nothing will change your life more than saying what you actually want to say

happy new year

Bob Thompson, Untitled (The Miraculous Draught of Fishes), 1961.

My one goal of 2026, which has been my goal every year since 2020, is to be zen at all costs. As a formerly neurotic person I’ve come far on this front. I now have a reputation in my friend group as someone who is comfortable with sharing whatever deranged thought crosses her mind—I will wake up at 8:30 AM and send a loved one a three paragraph text about how I’m feeling paranoid. I can’t tell you how weird that feels to admit, as someone who used to be extremely focused on how everything was received. The reason I was obsessed with how someone received my message was because I cared so much about how I was perceived. I never, ever wanted to be misunderstood; if someone ignored my text it would make my heart sink. Rejection sensitivity is hard to shake.

I’ve always been afraid of telling and receiving the truth. I was constantly doing something wrong as a kid and getting yelled at, whether it was for fidgeting too much at my parents’ friend’s house, wearing a tank top, cutting piano practice short or secretly signing up for a Facebook account. It became easier to just do things my own way and not tell anyone. I remember my college boyfriend getting upset at me—you’re so evasive, he said, you don’t tell me things. What I couldn’t say: I’m afraid of you, I’m afraid of you judging me, I’m afraid that you’ll stop loving me. I couldn’t understand that telling saves.

It’s hard to tell the truth sometimes. It’s not advisable in every circumstance. I’ve done it and had it go very, very wrong. You’re never guaranteed a good reaction because the universe doesn’t exist to validate your choices and other people don’t exist to absolve you. Iris Murdoch: “Art and morals are… one. Their essence is the same. The essence of both of them is love. Love is the perception of individuals. Love is the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real.” Even the people who love me don’t exist solely to love me; they have their own hangups and priorities and self-concept, and they must do what they can live with. This was a bitter lesson that I learned this year, but there was also an extreme sweetness to it, because in learning it I also realized: Other people are real, but so am I, and I am whole as I am, flawed and selfish and imperfect as I am. When I realized this, it was like I had been granted full permission to exist for the very first time.

I know only too well that this feeling of completeness comes from being loved and noticed for a long period of time. Not perfectly loved, because there is no perfect love, but loved as Winnicott’s good enough mother loves her child. I learned that even as people fail me they can heal me. They can teach me how to tell, and telling saves. Last year I started saying calmly and then not so calmly, Please help me, I feel so incredibly alienated. I lost all the discipline and composure I had spent the past 10 years collecting like coins. I got angry, even though I hated getting angry, and I stayed angry for so long I stopped hating it. I let go of many things. I stopped feeling insecure, and I stopped feeling ashamed, and I stopped being scared that none of my dreams would come true and that I would be alone forever. I didn’t let go of these things consciously, it’s just that I literally couldn’t hold onto them and continue to persist under the existing circumstances. I couldn’t hold onto them and keep loving you, so I just let them crumble. I stopped pulling my punches.

I’ve always been afraid of my own destructiveness. The heat and intensity of my personality, what it can do when I hold it against another person for a long time. I knew when we met that I would change you. Imperceptibly at first and then one day you would look up and I’d be everywhere, in your hair and eyes and blood, and you would never be able to get me out. But I’ve let you change me too.

I don’t care if nobody ever loves me again if you keep loving me. I think that’s what helped me feel whole. I started realizing that if I couldn’t say everything that mattered to the people I’m closest to than I would never feel free. I know that it would be better for you if I was different in certain ways but I am only who I am. Before, I never felt the wholeness of my own soul. I was always running from my shadow, too brittle to integrate, flinching at evidence of my own flaws. I didn’t even know how scared I was. I don’t regret who I am anymore, no matter what it costs me.

I’ve started talking differently, writing differently. I never realized before how much I held back. Because sometimes I wanted to be polite and sometimes I wanted to be charming and sometimes I wanted to be standoffish, so I would try on different words and demeanors for different occasions. Always, always, always wanting everyone to love me. To approve of me, to think I’m so nice, so sweet, so fun. Though I’m not always all of those things and sometimes I’m not any of those things. I’ve learned since that my capacity for cruelty is my capacity for warmth. My capacity for darkness is my capacity for light.

In the fantasy book I’m reading, Ship of Magic, the god Sa teaches through his contradictions. One must plan for the future and anticipate the future without fearing the future. A priest should not presume to judge unless he can judge as Sa does; with absolute justice and absolute mercy. This year, there have been contradictions everywhere I look. How is that telling the truth can break my heart, but also liberate me? How is it that I feel so able to be ugly with you because I know you’ll love me no matter what, but your opinion of me is also the only one that matters? How is it that your volatility, your ambivalence and your opacity are so hard to bear, but they’ve also been so necessary to me, more than necessary? How is it that I want to do right by people, and yet I cause them so much harm? How is it that feeling the full depth of my shame is what frees me from it?

When I say I want to be zen at all costs, I don’t mean that I don’t plan to suffer. To be human is to feel pain. But how you stay with it is what makes all the difference. I can compromise on a lot of things, but I can’t change the shape of my soul. Not everything that is what I want is going to be what you want. But talking about it is where we find the overlap.

I never knew how to communicate before, even though I talked all the time. Saying words is one thing, locating the deepest thing that matters is another. The one simple trick of articulating the truest thing I feel has taken me a lifetime to master. No other ability feels as important.

I find myself asking for random things all the time now. Just because I want them, just because I’m curious, just to locate people. Sometimes people say yes and sometimes people say no. Some of the asks have changed my life, brought me closer to the people I now love. I am no longer afraid to risk joy. Sometimes it’s still scary to be perceived. I want to be liked and I want to be loved and I never want to upset anyone—control will always be my native language. It’s just that I know now there’s a different way to live. It feels much, much better.