How do I let go even if it hurts to do so? When the right thing and the hard thing are the same thing? How do I let go even if I am not ready?

— Hurting

Dear Hurting,

I’ve been asked some version of this exact question often over the years, so I want to share what I’ve said before and would say again.

You do not force it.

You do not force yourself to feel neutrality if you are not neutral yet.

You do not force yourself to feel happiness if you are not happy yet.

You let yourself grieve for as long as you need to, and you do not bottle it up. You do not make apologies for it. You do not try to cover or conceal what has impacted you, what has shaken you, what has left scars. You process, and throughout the processing, you learn. You learn that you can withstand more than you ever thought.

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First and foremost, I want to offer you my deepest gratitude, for your books, your writing, and, perhaps most importantly, for the person you are and the honesty with which you share your inner world.

You are one of the greatest expanders of my thinking. Your work has challenged, shaped, and enriched the way I see myself, others, and life in ways I could never fully articulate. There are ideas I have encountered through your writing that have stayed with me long after I first read them, quietly influencing the way I think and move through the world.

I can only hope that, one day, I might become a writer who creates a fraction of the depth, honesty, and expansiveness that I find in your work.

I have a few questions I would love to ask you, and I would be deeply grateful for any response you might feel called to share:

How do you give yourself permission to write before you feel like you have enough to say? I write often and dream of sharing my writing one day, but I continually feel the ‘who am I to write about this? Who am I to give advice?’ I’m 24 and sometimes feel I need to wait until I’m older, wiser and have experienced more of life. But I wonder if I’m confusing humility with self-doubt, and if waiting until I feel qualified is just another way of pushing the life I want further away. How do you know when you have enough lived experience to speak, and when you simply need to begin?

— Anonymous

Dear Anonymous,

The short version of my answer is that I think you should write, often and with your whole heart, and then take time to decide what you want to share, where, and for whom. When we intertwine the act of creating with performing, we end up choked like this. If there’s something inside of you burning to write, you should write. I think you have to write. Your soul is asking for it.

It sounds to me like you sense that part of your journey is also to share it. It’s true that our creative callings are never in a vacuum. What we long to make is, at some level, what someone out in the world is longing to receive and experience.

I don’t know if you’ll find it stressful or reassuring to know that many of literature’s historical giants did their magnum opuses at your age, and younger.

Hannah Arendt wrote her dissertation, Love and Saint Augustine, from the ages of 22-23. Simone Weil was publishing philosophical essays in her twenties and wrote some of her most important political and spiritual work before dying in her mid 30s. Anna Freud wrote Introduction to the Technique of Child Analysis in her 20s. Susan Sontag published her essays in her 20s. Elizabeth Cady Stanton helped write the Declaration of Sentiments and underlying philosophical arguments for the Seneca Falls Convention at 32.

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How can we love ourselves as we are while still wanting to become more? I struggle to pursue growth without turning that desire inward as criticism or punishment. Sometimes I feel as though I need to dislike myself in order to change, as though fully accepting myself might make me complacent. How do we hold ourselves accountable, challenge ourselves, and aspire to become better without making our sense of worth dependent on who we become?

How do we reconcile the pursuit of what we desire with the practice of contentment and gratitude? How can we remain deeply appreciative of what we have without allowing gratitude to become a reason to stop aspiring toward what we might still want? Conversely, how do we pursue growth and desire without making our present lives feel perpetually insufficient?

With love,

— A

Dear A,

If there’s one thing I know about people, it’s that we don’t change until not changing is the less comfortable option. This is to say, we operate our lives and inner selves through homeostasis. Not just in our biology, but in our psyches as well.

I believe that as a whole, we are crossing a threshold where pain, loss or hurt acting as our primary and sometimes sole catalyst for evolution is not going to be sustainable anymore. It already isn’t. No longer can growth be like chemotherapy, where some part of us is revived or recovered, but at what cost and how much damage to the rest?

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How do you actually get to a place where you trust that things are going to be okay?

Even when you’re doing all the right things, it’s so easy to stay caught up in the uncertainty of what’s next. How do you quiet that doubt and just believe that it’ll all work out in the end?

Thanks!

— R

Dear R,

Despite having what I would consider a deep and at times almost supernatural connection with nature, I also, at times, have an incredibly strained relationship with the universe, with the day, with life.

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How does one create a beautiful future when their past is painted in grief and ache?

— ND

Dear ND,

The fact that you are still asking how to create a beautiful future means that a beautiful future is living inside you. Despite every which way that life has tried to kill it off, it has not, in fact, succeeded. I think this often about profound, immense pain. The incredible thing is that it’s a sign you’re resisting the current that wants to take you under. It’s a sign of something in you still fighting. In your case, it’s a sign that something inside you still senses, still knows, this is not the way the story will always be, or has to be.

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Sometimes at college I feel like a need to fake a personality to be part of a group of girls. They are lovely, but sometimes, I feel I’m not truly being me with them. I can’t talk about spirituality, and they judge a lot the people around them. Sometimes I feel so exhausted and out of place on those conversations. Some advice?

— AL

Dear AL,

There is no point in my life in which I have not felt like a fish out of water. I have clear memories of being a child and having this knowing that something was “different” or “off.” I could wear all of the same clothes, speak the same way, do the same things, and yet, there was something… not quite right. All of the time.

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