“Art star Marina Abramović and London’s Serpentine Gallery have become embroiled in a row over ‘nothing’. A prestigious group of curators and art historians have written to the gallery questioning why Abramović’s latest performance piece — due to open 11 June and about which she has repeatedly emphasised the importance of ‘nothing’ — fails to acknowledge the influence of another contemporary artist who has also made ‘nothing’ central to her work.”

“Albany’s celebrity bear has climbed its last tree.”
 — I’m not happy about it either. Maybe just watch this instead to cheer yourself up.

by The Awl

It is with mixed feelings that we announce the departure of Awl Publisher John Shankman at the end of this month. John, who has been with the company for nearly three years, and helped us grow from the lean and scrappy startup publications few of us would even recognize now, has been bit by the founding bug and is leaving us to start his own company. According to John, Hashtag Labs “wants to help advertisers produce great #content and help creative talent and publishers maximize their earnings.” We look forward to working with John and Hashtag Labs in the future.

John’s departure comes at an important juncture in the history of The Awl. Now that the original site has been handed over to a new set of editors, Alex Balk and Choire Sicha have nothing to do all day. Haha J/K. What we mean to say is that Choire and Alex have more time to focus on the larger business and editorial aspects of a growing company.

But we won’t be doing it alone. Stepping up to fulfill many of John’s former tasks is Associate Publisher/content philosopher Michael Macher, whose impressive abilities in his previous role have made us more than comfortable with the impending transition. Do you want your brand associated with this site and its impressive and sexy demographics? Macher’s the man to see. (He is still coming up with his own synonym for “indiellectual,” and we will inform you all once that decision has been made.)

We’d like to say thanks to John for all his tireless efforts on our behalf and wish him the best of luck in this endeavor. We’ll miss him, but we’re excited for everyone as we move on to the next step.

“One gift-shop item in particular has raised hackles: a decorative ceramic platter in the shape of the U.S., with heart symbols marking the spots where the hijacked planes made impact on 9/11. As of Tuesday, it was no longer on display in the museum store.”

Here’s the guy who runs Uber, which has raised over $300 million:

Uber CEO Travis Kalanick says he was not getting any ladies when he was previous startups were tanking. “It’s great now!”

— Nicholas Carlson (@nichcarlson) May 28, 2014

And the guy who co-founded RapGenius, which has raised over $15 million because it’s the darling of two of the most influential investors in the world:

(Previously: “I’mma rape you in your mouth”)

And finally, this is the guy who founded Snapchat, writing in 2009:

Bro, these three samples were collected from this week alone: This isn’t a fluke! This is who wins in the tech meritocracy. There are glimmers of accountability: Mahbod Moghadam of Rap Genius was fired, at least, but he will still get rich in a LIQUIDITY EVENT, or a pity sale, or whatever near-guaranteed positive fate that befalls his company. Travis Kalanick and Evan Spiegel are both poised, as much as anyone can be, to become some of the most powerful figures in American capitalism. The views they will bring to bear upon the world, the molds in which they openly desire to recast society, were forged over beer pong tables in basements near Stanford. Listen to how this grown man talks:

The most promising sector the economy has is represented by a fraternity of leering boys wearing their fathers’ suits. They should not get a pass because they’re “visionaries” — in any other context, this would be understood as garbage behavior from garbage people. Let a wave come and wash away these people so that we may try again! Their ideas will survive just fine.

by Adam Carlson

Almost one year ago today, a very strange thing happened to the very strange podcast “Welcome to Night Vale”: It became very, very popular. On the show’s first anniversary in June, all of the episodes had been collectively downloaded about 150,000 times. The following week, they were downloaded another 150,000 times. For several months, “Night Vale” was, according to iTunes, the country’s most popular podcast.

Since last summer, the New York-based “Night Vale” has been able to capitalize on its fame: a book deal with Harpers; tours across the United States and Canada; stops at the Comic-Cons. Co-creator Jeffrey Cranor told me that the “unsustainable explosive growth” the show saw in 2013 has slowed, but that the download totals for each individual episode are still higher than the last, even at episode 47. “In a lot of ways, ‘Night Vale’ is still our thing — in almost every way it’s still our thing — in that we don’t really answer to anyone and it’s still us telling the stories we want to tell,” co-creator Joseph said.

The show is styled as a half-hour community radio broadcast out of a town where every conspiracy is true and truth is a lie. It is poetic and surreal and more and more beguilingly narrative, with a “Simpsons”-like investment in its townspeople.

What happens to a phenomenon as it ages? What happens to independent artists who have to sustain success? And what happens to a small Southwestern town when it gets taken over by an Orwellian supercompany that may or may not be an analogy for the sun?

I recently put all of these questions to Cranor, Fink and the mellifluous voice of “Night Vale” himself, Cecil Baldwin.

What’s the day-to-day like now — is “Night Vale” the full-time job?

