How to love parts of yourself you may not like (w/ Heather Havrilesky)

0:28You're listening to How to Be a Better Human. She is hilarious and sharp and so often beautifully eloquent about what it means to be human. Whether Heather is writing a memoir about her marriage called Foreverland or writing one of her two advice columns, Ask Polly or Ask Molly, she is always pushing for people to be more, more themselves, more honest, more fearless, more messy sometimes. So today on the show, we're going to talk about a big, huge question that every single one of us has to navigate every single day of our lives. How do you be you? To get started, here's a clip where Heather is talking about the kinds of letters she gets from people asking for advice.

1:06I really love answering letters from people who are in their 20s, early 30s, partially because it's such a terrible time, honestly. Even though you come out of college, you know, high school or come out of your youth having had a lot of structure, a lot of very rigorous expectations of your behavior, theoretically, in many cases. When you enter into your 20s and it's up to you, the sudden loss of structure and someone telling you what to do and people saying this is how the real world works and this is how life works can induce this kind of sense of vertigo. And I mean, in my own experience, months after landing in San Francisco felt like I was a complete failure.

1:55I think a lot of people in their 20s and 30s put pressure on themselves to hit certain marks at certain times to be a success overnight. There's a lot of pressure by the culture to be a phenom, to be a precocious 20 under 20, 30 under 30, 40 under 40. My first book came out when I was 40. I had some early successes, but I did a lot of flailing year after year after year. And I think my main advice for young people is just do not take those years so personally. Do not take them so seriously. You have a lot of time to figure things out and you have many times to start over and you have a million mistakes to make from now until the time you're dead.

2:43whether you are 22 or 92 i feel certain that there is going to be something in this conversation with heather today that provokes you hopefully provokes you to think deeply about who you are and who you want to be so let's get into it banking with capital one helps you keep more money in your wallet with no fees or minimums on checking accounts and no overdraft fees just ask the Capital One Bank Guy. It's pretty much all he talks about, in a good way. He'd also tell you that this podcast is his favorite podcast, too. Ah, really? Thanks, Capital One Bank Guy. What's in your wallet? Terms apply.

3:20See CapitalOne.com slash bank. Capital One N.A. member FDIC. You know how everything's a subscription now? Music, movies, even socks. I swear if I... To continue this ad, please upgrade to premium plus platinum. Uh, what? No, anyway, blue apron. This is a pay-per-listen ad. Please confirm your billing. Oh, that's annoying. At least with the new Blue Apron, there's no subscription needed. Get delicious meals delivered without the weekly plan. Wait, no subscription? Keep the flavor. Ditch the subscription. Get 20 % off your first two orders with code APRON20. Terms and conditions apply. Visit blueapron.com slash terms for more.

3:56The market's uncertain. Revenue's tied and hiring on hold. That's why results-driven companies are using Upwork to keep work moving. Go to Upwork.com today and start hiring proven freelance talent fast. No bulky overhead. No rigid long-term contracts. Just the right expert right when you need them. Work smarter and faster with Upwork. Go to Upwork.com now and find your freelance expert. That's U-P-W-O-R-K dot com. Post a job for free and get started today. Hi, I'm Heather Haverleski. I'm the author of four books, most recently Foreverland, on the divine tedium of marriage. I write the advice column Ask Polly, which is on Substack.

4:42And I also write a newsletter called Ask Molly, which is written by Polly's evil twin. I think of you sometimes in some ways as like the poet laureate of being yourself. Like you're allowed to be who you are and you don't have to feel ashamed of that. I feel like that comes up a lot in your writing. And you write about it so beautifully, both about your own personal experience, but in responding to people who are genuinely struggling and really like suffering from trying to be someone who they're not. It's interesting. I think I've just had a lot of different experiences with being my complete self and being half of myself and being a third of myself.

5:20I started out in the world as someone who was a little bit less in tune with other people's needs a little bit I mean I used to say I had a kind of a sociopathic streak to my behavior when I was really young you know it's a defense mechanism that you sometimes have if you are determined to have a kind of bluster and swagger when you're young I wrote a cartoon when I was 25 for one of the first websites online. And my whole thing was being kind of an asshole. My cartoon was about my coworkers. They loved it. They were all assholes. I rode that horse until it died. And then I had to reassess and I had a bad kind of late twenties, early thirties kind of come to Jesus.

