Guilt is a waste of time, always pack a scarf, and other lessons from my twenties
10 things I've learned over the last decade, in celebration of turning 29.
Today is my 29th birthday. In lieu of an essay, I will be sharing a list of ten things I’ve learned throughout my twenties that I wrote earlier this week. In real life I will be brunching, thrifting for new (to me) furniture, and happy hour picnicking in the park. Cheers!
1. Learn to tell the difference between “doing it for the plot” and self abandonment.
I used to get tangled up with all sorts of bozos under the guise of “doing it for the plot.”
This exposed me to wonderful experiences—like the time a guy ditched me for a dog’s birthday party, or the boy’s trip to Thailand I inadvertently crashed in 2019.
It took me years to realize that sometimes, living out the most interesting story is the fastest way to break my own heart. After a disastrous trip to Mexico City with an ill-fated romantic interest, I realized that my well being is always worth more than the interesting story. These days, I aim to protect my own heart, even if doing so makes for a less exciting plotline.
2. Maybe someone is thinking or talking about you. But what does that matter?
We’re always telling each other, “Relax! Everyone’s only thinking about themselves! No one’s actually thinking about you!”
I call bullshit, because I think about other people all the time. My UPS driver told me a foul joke four days ago and I’m still thinking about it.
We’re all sometimes haters, we’re all sometimes talking and thinking about one another. Maybe someone does think you’re annoying, not very smart, or feels secondhand embarrassment for you. Maybe, at this very moment, a coworker is laughing about something stupid you said in a team meeting!
Bear with me here: so what?
People are gonna talk. But that’s none of your business and has no bearing on what happens to you. Do your best to live within your values. Focus on the next right thing you can be doing. Who cares about how anyone else interprets that?
3. Guilt is a waste of time.
Feeling guilty feels awful. On top of that, it makes no net positive contributions to your world or mine!
Guilt doesn’t fix mistakes or heal wounds. It just traps you in a loop of self-punishment. Guilt can even be a little selfish, keeping you focused on your own feelings instead of what you can do to make things right.
If you feel bad about something, either do something about it or let it go. But languishing in the guilt and shame of it all is doing nothing for you, your life, the people you may have hurt, the mistakes you may have made. Do your best to make peace and move on.
4. Always pack a scarf and a bathing suit.
A scarf is everything when on the road—a blanket. An eye mask. A pillow. A sarong. A towel. For those of us with certain gifts for styling, perhaps even a shirt, though it’s never personally been my best look.
A suit is just a suit. But man, don’t get caught without one when the fancy hotel unexpectedly has a hot tub. Packing both ensures you’re ready for everything.
5. Knowing your problem isn’t the same as dealing with it.
A roommate of mine in college used to chalk up all her dating drama to what she called her “daddy issues.” Knowing what you struggle with and what you can work on? Right on, great first step.
However, she used it as a catch-all explainer for why her doomed situationships never got off the ground. Turns out, if you keep dating people who treat you like dirt and simply point to the wounds someone else left you with, you’re taking your own sovereignty off the table.
It’s not your fault that someone hurt you. But it is your responsibility to figure out how you’ll live the life you want to live from that point forward.
6. You can only dig into the “why” so much.
On that same note: sometimes, you just can’t know what nefarious combination of childhood traumas caused a certain aspect of your fucked-upness. You can lay back on the analyst’s couch and get lost trying to peel apart the ancient layers of hurt. But sometimes, you just need to move from where you already are.
Nothing can change what has already happened to you. Often, your only job is to learn how to move forward from the wounds you’ve acquired, even if you haven’t quite puzzled out their source
7. What if everything were a mirror?
A (sometimes not-so-fun) exercise I like to play when I’m judging someone else, or otherwise annoyed or angry at them, is to consider the ways in which they are the looking glass into my own psyche.
Do I really think her yoga talk is an eye roll, or am I envious because I dropped out of yoga teaching training two years ago and still wish to fulfill that dream?
Is it his impatience that’s bothering me, or the subconscious reminder that I inherited that same impatience from him? (hey dad, love you dad.)
8. Some of the very best friendships have a short lifespan.
What is a woman’s roman empire? Her ex best friend.
Some of the most important friendships of my life have come to a dramatic end during my twenties, one or two of whom I think of regularly. It’s painful even now to realize that it’s now been eight years since I last talked to the girl who was my best friend through high school and early college. A helpful reframe for this has been what Cheryl Strayed wrote about her mother’s death:
“It has been healing to me to accept in a very simple way that my mother’s life was 45 years long, that there was nothing beyond that. There was only my expectation that there would be—my mother at 89, my mother at 63, my mother at 46. Those things don’t exist. They never did.”
Some of our most meaningful friendships may only last a few years. That doesn’t detract from their significance. It also doesn’t mean the relationship was a failure. Cherish the memories and all you’ve gained, and move forward into new friendships that feed the person you are today.
9. Life is 90% maintenance.
Maintenance of our bodies: eat, sleep, move, wash, repeat. Maintenance of our relationships: talk, spend time together, sometimes disagree, repeat. Maintenance of our work: send the emails, go to the meetings, complete the deliverables, repeat.
This has been pretty easy to accept. What’s been harder for me to wrap my head around is that I will never reach a point where the values and beliefs I wish to hold about life will totally stick without continuous effort. Lucy Grealy summed this up perfectly at the end of her book Autobiography of a Face:
“I used to think truth was eternal, that once I knew, once I saw, it would be with me forever, a constant by which everything else could be measured.
I know now that this isn't so, that most truths are inherently unretainable, that we have to work hard all our lives to remember the most basic things.”
I will never reach a state of static bliss in which everything is complete and whole, my life gliding along on a frozen, perfect track. And that’s alright, because the point of being alive isn’t to sit on a throne of enlightenment eating grapes. It’s to work with the daily grist of our lives and constantly remind ourselves who we are and what we’re here for
10. You can only outrun what you know to be true for so long.
I love my gut, I love my instincts. Big fan of the ol’ intuition over here. But sometimes it tells me things I don’t want to hear and I stupidly think I can just walk a little faster and the truth will get left behind.
The more I do this, the more I realize: the truth is impossible to outpace. No matter how fast I go, what I know to be true for me will always catch me in the end. And so now when I have a difficult decision to make, the question has become: am I going to do it later, or am I going to do it now?
No input or output this week. Happy birthday to me! Back to our regularly scheduled programming next week.
xoxo,
Katie
Number 9!! Reading that felt like a lightbulb moment.
HBD x thank you for writing.