step: You sit with your shame and you develop compassion for yourself and your shame. You look around with new eyes, and all you can see are people living inside their shame. You can see how dramatic other people’s shame is for them. You notice these things, and you forgive them, and you forgive yourself repeatedly, too.
These days when I write, I feel like I’m writing music. I am much more daring and I trust myself, the way I did when I wrote music in my 20s. I am also WRITING ACTUAL MUSIC.
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