6:12Oh my God, I make everyone mad. No one likes me moment. I recognized that I was very insecure, a little narcissistic. I had a lot of different problems. I was definitely a drinker. I wasn't necessarily completely over the top with any of these things. I just didn't know what was going on. And I didn't know who I was. And so I spent years rebuilding. Then I had kids, which incites its own kind of crisis of identity. I struggled a lot with mom friends, kid playgroups, the social scenes formed from that my kids chose that I didn't choose. I mean, that was hellish for me. I lived in the suburbs. And now I just four years ago moved to North Carolina from LA, lived in LA for 23 years.

7:04So I'm undergoing this whole new transformation, adjustment to Southern culture, adjustment to much more polite, much less extroverted culture. I have been through the ringer. I've tried everything. I've failed at everything. And I am not really that naturally good at that many things. So that's at the heart of the whole column. It's just about the joys and terrors of being humbled over and over again. Yeah, I think so much of what you're talking about, too, is at the core for me of a good sense of humor. And I think you are so funny and you have such a great sense of humor that I think sometimes when you've broken out into the broader world, people don't fully appreciate that you have a sense of humor.

7:54And it leads to people misinterpreting your work in a way. You can't really make a good joke about yourself unless it's true. No one laughs when you're like, I am so put together and I have my life on track. That's just not funny. But I think being like able to look at yourself with clear eyes and then make a joke about it, that's to me at the core of like a really good sense of humor. Well, I mean, I wouldn't want to write an advice column where I didn't mock myself, make fun of myself, joke about things. It would be excruciating for me. I mean, in some ways, my sense of humor helps me in everything I do.

8:27I don't think that I would still be interested in writing Ask Polly if I couldn't swear and insult myself and go on tangents and do a lot of messed up stuff. You know, in terms of my personal writing, I don't know if it's part of it is that Polly is sort of serious a lot of the time and earnest a lot of the time. And so people confuse that with my tongue in cheek writing. They just, where they assume that I'm in earnest saying, for example, everyone hates their husbands, it must be so, you know, as opposed to just love and hate are things that exist hand in hand. Being an artist includes hating yourself and trying to create things is necessarily a battle of good and evil at some level.

9:23And day to day kind of trivial choices you make can feel heavily moralistic and moral and, you know, feel like giant moral failures. I take a lot of artistic license. I veer around a lot. I've worked hard to sort of drill down into the core weirdness of my being in order to do any of the stuff that I do. And when I stopped doing that, when I feel like I'm just, what do people want? I got to give them the product that they signed up for. And, you know, That's when I really lose the magic. And so I think because I have to do that myself in order to produce work, it's easy to give people a lot of advice about when you're speaking from your core self, you are naturally being your best self.

10:15And also your best self is the same as your worst self. They are the same person. It's been interesting to see some of the public reaction, especially to your book, which I loved. Foreverland I thought was so funny and so great. And you wrote about marriage and relationships in a way that was so truthful and I had never read before. But it's interesting to see that I think people were, they didn't always want to acknowledge that you could be joking or funny. And there was this very moralistic tone around some of the parts of the book, like what you said of like writing about like, sometimes you're going to hate your husband, which to me is like, I can't think of a more innocuous and true statement than if you're in a long relationship with someone, there will be times where you're like, oh, my God, this person.

11:00Yeah. And yet I think because it was coming from you, that was like almost like shocking. People like clutch their pearls about that kind of an idea. Definitely. People who had read my stuff for many years were sort of like, no, no, you don't understand. She writes. This is how she writes. Yeah. I never really figured out what it was, what kind of preconceptions people were bringing to the table. I mean, for sure, women talking about marriage don't have a ton of leeway. Women have less leeway in talking about almost anything. After the book came out, I beat that drum a lot. And I'm an outspoken feminist, always have been, always will be.

