My Existentialism Story, What's a Narrative Identity? And Why I š Advice. (+ refuse to say "frown lines")
One thing you should know off the bat is that I'm not here to give advice. I hate doing that. Gives me the heebie-jeebies. Which always sucks when I take a personality or character strengths or Myers Briggs, Enneagram, ideal-career, "or what character inĀ The Handmaid's TaleĀ are you?" test (I'm making that sound like I do them quite often...which is the truth) and I'm asked, "what kind of advice do people always come to you for?"Ā
There's no multiple choice option for "Umm, nothing unless we're counting helping my husband with anything Bluetooth related?" so I always have to pick something...which feels like rounding up in a way.Ā
The truth is, I zero percent of the time give out unsolicited advice.Ā
I even have a tough time givingĀ solicitedĀ advice, which is why I get super sweaty when anyone asks me for directions. Even if I'm dead sure I'm right. Like I canĀ seeĀ the Starbucks up ahead.Ā
Hi! What youāre reading is also what I record in my Existennial Podcast, so if you prefer letting your ears rather than your eyes do the work (or really need to empty the dishwasher but canāt pull yourself away from my content š) feel free to listen instead:
But giving out guidance has always felt like too much pressure. Maybe it's because I'm pretty empathic and focused on the fragility of life, so if I advise someone to order the pesto and artichoke pizza and they do, and they think it's just meh, I get racked with guilt that they wasted precious living time on a meh meal because of me?! Or maybe it's because I actually don't likeĀ takingĀ advice myself? Like I still get a pit when I stumble upon my two dusty pairs of wedge sneakers, which I was ADVISED were timeless, practical, and could be dressed up or dressed down...
Or maybe my aversion to asserting advice is simply because my suggested solution for every single thing is the same: Windex. Okay, is thatĀ My Big Fat Greek WeddingĀ joke/reference retired? Was it ever, really, in business?Ā But my suggested solution for everything is:Ā what does your gut, soul, inner truth, personal genie, telepathic cat say?Ā
A friend asked if they should post photos of them looking gorg at a wedding on Instagram: I said, "what does your gut say?"Ā
A stranger asked if they chose a good color for their pedicure, and I said, "do you like it?" "yeah, it's cool." "Then it's great!"
My sister once asked if her dating profile was good, and I said, "okay, give me your phone. I'm rewriting this entire thing for you." Because I make up for my dislike of advice-giving with my gusto for word-editing.Ā
Now, I do feel immensely grateful that there exist people who enjoy giving advice.Ā
It's hella helpful to know how to gua sha my squint wrinkles away (I refuse to call them frown wrinkles BECAUSE I GOT THEM FROM SQUINTING!!!! My eyes are very sensitive to the sun). Or how to keep a snake plant aliveāor a newborn human.Ā
I appreciate people sharing best practices for layering rugs, pairing wine with curry, or using credit card points to snag airplane tix...
But questions like, "should I break up with him? Get a dog? Get a lob?Ā
Give my dog a lob?" And I'm outa there.
But you know what flies out of me like a swarm of Moms on Black Friday when stores were in person before COVID?Ā
Stories.Ā
Stories feel safe. TheyĀ areĀ safe. No one can tell you your story was wrong, or led them astray, or caused them to waste 108 minutes of their life on, I quote, "a mediocre movie whose payoff is worth less than a Forever21 sweater" (said about M. Night Shyamalan'sĀ The Village). I'm sorry, I liked that psychologically metaphorical deep layered film!
Sharing a story instead of administering advice is like the difference between describing your thrilling time at Tsunami Surge versus shoving them down the waterslide and yelling, "trust meeeeeee" as they tear out of eyesight.Ā (Honestly, I'm not sure if that analogy makes any sense.)
Let's get smarter for a minute: A Spanish philosopher named Baltasar Gracian once said about giving advice: "When you counsel someone, you should appear to be reminding them of something they had forgotten, not of the light they were unable to see."
How I digest that is: we each have a ton of inner wisdom that's as unique to us as the thumbprint that opens our iPhone. Or clears us from a crime. Or makes an adorable fridge-display-worthy Thanksgiving turkey. The BEST thing a teacher can do is inspire, nudge, and empower them to access their own inner wisdom.Ā (Unless you're teaching organic chemistry. I don't think we're born with innate wisdom for...whatever you learn in organic chemistry.)Ā And in my opinion, which has been backed by study after study, the best way to inspire, nudge and empower peeps is to tell them stories.
But stories also have profound personal powers.
A psychologist named Dan McAdams at Northwestern University is an expert on something he coined "narrative identity." Narrative identity (or N.I. for short as I like to call it in my rap videos) is what he describes as anĀ "internalized and evolving story of the self that a person constructs to make sense and meaning out of his or herĀ [or their! I added that. #woke]Ā life."Ā
Another way to say that is: so that every day in our life isn't just some rando, we each decide how to string them together so our existence makes at least a little sense as one big story.
Not surprisingly, McAdams found that people tend to focus their stories mainly on their most extraordinary events, good and bad...
