Afraid to be wrong

a first letter to a friend

Hello and welcome to letter to a friend. This is a new experiment for me, living mostly behind the paywall, not to make money so much as to keep it between friends. If you’d like to read it and aren’t a paid member, you can either upgrade your subscription or just shoot me a note and I’m happy to comp it for you. No need to explain why.

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my brother and I setting up the new family iMac in 2007

Dear friend,

At this point in your life, everyone else seems to know how to be a person and you don’t.

You might be asking yourself, “What’s wrong with me?” The shortest answer I can give you is that nothing is. The next shortest answer I can give you is that the people more like you are elsewhere and you’ll meet them later.

The longer and fuller answer is that everyone feels this way sort of, everyone is marking out the edges of who they are and trying to get those edges to fit flush against the people around them. Sometimes to make those edges fit flush, we try to change ourselves and sometimes we try to change the people around us. Neither of these work very well. The fact that your edges just don’t fit flush isn’t a sign by itself that you’ve got your edges wrong. You’re imagining ways to be that go beyond what the people around you right now have considered. Some of them will catch up in some way or another and you’ll fit together better later. Some of them just won’t ever fit super well with you, so you’ll each find other people to try with. If it’s true that everything belongs, and I think it is, then that’ll all shake out over time.

More importantly, the best people will make room for your curiosities. When you go farther, when you try something new, they’ll accept that you might need to walk into the wilderness of thought and mystery. They’ll be there when you come back. Chances are, they’ll be curious and ask you what you learned.

I know that it often feels like there is one best way to be and you just need to figure it out. I know, because I still struggle with this plenty. The other side of this coin is the hope that if you can “figure yourself out” then you’ll know at least what all you could be and you’ll just have to make a simple choice and commit to it. I often still flirt with that belief, even though I’m more and more skeptical that it holds water.

The answer is probably somewhere in the middle. There are tendencies, patterns, that you will follow your whole life. Growth happens, people and circumstances change, but some things remain the same. The trick is to see the potential in that, rather than the limitations. I’ve found, for example, that accepting some of those “unchangeables” lets me plan for them. No more shock and dismay when letting my house get all dirty and cluttered makes me feel depressed. Can’t protest when the same behaviors lead to the same outcomes. This is called being realistic and it can be humbling. It also feels like a kind of self-respect.

I don’t want to give you the idea that nothing new can be achieved or that you can’t ever surprise yourself. I surprise myself constantly, but more often now when I do something challenging or risky and less out of disappointment that I didn’t wake up a new person. More and more I’m acting on behalf of who I am instead of who I think I should be.