11:36So that's pretty natural. Honestly, part of what I love about what I do is challenging these kinds of ways that people want to pigeonhole you and sort of pushing the new, apparently new notion that each individual can be a lot of different contradictory things. and it's much healthier to embrace a lot of the contradictions in who you are. And it's more fun to bring your whole self to everything you do. I mean, I started Ask Molly, my other newsletter written by Polly's Evil Twin, partially because there's so much room for experimentation with creative projects and with your identity. I mean, it sounds like hopelessly 2025 to say that.

12:27I'm confused by the fact that people, that they feel like a brand, they have to be a brand, and the brand has to give one thing. I do understand the temptation. It's hard not to worry about confusing people, because when you confuse people, you do end up not selling that many books, right? I'm very proud of my book, Foreverland, but it didn't sell that well. people I think were like a marriage is it are you talking about happiness are you talking about hating your husband why aren't you divorced why isn't this a divorce memoir I mean but I still feel like it's one of the most powerful messages I have to share is that we cannot be tempted to turn ourselves into brands because we're hollowing ourselves out.

13:16The more you bring your full self to anything you do, the happier that thing will make you and the more satisfying and the more brilliant the thing will be, you know? I think it feels really in line with the arguments and the points that, you know, I think you make so persuasively across a lot of your work about being all of the complicated mess of yourself and not feeling ashamed of that. But people sometimes feel like, especially because there's this, like, Like, what are we putting out publicly and how will I build my career and my friends and people want this thing from me? I have to have a thing.

13:54And yet you don't want friends who are that that flat. But we think that we should be that flat. That's absolutely true. And I think that people are confused. I mean, people in general who do things that are public facing are, you know, you know, reasonably bewildered by how to manage to manage that universe, to manage the contradictions between private and public. Like, it's just everyone's kind of learning on their feet, right? Like, we're all sort of watching everyone do a lot of different levels of marketing of themselves. And even, you know, people who don't have anything to sell are almost marketing themselves.

14:34And I think that it's very natural to see someone doing it in a way that you would not like to do yourself. it's not that smart to do things that you don't feel great doing you know i just remember when foreverland came out i got on a podcast and it turned out to be video and it's like hold on a second you know i'm running to the bathroom i've got like gray roots in my hair i mean all of your fears and insecurities right are triggered by this particular moment in self-marketing and self-branding. It's very difficult to be a peaceful, self-branded human being. This is certainly what I struggle the most with personally right now in my own work is that I really love having conversations for the podcast.

15:23I love writing essays and I love performing live comedy. I love those things, but they all require me to do this other thing that I don't like, I'm not very good at, objectively, I'm pretty bad at. And that makes me kind of go crazy, which is to post short clips or get people to come to a show, but also entertain them in between that stuff. And it's like, that's the thing that makes me be like, maybe I should just do a completely different career. But then the thing is, I love the other parts that I do. I think it's good to resist a lot of the dumb imperatives that are foisted on you. If you gave in, if you surrendered to it, the angle is just find the thing that you can tolerate.

16:07Like find something that you want to create. It's only loosely related to what you're promoting. You know what I mean? Like if it's pancakes, you know, something small and weird is good. I mean, you know, we talked about being misunderstood, but I think that it's important also to, to understand as a person, whether we're talking about branding or just socializing, people understand you better than you think they do. The people who love you love you more than you think they do. The people who you think hate you care a lot less than you think they do. They're just not invested. And what's important is when you choose something that you find exciting, you serve everybody.

16:50You turn off the people who don't give a shit anyway. you know you turn on the people who care and want the purest the highest level of hit of your thing that they can possibly get you know molly has been very nurturing to my soul and almost keeps polly afloat just by allowing for a place for me to be ridiculous at some times though i feel like i need to remember that polly is also molly and polly always was molly like from the very beginning And that's how Polly got popular in the first place. And Polly doesn't need to always be service oriented. Polly can also just be fun. I think this is also 100 % in line with what we're talking about in the sense that like you could reduce the work that you do with Ask Polly and Ask Molly into like their advice columns.