It's kind of like you Instagram or Facebook stalk yourself. Like how you look at all of someone's squares and little snippets and use our own lens to make up a story about them: example, example, examples... we do that to ourselves.Ā
As I'm saying all this, I'm thinking DUH, TALIA, GOOD IDEA EXPLAINING INSTAGRAM HIGHLIGHT REEL CULTUREĀ TO MILLENIALS. THAT'S A GOOD USE OF YOUR AND THEIR TIME.
But this is different than racking up double-taps on our the curated life snippets on social media. This is deeper than that.Ā I know, deeper than IG. Shocking, right?!Ā
Instead, creating a narrative identity is about introspectively and imaginatively interpreting our pasts to develop stories that help our life feel more understandableāand more meaningful.
It's not dissimilar to that Steve Job's quote, "You can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backward. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future."
Two majorly interesting things (among many, I'm sure, but these tickle my fancy) that the psychologist McAdams discovered happen when we connect our dots:Ā
First, our unique interpretations of our experiences mayāand likely willādiffer. Emily Esfahani Smith, who wrote one of my favorite books of all time,Ā The Power of Meaning: Crafting a Life That Matters,Ā explained it like this:Ā
She said, and I'm paraphrasing, "for one person, a childhood experience like learning how to swim by being thrown into the water by a parent might explain their sense of self today as a strong entrepreneur who learns by taking risks. For another person, that being chucked-into-the-water experience might explain why they hate boats and hoesĀ andĀ do not trust authority figures. A third person might omit that experience from their life story altogether, deeming it unimportant and unrelated to who they are today.Ā
As McAdams said, "we are all the authors of our own stories and can choose to change the way we're telling them."
Okay, and here's fascinating thing number two: McAdams found two main genres, I'll say, of stories people tell: redemption stories and contamination stories. The former being like, "bad shit happened to me, example here, example there, oh and here's a regretful thing I did, but ultimately, this positive thing resulted from the negative crap and here's the meaning and how I grew, yada yada." These redemption storytelling people, he found, feel confident, loved and their lives are pretty purposeful, as they're actually more driven to contribute to society and to help out future generations.Ā
Alternatively, contamination storytellers, as I'm sure you can guess, are folks that interpret their lives as going from yay to nay with no meaning, no way! These storytellers tend to be more anxious and depressed and generally feel like their lives are just a series of random, inconsequential, non-dot-connectable events.Ā
Last thing I'll say on this topic, though I hope you find this as freaking interesting as I do. (If you do, can you let me know? Either by emailing me at thing@taliapollock.com or leaving a comment below this post if you're reading it?)Ā Ā
McAdams and other psychologists have found what writers like me already knew to be true: there'sĀ alwaysĀ room for edits.Ā They found that people's lives can beĀ significantlyĀ impacted by making even minor tweaks to their personal narratives.Ā
Literally, as Emily writes inĀ The Power of Meaning, "through editing and reinterpreting a story with their therapist, the patient may come to realize that they are in control of their life and that some meaning can be gleaned from their hardships.Ā A review of the scientific literature finds that this can be as effective as antidepressants or cognitive behavioral therapy."Ā
Wowie kazawie. Who knew that a word processor's little underlines could help us avoid needless commas AND lasting emotional pain!Ā
After so long of pretty much only interacting with my plants, pet, and partner, I've been out 'n about meetingĀ lotsĀ of new groups of folks lately. I started my master's program, went on a women's writing retreat, joined a new medical practice, and began going to our small town events to socialize with stranger neighbors whose upper face I sort of recognize from a year of street waves.Ā
There's been a lotttttt of introductions, meaning a lottttttt of opportunities for me to craft, revise, edit, and tweak my personal narrative and here's roughly where I've settled:
Since I could read and write, I haven't stopped. Words to me are like fire to a nympho. I mean pyro. In college, while majoring in journalism, I learned there's a style of writing that mags and newspapers and book companies publish that actually isn't based on thrice fact-checked facts, textbook grammar, or scaring the shit out of people to rack in the ad bucks: humor writing. Humor writing came to me naturally and passionately. When I discovered it a la my school paper's weekly humor column, David Sedaris essays, and Chelsea Handler's first books and tried it on for size, I felt like I'd found an arm with whom I'd been separated at birth.Ā
My quickie credo about humor writing is that it's truth-telling that can heal. We laugh at what we can relate to, and when we can relate, we feel less alone. To me, it's pure magic.Ā
A few years out of college, after doing stand up comedy, interning at Adam Sandler's production company, working at The Late Show with David Letterman, I decided I wanted to pivot out of the humor a la scripted Hollywood situation and schooch myself more into the truth-telling that heals area. That's when I started Party in My Plants, my humorous, healthy living brand? Platform? Business? I still have no clue. It was 2014 going into a coffee shop asking for almond milk would've yielded you the same expression back then as going into a Gap asking for the boy's clothes will yield you in 5 years. (You wait. Gendered sections are on their way out. I'm predicting it now.)Ā