Joseph Fink: I mean we both have jobs. There was a moment where we stopped doing those jobs. I think long before that though, “Night Vale” did become more and more work to a point where we couldn’t be doing the amount of work we’re doing on “Night Vale” right now and also be doing full-time jobs. There’s just not enough time in the day. Especially once the tour came in, too. You can’t have a day job where you’re just like, “Hey, a few times a year I’m going to leave for three-five weeks.”

Cecil Baldwin: Yes, I mean it definitely is kind of my full-time job. Obviously I work on other projects as well, but it seems like every day I do something involving “Night Vale” that kind of requires attention, and usually it’s a lot of planning things. It’s not the glamorous nature of getting to go to the shows, but it’s a lot of the nitty-gritty stuff as well. A lot of emails. A lot of “replying-all” to emails.

Has the production (writing/recording) process changed at all?

CB: I think we all kind of collectively, even once we became more popular, went, “Well if it’s not broke, don’t fix it.” I think we all just kind of said, “This is the way we’ve been doing it and it’s obviously very comfortable for us, so let’s keep doing it.” Joseph has sort of an office now and he had set up a microphone in his office and he’s like, “Listen if you ever want to come over and record.” And I’m like, “Nope, I’m good.”

How is the book coming along? Are you turning in a draft soon?

JF: We very wisely organized it so we have both a very large live show and a deadline for our first draft of a book all in the same week.

Jeffrey Cranor: Mmmhmm!

JF: So we’re working to have the first draft of the book done in the next three or four weeks here and are also simultaneously writing the hour live show. So that would be why, this month, most of it is writing.

JC: But we’re very very near, I would say we’re more than three-quarters of the way done with the “Night Vale” book. And then we’ll turn it into our editor in June and then we’ll have a bunch of months of back-and-forth: “No, redo this.” “You redo this.” Etc. etc. However editing works. I’m not sure.

So what can you say about it? Fans are baffled and amazed and curious about what shape the book will take. Is it narrative? What part of the world does it take place in? Is it predominantly Cecil?

JF: To answer the seed of your questions: It’s a novel. It’s a fairly, as far as “Night Vale” goes, straightforward narrative novel. It’s characters and story. It does not focus on Cecil. I think a lot of the characters from the podcast are of course a big part of the book because it takes place in a not-very large town, but we weren’t very interested in retelling a story we already told. So we have kind of focused on parts of Night Vale we haven’t really been able to talk about in the podcast.

JC: Cecil is definitely a character in the book, but we knew being a novel and not a podcast, you can’t tell it with the same voice. It’s a novel, meant to be read. So we knew we needed it to not be one long Cecil talk show. That would be a very weird talk show to have.

You guys are coming off a lot of touring this spring, with the whole Night Vale family — special guests and not just the three of you.

JF: It was simultaneously really fun and kind of awful, because it’s a month of sitting in a car. Either you’re sitting in the car or you’re at work pretty much the entire month. And so that’s really hard but at the same time, it’s a month of billing new places and hanging out with your friends and your work involves putting on this big live show, which is a lot of fun to do so that’s really great. It was interesting — while I was touring I started reading Get In the Van by Henry Rollins about touring with Black Flag when he was in his twenties. And what I got out of it, besides the fact that Henry Rollins in his twenties was really hard to take, is that we’re having a much more comfortable tour than a struggling rock band. We slept in real beds. So it puts some perspective on it, reading about touring with a low-paying punk band in the ‘80s.

CB: I got home and all my friends and my family were asking me, “How was it? How was it?” And I said, “Well if the worst thing that you can say about a tour is that you didn’t have as much time to sightsee as you possibly wanted, then that’s a really good thing.”

Tell me be about the fans who came out to each show.

JC: A lot of people, when we were able to stick around and sign for people, people brought us artwork all the time. Joseph has a whole house full of deer paintings and paintings of deer wearing pictures of deer around their necks. It’s phenomenal. It’s fucking phenomenal.

JF: Honestly, I can think of one time where someone threw something at my face. And it’s just a general code of conduct really in any situation, you shouldn’t throw things at people’s faces. Other than that, the interactions with the fans were really entirely positive and amazing.

CB: It totally ran the gamut, from the fans that are wearing a glow cloud outfit that takes up four seats and you’re like, “Wow you took a lot of really amazing hard work into it, but how do you sit down?” There’s a lot of that. All the various Cecils. Third eyes and microphones. And then there are the kids that are obviously really into it, but who are very specific about what it is they like about the show. Like I had a girl give me a hammer after one of our shows — not anything special or fancy, just like a hammer you would find at Home Depot. And I was like, “Gosh, thank you for this.” She was like, “Oh, it’s so you can beat off the Strex pets.” To her it was very important that I receive this hammer.

I remember Atlanta, actually, the fans in Atlanta were really amazing. A guy came up to me after the Atlanta show and told me that “Night Vale” had gotten him through his last tour of Afghanistan, and I don’t know if it was just him or the other men and women in his unit that listened to it. But he was so affected by it and he didn’t have anything to sign, but he literally waited in line for half an hour or whatever to meet me and shake my hand.

For this next tour, were you like, “You know what we should do? Let’s go to Canada”?