17:44But honestly, like for me as a fan of them, as someone who reads them and really enjoys them and gets a lot of meaning out of them. To me, like the least thing that they are is advice columns. They're so not just about like someone writes in with a problem and you give them a solution. They're like these big essays on life and meaning and culture and your own experience. Like they're not like, I was wondering, how do I invite people to my wedding? And then someone, and then you write back like, well, you should try like a heavy cardstock and put it in an envelope with a nice personal signature.

18:16Like that's an advice column, you know? Yours are much bigger than that. And yet I understand how it's really hard to say like, this is like a humorous, but also quite earnest at times, like meaningful column that uses as a launching place, like someone's real problem. You can't communicate that. And yet that's what people like about work is the complicated nuancedness of it. Yeah. I mean, in the beginning, I called it an existential advice column. I love that. I probably need to call it that in general whenever asked and everywhere. But there are times when I fall down the rabbit hole of writing about what's wrong with culture right now and what's wrong with the way people do things or, you know, what's wrong with the way people text or how passive people are, how avoidant they can be, how, you know, anxious they can be over so many things, myself included.

19:05I'm very anxious about a lot of dumb things but sometimes i forget that like i'm partially giving people a kind of optimism mixed with cynicism about having to go out and endure other human beings and to endure just the stupidity of the culture you know which is so oppressive i mean i would say that like the the core ask poly reader is always surprisingly smart and and alienated from mainstream culture in a way that i don't i don't think of it that way i think its appeal is a little wider than that kind of like alternative grumpy person in a cave but you know the grumpy person in the cave exists in a lot of us there's not a lot of culture that caters to that grumpy person in the cave you know what i I mean, like, when you're grumpy in your cave and you go to your phone and you say, like, I need something to just fucking get me through this, the combination of just apocalyptic dread and poptimistic nightmare realm, you know?

20:22I need something that's not those two things, you know, that's not hysteria, that's not realistic fear over the future. There are days when you just want the internet to sound more like a smart friend who's like, yeah, don't worry. Of course you're going crazy. It's normal. I've been trying to think of what my next book should be. And I just keep coming back to like, the world's on fire. Why shouldn't you be? Occasionally I'm like, just write a book about something that's the maximum shallow that you could possibly write. You know, like stop trying to write literature and just write the stupidest, most insane thing that just sounds fun.

21:07You know, I mean, I do think we're in a moment of like, where do we find the fun under these conditions?

21:17We're going to find more fun with Heather right after these podcast ads.

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23:43And we are back. So Heather, when you're writing and you're drawing on personal experience, you're at least giving the impression of someone who figures things out by writing. So how do you find the difference between like a first draft that is for you versus a draft that's going to work for other people and you don't want to revise it too much and lose the searching and the quality of of messiness that other people can relate to? How do you find that balance in your writing? I'm going to make it sound too easy, but it's also really hard. sometimes the best things i write honestly i started the beginning and i just follow my whims and they go to the end and i'm like yes i did you know i'm just on i'm just in the zone and i just have it the best ask polly columns were all written in that way the best ask mollies are like that although ask molly is slightly more go back fix the joke you know i mean when you're writing jokes ask polly is not like it's not precision work right but ask molly is sort of everything's gotta be funny for ask molly i'm sure you struggle with this when you're trying to be funny right it's kind of crazy because funny people are also very moody it's like what are we doing to ourselves right how many times do you sit down you're like i'm gonna be funny today and you can do it.

25:08Oh, well, I was going to say very often the first part, very rarely the second part where I'm like, I'm going to be funny, but then successfully doing it. Almost never. Oh, it never works. Then I'm like, I end up writing the saddest or like most serious thing or the most boring thing I've ever thought of. Like, it's just very hard to get into that. Like sometimes if I'm trying to be funny or I'm trying to write something that's worthwhile and I just veer in the total opposite direction and just go negative, dark it can be funny too like you let the some beast out and then you can you have to follow what you have inside you have to follow your soul you know you can't just force yourself to be one thing or another but i was gonna say that when you put funny stuff down it's the start of something funny you pick it up again make it a little funnier i mean that's how i used to write my cartoons.