So it made perfect sense for me to blend my chops for comedy with my chops for chopping kale, and so that's what I did. I immediately started in my wheelhouse: writing pieces for Mindbodygreen, which at the time was a humungous deal in the world of wellness and in the world of Talia.Ā
All I can say that happened next is that I woke up many blurry years later and realized I'd been "Bachelor Franchised." Like a cute naive girl used goes onĀ The BachelorĀ motivated by love, but then comes out the other side mistaking fame, "likes" and moolah for love, I think that's what happened with me. I started Party in My Plants with my true values intact and then got swept away in the social media rat race and lost my anchor.Ā
I imagine this is quite common, right? I mean it's like a millennial's "American Dream story" except instead of waking up at age 55 thinking "why the eff did I waste my life climbing this corporate ladder for?" it was an age 30 "why the eff did I waste my 20's chasing likes for?"Ā
And that's what led to my existential crisisāmy complete unraveling. I had hustled my way from some Mindbodygreen articles to a dozen Dr. Oz appearances, video features in Bustle, AOL, and Mashable, a top-rated healthy living podcast, and at the tippy top: a major published cookbook with my face (and body) on the cover, which my face (and body) debuted live on Good Morning America, complete with some minutes on the Times Square TV screen and all. I realized I was standing on the top of a mountain I had zero desire to be on. And there was very little oxygen up there. So I had a hard time breathing. And I felt very sick.Ā
So I did a deep clean of my life. And my soul. And my home. And car. And bin of dusty free health food samples. I had to put words to the fact that I had strayed so far from my core values. Then I had to give myself self-compassion up the wazoo.Ā
After that came a looooooong pause before anything else. We call this my Elin Hilderbrand period, where I just lay on our couch, window seat, floor.. and read every one of her, I think 27, rom-com, beach-based fiction books. Ok not really com. Mostly just rom.
Reading hours and hours of fiction for the first time since high school brought me to worlds outside my current one, which helped me start to reconnect with long-lost values.Ā
During this time I also got diagnosed with Bipolar II disorder, which had been with me my whole life but only got the attention it deserved when I paused long enough to attend to it.Ā
This diagnosis is what has enabled me to actually discern what kind of life I want to live. I realized that I actually don't enjoy living from highs to lows like a goddamn yo-yo thank you very much.Ā Remember yo-yo's? I actually saw a kid yo-yo'ing the other day and I wanted to say GOOD FOR YOU DUDE FOR choosing this mindlessness over technological mindlessness.Ā
But my whole life people had touted my high energy; so I not only believed it was my best trait but also like a kid whose family are all doctors, felt like I kind of had to be a doctorāI mean an endlessly energetic star. But I started to realize that with my bipolar, the highs that I would experience that led me to make my quirky, crazy, YouTube videos, and funny Instagram stories for example were actually me not being well, like it's not a healthy place for me to go up that high because what goes up must go down and I would go down way lower than I'd ever go up. And then sometimes when I'd be down, I'd still have to maintain my image of up so I would have to dig deep and manufacture it. Phone it in. Kind of put on a Talia performance. That was sure exhausting.Ā
So I paused. And this existential pause of mine overlapped with the world's gigantic pause, which I think is actually more common now than not. Y tu?Ā
I wrap up my "nice to meet you" story by saying that eventually, with self-compassion, acceptance, introspection and the help of meds, therapists and many many long walks, I found my way to my healthiest myself and set out to reassemble my core values and live accordingly.Ā
I'm now in a place where family members who haven't seen me in years comment on how they love the brightness, exuberance, and sincerity of this "new Talia," to which I say "no no no, this is True Talia."Ā
You know, really, my problem with advice is that the advice giver's values inform their advice. Again, this isn't for step-by-step how-to advice like how to hang a gallery wall or ice skate backward or make your own sourdough donuts. But our values color our counseling for the big things like should I prioritize finances or freedom? Should I start a family? Which cheese is better: gorgonzola or burrata?Ā (I'm team gorg because my value isĀ flavorrrrĀ thank you very much. I do not understand burrata for the life of me.)
See? Life is so stinking subjective.Ā
So my hope with this show and newsletter and books and future endeavors together is to advice-free-ily remind, nudge and excite you to, similar to what Barney/Neil Patrick Harris says in How I Met Your Mother, VALUE UP! So you don't get blown by the wind or "Bachelor Franchised," baby, and always dwell consciously and comfortably in all facets of your life for the right reasons.Ā
Well, thanks for listening to this second episode of Existennial! Your excitement over this new show has been palpable and appreciated! Feel free anytime to reach out to me at thing@taliapollock.com, I would LOVE to talk further about all this jazz. And I'm still troubleshooting how to have a healthy respectful relationship with social media, so I'm hoping to spend most of my time connecting with you via good ol' fashioned email. If you're a millenial, you remember the thrill of your very first YOU GOT MAIL. And now you know the dread of it. But hopefully emailing with me won't be dreaful! So if you want to get my frequent-ish (remember the bipolar thing) emails with all sorts of fun meaningful things that I'm hoping to be like an orange tic tac in your inbox...something delightful, refreshing, and peppy? Scroll down to the shownotes and click the link that says get my newsletter or go to taliapollock.com and click the same button. K thanks, talk to you soon!Ā