Tell Your Friends What To Do

I made it a maxim some time ago never to accept friends’ advice.  Mostly when it comes to relationships.  This may sound cruel, but it’s not. When friends are “offering advice” they are up to something else entirely. They are pumping you up like a hype man.  We hold our friends in lofty esteem, which, in turn, creates gaping blind spots. What offense could you have committed, my queen? You are the platonic ideal of a 21^st century woman!  What potential responsibility could you possibly shoulder in this unseemly morass? Crimes have been committed against you!  You must deliver a speech to him, a monologue about justice.
 
I adore these summits, the narrativizing of Ways I Have Been Wronged. But pragmatic advice this is not.  This is something more akin to co-writing a dis track, or fomenting a frothy rage of righteous indignation prior to burning an effigy.  And believe me, I am the worst offender.  If you come to me with the slightest discomfort, I will always tell you to dump him/order the second pizza/charge the Spanish vacation to your credit card when you work in publishing and make 32k per annum/ nominate yourself for a MacArthur.  Because I believe in you and know your worth and you deserve it.  But these are not practical tips.  So, after many a brush of taking friends’ advice and experimenting with dubious calls-to-arms concocted over rosé, such as “don’t speak to him until he apologizes!” “send your headshot with your book!” “go buy all of the things you cannot afford!” I’ve learned to let my friends’ tips wash over me like a warm bath, and to make sure I’ve drained the water once I’ve reached home.
 
While friend advice generally sucks, they do offer one thing you can’t get anywhere else: permission. When two friends meet who are equally ambitious and sensitive, equal parts boss bitch and hot house flower, the ability to say, “Sister, close the twenty tabs open on your laptop, don’t send that email, get thyself to bed!” is a true blessing. 
 
I met my bestie Sally-- a novelist of prodigious talents, whose first book of hilarious and poignant brilliance drops in Spring 2018-- at an artists’ residency a few years back. It was love at second sight.  Not exactly at first sight, because she intimidated the hell out of me! I first glimpsed her as we boarded the tiny plane to ferry us to a comically tinier town in Wyoming. I saw a corner of Harper’s poking out of her bag.  For the duration of the forty-minute flight, she thumbed through the issue along with the latest New Yorker in regal elegance, her hair at that time a fetching shade of lavender, her stature skimming a queenly 5’10,” with the unaffected Nordic gorgeousness of an upper Midwesterner who grew up around other good-looking people and did not perceive her beauty to be anything extraordinary.  My beloved is the same way. Scott is a dashing 6’3” with a piercing gaze of blue, yet in high school his weekends were split between Boy Scouting, a Christian youth group, and Math Bowl. He didn’t kiss a human female until he was 38 (when he met ME). Had he grown up in Worcester, populated by squat, squinty, thin-lipped troll people of Irish and French-Canadian parentage, he would’ve been elevated to King of High School by popular decree.  ANYWAY Sally was casually reading Harper’s and gazing poetically out the window while I pawed my way through a crinkled Hudson News bag stuffed with tabloids and candy. I didn’t think this unearthly Scandinavian goddess would ever deign to be friends with a squat squinty troll person such as myself (don’t blog at me, Worcester, I identify as a troll person).  
 
Well, game recognized game, and Sally is my sister from a different mister.

(Here we are, au natural, on vacation in Puerto Rico, where after a mere 45 min, Sally, who resides in Minneapolis, declared, "I don't remember what cold is!") 
 

We bonded over soul wounds, issues commonly known as daddy, and the #struggle of being a sensitive person whose equilibrium can be thrown off by including but not limited to: wind, abrupt sounds or movements, cheese. This recognition of our shared neuroses has been such a gift, and one, dare I say, that we have utilized to better ourselves—see that ambition?! We’ve always given each other permission vis-a-vis text exchanges like this:
 
Me: Sister, today I sent eighty four pitches, applied to seventeen residencies, went to bootcamp, cried for 45 min, and have walking pneumonia. Am I a garbage person if I re-watch Kell On Earth and eat salt and vinegar chips for the rest of the day?
Sally: You are the opposite of a garbage person!!! Take to your bed!
 
And then, some of the guilt is relieved. 
 
Lately, we’ve kicked it up to a new level with what I want to share with you today.  I recommend:
 
Telling your friends what to do.
 
Each Sunday evening or Monday morning, I can expect a text with a little bundle of three to five directives to follow for the week ahead.  These tiny to-dos are geared toward rediscovering adventure in the creative process, which we both succeed in squeezing all the fun out of, and little ways to bring a sense of playfulness back into the dross of daily life.
 
In the past few weeks we’ve traded ideas about:
 
Ways to spread joy:

--Turn on some trap music, draw the blinds, and dance, as they say, like no one is watching for a good twenty min
--Send an encouraging note to a writer pal who feels frustrated. Cite specifics of why you love his/her work.
--Go above and around. Find a way to circumvent permission, whether from yourself or from others
--Do something rebellious or badly behaved, just make sure you’re punching up
 
Ways to create more space:
--Stop doing something you don’t want or need to do—you’ll catch yourself and know exactly what it is
--Take the long way home. Get off at the wrong stop on purpose
--Go to a movie in the middle of the day
 
Always reading recs. Some of the latest include this this and this.
 
Writing prompts, obvi, some informed by astrology (obvi obvi):
--As we move into Scorpio season, find a muckety muck spooky creepy area of your work where you know there’s some rich darkness lurking to play with.  Meet the creepiness with silliness.  Laugh at those ghosts.  All to say that perhaps there’s a way to poke around something rotten with a bit of levity, to take the piss out of that which scares us.
--Write 1k words for no other reason than to delight yourself
--Write a tiny dialogue in the voice of one of your new novel characters making a customer service complaint
 
The understanding is that these suggestions are all take ‘em or leave ‘em, do whichever speak to you and discard the rest.  We report back to each other the following week on how it went.  When we don’t get to them, the sentiment is guilt-free, because just knowing they are there is so wonderfully grounding and inspiring, just like knowing you have a friend out there who gets it, even if she is halfway across the country.  The very fact of their existence makes these directions feel like a support rather than a burden. 
 
While our particular blend is geared toward current nobodies/aspiring somebodies suffering from a variety of undiagnosed personality disorders, it is my belief that anyone can and should team up with a bestie to remind one another to embrace the best of life.  Perhaps your mélange is focused toward self-care, letting yourself off the hook, pushing each other to take steps toward a project you’ve been neglecting.  Sometimes it’s just a lot easier to take direction from someone else rather than relying on our own dwindling stores of motivation.  For me, dare I say we, our directions exchange has proven to be reminders to have a little fun, not take the damn thing so seriously, and to breathe life into our work, which is our life.

So, tell your friends what to do! Especially if you point them toward taking to their beds. LMK how it goes!
 
What are you recommending these days?
 
NEWS:
 
Because I've never met a microphone I don't like, this past Sunday I hosted a reading for Writers Omi at the world-famous KGB Bar in the East Village.  I butchered a mere 60% of the readers’ names. 
 
I’ll be dispensing tips and MORE in a nonfiction workshop at The Catapult starting November 6.  There are still a few spots left!
 
On November 9 I’ll be speaking about death fraud and disappearance at a meeting for private investigators, under the invitation of this guy, the subject of Chapter Two of PLAYING DEAD. So if you’re a licensed PI and would like to attend, get at me!