26:00Put it down, pick it up, write another joke, put it down. But I would say, though, that if you want, like, how do you know something's done? How do you get to the place where you're not over, you know, second guessing yourself? I feel like sometimes you just write bad drafts of things and then forget them. And then one day you get up and you know you're in the right mood and you're like, maybe I'll write about that thing that I tried to write about before and then you've got it the second chapter of foreverland is about going to europe with my soon-to-be husband and just hating him hating him the whole time and just we're about to get engaged and i like i've never been less into this person and now i'm about to get engaged which was just a weird moment in time it was just like i had high expectations of europe i had high expectations of getting engaged i you know i just wanted everything to be magic and of course everything with shit because I wanted too much.

26:53But I tried to write that experience so many times. I think I wrote, actually wrote bad versions of it maybe five times. And then one morning I was like, I'm going to try to write that. That's just a funny story. I'm going to write it. I think I sent it to Corey Seager at the New York times. And I said, this is a crazy piece. I don't know if you'll like it. He was my editor at the all and hired me to write Ask Pauling in the first place he's so great and he was like oh i don't want to change that many things i want it to be just like this and i was like yes you know that's the magic that you love but it took a lot of work to get to you do have to do the drudgery the just tedious terrible work to land i mean every now and then you're just like ah i i'm just on fire today i can write about anything and it'll be great and half the time you're like oops that wasn't actually that great but i hit publish before i knew that and other times you're like wow i just had the magic but generally speaking especially stories that are yours like from your past it takes a lot of like processing that out but fast processing that's what i want to recommend fast yeah you know what i mean like get it down move on come back i mean think especially like with a true story from your own life almost always the best way is the way that you would tell it if you were telling it to someone who was in person exactly That does require like you have to have the story, but you also have to not like overwork it and get it overly complicated.

28:23That's exactly right. And if you're that kind of person who enjoys entertaining people live and in person, right, if your favorite thing that most human beings never let you do, damn them, is talk forever about your thing, you know, and so like, how do you tell a story conversationally? like let some storytellers tell a damn story i love it when people go along but anyway if you're that kind of person it is like talking and it's sort of like essentially writing becomes building your relationship with the page so that you're the page is a good friend that you tell everything to yeah yeah and you you try to enter that state as much as you possibly can i think like the funniest moments come from not trying to make a joke but it just like it exists because you're being honest or you're just having a natural reaction.

29:13And that ends up being the funniest moment. In an Ask Polly column somewhat recently, there was a moment where like you were writing and then you paused and you said like, I'm right now, I'm sitting next to Bill in bed. And I paused because I liked what I was writing so much that I wanted to like push this over into another day. I just like thought that was so funny and so perfect, but it's because it was like very truly honest. Like this is this thing where I wanted to sit with your letter for a little bit longer. And here's where I am right now. We have a spotlight. And I think whatever that moment is in people's writing, where you get to see them, that's always the most, for me, that's what I live for when I'm reading people's work.

29:47Yeah, that's true for me too. I need to remember that because I forget that that's part of my job sometimes. The more off the cuff you can be, I don't know. There are a lot of warring impulses with writing, right? You can have these heavy things that you're carrying around like, I'm a great writer. I'm really great. So I got to be more literary, more whatever that is. And then you read Nabokov or whoever, and you're like, Jesus, these people were just casual, actually. I mean, sure, they had a beautiful way with words. They also put in Moby Dick, the sperm whale. I'm obsessed with whales, so I'm just going to tell you about whales for a while.

30:31God, I love whales. Very much the energy of a third grader telling you a lot of whale facts in some chapters for sure you're just like what why would okay you know a lot about the whales like you're you definitely know a lot about whales there's a way that that those parts of obi dig though are so great because certain writers like making you pay a little bit because some of the prose in that book is so insanely good and so relatable it's just like these soulful relatable moments it's almost like you pay the price on your knees you You know, you're hearing about sperm whales. Polly is like that, too.

31:08You know, I just like go on too long. I mean, I think that the main thing for me is just is there momentum? Does it feel like it's getting bogged down like a book, like a heavy book? Or does it feel like there's something important to say here? We're going to take a quick break for some podcast ads, and I really hope one of them is whale related. I mean, that would be incredible. Hopefully they were able to find a whale company that wanted to advertise. Either way, though, we will be right back after this.

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33:20And we are back. We're talking with Heather Haverleski about how to be true to yourself and how to navigate relationships, the world, and finding your voice. When you're starting out as a writer, I think it's very natural to want to, or maybe even unconsciously, emulate writers who you like. You start by kind of being like, I'm going to try and sound like that other person. And your writing does sound like a bad version of them. How do you get past that, right? How do you find the amalgamation of all these other people and yourself that is your actual writing voice or your tone? So you can get to this place where it is just talking to the good friend who is the page.

33:56What advice do you have for people who are starting out as writers? I think it was just if you read enough of someone you love, you end up through osmosis kind of imitating them, whether you want to or not. And my thing, I think, was just I love Joan Didion so much. I mean, like so many cliche white women of the universe. I also really love John Updike. And I think what happened was I would just I had been writing in journals so much that I could freely write in a conversational tone pretty early on in my career. The key with me was if I managed to write about something that I was emotionally invested in, either angry or, you know, I mean, in the old days, it was TV shows I loved a lot.

34:40I could write really well about when I was a TV critic for Salon. I could write passionately about them. And something would kick in about a third of the way through the piece where I'd start sounding a little Didion-like. I don't think it sounded imitative, actually, because I wasn't aiming for it. It was just part of my subconscious that conjured it. I personally feel like that's the ideal. It's like you read enough books that you love and writing that you love. And I think when you read someone who's funny enough you just you just end up kind of like it's not that you're imitating their style it loosens you up because the funniest writers are always very loose they're just like you know they go on weird tangents and you're like yes yes go on a tangent you know you you trust them you trust their tangents i mean that's like a good writer you trust you trust them to run with the ball, you know?

35:38And then when you trust yourself, when you see that, it teaches you to trust yourself to run with the ball when you're feeling it. So I feel like feeling it is like 90 % of the battle. I mean, that makes it sound a little bit magical thinking like, but I don't think that's it. It's like you put in the practice until you can feel it. Yeah. I mean, for me, it started like when I started in comedy, it was very clear to me that I was like, if you are looking for a less funny John Mulaney. Here I am. I can copy him, but not be as good at the thing. And then, and a few times my wife and I would like go to his shows, you know, I'd be like performing for like five people in a basement where I was begging people to come.

36:18And then we'd go and see like him tape a special at Radio City Music Hall. And he would have like, just objectively the same topic, but so much funnier and better. And she'd be like, well, I guess you got to stop talking about that joke. And I'd be like, no, why did you have to do it? Why are you so good? But it was also, like you said, it was this real like path of like, oh, I see what the craft is and like how you can do it in these ways. And I think it does help to be like, okay, I think that I want to be like that, but actually I'm going to be myself and myself might be different. And it may not be, you know, it may not be a Radio City Music Hall level of comedy, but it may be something that's more me that I won't then be like a weird carbon copy.

36:58And I don't feel like I'm a carbon copy of him anymore, but I also still don't feel like I'm as funny. Both of those are okay. I had a little thing with Cheryl Strayed for a while where I was like, I mean, you know, I was sort of writing advice before she started writing advice, but like she did it in a way that was amazing. And I was like, she's great. I love her. But then, you know, I started writing advice too. And I was like, I don't know, maybe I hate her. Just because you're competitive and you're like, I don't do it that way. I do it this way. You're just like you said, you're always going to bring your own weird shit to the table.

37:36You're always going to innovate. And the more you follow your own whims, I'm kind of just repeating what you said. If there's one thing I love, it's someone saying back what I said. I love that. That's truly why I do what I do. Podcasting is a lot like therapy. Well, actually, let's talk about the podcasting and the advice column because one thing I think is interesting, especially about a show called How to Be a Better Human exists in this space that is like, I don't think of this as a self-help show, but it is in a self-help adjacent place at the very least. There's this idea that's kind of implicit in a lot of self-help that's like, you need to change.

38:12You need to make yourself better. You need to do all this work to improve who you are. But I think that you have pushed back a lot on that idea of you need to be someone different and better than who you are. That, in fact, probably what you need to do is to be exactly who you are and to understand that and accept that more. I always sort of flinched at the concept of living your best life, even though Oprah's awesome. I love Oprah. And obviously anything you come up with, other people are just going to kick it over and say, you know what I hate? Self-care. Self-care is bullshit. You know, every day you should do whatever.

38:49But everything is a balance. Okay. Today, I literally wrote a Ask Polly column where I said, we all want total control and total perfection and we all want to live forever at some level. And we're all a little self-obsessed that way. And we're willing to be hated at some level just to kind of honor that neurotic perfectionist inside us. But then the other side of that is, just as you have to honor that inner perfectionistic neurotic, you also have to honor the grumpy bridge troll that lives inside you. and also invite the chaos of other human beings into your life, you know, failing to connect with other human beings as well as you might if you just ceded some control, learned to surrender to the moment, learned to surrender to the awfulness of other people a little bit more often.

39:37So I feel like I have so many self-improvement impulses just poised and ready to go inside me that are just really awful. There was a time in my life where I was a little bit chubbier and I would look at myself in the mirror and I was like, I don't feel like myself. I don't feel like this is me. And it's like, that's not a good place to be. If chubby were myself, it would be great. I'd be able to eat more snacks. I would like it. It's just, you have to be true to whatever crazy, crazy, crazy mix of beasts exists inside you. So a lot of the problem with self-improvement culture is that there's an inherent shame to believing that you should always be making progress in life.

40:29There's also just an inherent anxiety about it. It's depressing to think that you're supposed to always get better because people just don't do that. People don't understand that if you're not good to yourself, especially like if you don't learn to be good to yourself when you're younger, you grow up and have this like terrible, punishing, neurotic idea that you're supposed to keep improving and that marriages don't get better and worse and better and worse and that relationships with people don't require all kinds of special care and attention and a lot of frustration and a lot of like, blech.

41:08One of my main purposes in life is to just tell people, once you cut out the shame of not being this idea, this fantasy idea of what you're supposed to be, you're going to be 80 times happier. You know, you just, and it's hard because you don't want to stifle people's ambition or their dreams. I mean, dreams are a huge part of feeling happy. Dreams in and of themselves can bring you satisfaction even when you don't achieve them because it's just good to have dreams. They're part of your imagination and part of your ability to feel the possibilities in any given day. So that balance between putting too much pressure on yourself, triggering your shame with your ambition, it's a hard path to walk.

42:03Creative people have very naturally ambitious. Creative people have a lot of struggles for a very good reason, because you can't be Zen and be ambitious at the same time. You actually have to be both things. You have to be dark, light, optimistic, skeptical. You have to be all of it, you know, and you have to accept all of it and play with all of it to create. so I'm pretty anti self-improvement on the one hand I'm obsessed with it I love it but I think that the language of self-improvement is just lazy and sloppy and it presupposes a kind of like capitalism of the soul where you're optimizing your product for the masses I mean there's nothing worse for you than that creatively Heather Haveleski thank you so much for being on the show really this was great I had a really good time it was uh fun and I hope I can come back that is it for this episode of how to be a better human thank you so much to today's guest heather heverleski her latest book is called foreverland and she is the author of the ask polly and ask molly newsletters i am your host chris duffy and you can find more from me including my weekly newsletter and other projects at chrisduffy comedy.com how to be a better human is put together by a team of geniuses constantly doing battle with their evil twins on the ted side we've got the radically honest Daniela Balaresso, Ban Ban Cheng, Michelle Quint, Chloe Shasha Brooks, Valentina Bohanini, Eleni Lott, Tanzika Sungmanivong, Antonia Leigh, and Joseph DeBrine.

43:36This episode was fact-checked by Julia Dickerson and Mateus Salas, who know that the only true forever land is the truth. On the PRX side, they give audio advice that cannot be denied. Morgan Flannery, Norgil, Patrick Grant, and Jocelyn Gonzalez. Thanks again to you for listening. Without you, we are not a podcast. We're just me talking alone in my basement. Please share this episode with a person in your life who you think would love it, who you think would enjoy it. We would so appreciate you helping us to spread the word about our show. We will be back next week with even more How to Be a Better Human.

44:06Until then, thanks again for listening and take care.

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