JF: I think we’ve been talking about a lot of places we want to go, so this seemed like the next one that made sense. We’ve definitely got a lot of Canadian fans. We’ve been hearing about them for a while. And there were also just a lot of places on this March tour that we didn’t have time to get to, Austin and Denver and Salt Lake City. So it was nice to kind of pick these up. Nothing is set in stone for the future, but this won’t, I think, be our last tour.

When you say you were hearing from Canadian fans — like do you guys know that you have a lot of fans in Ireland or Brazil?

JC: We are of course far and away most popular in terms of downloads in the United States, but Canada, the UK, Australia are all kind of right up there. These are the other well-populated English-speaking countries. We definitely have followings in Europe. Germany is up there, I think Ireland is up there. New Zealand.

JF: In Norway we’re doing pretty well.

JC: Downloads don’t always translate into ticket sales in a place, and it’s even harder to tell when you’re going to a non-English-is-a-first-language place. But at the same time, it’s a good measurement for saying, if you don’t have very many downloads for Brunei, then maybe you don’t go to Brunei.

Don’t forget to set your clocks forward. Don’t forget to confuse time with numbers. Don’t forget the vastness of space.

— Night Vale podcast (@NightValeRadio) March 9, 2014

You guys will be at the inaugural DashCon and then are kind of wrapping up the tour at San Diego Comic-Con, which you didn’t do last year. You’re doing a crossover event with “The Thrilling Adventure Hour.” That’s going to be big.

JC: We’re doing signings at the Topatoco booth, so we’ll definitely be there. Pending what San Diego Comic-Con comes back with, we’ll probably do a panel.

CB: I have no idea what to expect. We’ve sort of been building on our Comic-Con experiences: last year we were at New York Comic-Con, we were kind of a late entry for that. I think we literally applied for New York Comic-Con an hour before entry had closed, and then we did one panel and then we left. We just did Emerald City Comic-Con in Seattle, which was amazing. After touring for a month, I did a lot of damage where I would just walk around the floor and see somebody’s art or somebody’s graphic novel and I’d be like, “I like that, I’m going to buy it.” I got out my phone and started Googling “queer comic book artists Emerald City Comic-Con” and made a list of all the booths I wanted to go to of people that were making either queer-themed art or were queer artists themselves and I just wanted to go meet them.

And I don’t know if I’m going to necessarily get the opportunity to be the fan that I want to be at San Diego. It just sounds huge. It sounds massive, and everyone says that the Comic-Con takes over the entire city, like you can’t go out to breakfast because there’s a panel in a restaurant — everywhere.

The show has gotten a lot more plotted, I think, and maybe a lot weirder? You have a lot more story to perform off of.

CB: It’s slightly more structured. I love the idea of like, What’s going to happen next? It’s a more traditional storyline where the end of an episode comes and you’re left with a question of what is going to happen to Cecil. What is going to happen with StrexCorp? These are more traditional ways of storytelling. Keep in mind, we’re also gearing up for our big two-year anniversary show. But then I imagine that once the season finale happens, the anniversary happens, Joseph and Jeffrey will probably kind of ease up on the gas a bit and it will be back to the more experimental — Jeffrey and I were talking over some experimental ideas for episodes and they’re… get ready. Next year is going to be no different.

JC: We definitely don’t think in terms of, like Joseph said, seasons. There is more of a big finale feel to it, but more so because it was a chance to do a live show in New York around our second anniversary so it seemed a good time to have a long, full script with a lot of special guests and things like that. But maybe next June on our third anniversary, we won’t necessarily think the same way we might have [of] a more traditional approach to what that show would be.

JF: Also with the June 4 show, not only are we doing some plot stuff, it was also just an excuse to do, because we’re going to have so many special guests, there were just a number of moments that involve characters interacting that we always wanted to see or involving other actors that we always wanted to see. It kind of allowed us to build those moments because we had an excuse to bring those people in.

With “The Auction” — I think that’s when I realized that the show was doing something essential with Cecil, that they were going to make him into a whole character with a whole lived history that we didn’t know yet.

CB: And what was great about that episode was that it was guest written by Glen David Gold, the amazing author who wrote Carter Beats the Devil. He had so many little details that were just brilliant that really made that episode sparkle. And the language — I think I might have written an email thanking for him for that episode, but man was it hard to record. The language was so dense and it was so ornate. Like I think there was a sentence that was a paragraph long. Very much in the style of “Night Vale,” where a story will start in one place and by the end it ends up in a totally different place, and he did that in one sentence.

But yeah, it’s so true: We’re getting into the idea of, What are these relationships? Why does Cecil hate Steve Carlsberg so much? We’re starting to put tentative answers to a lot of the fan questions. It’s like a Dickens story, and I feel like the world of “Night Vale” is becoming an intricate tapestry in a very similar way, where a small detail or a minor character from the first year might become the major character of an entire plotline three years later.

I was wondering in just the last week or so, have you heard from fans? With “Company Picnic,” we don’t know what’s happened to him. He’s gone away. Are people distressed?

JC: Oh my God yeah, we’ve definitely gotten a lot in the last two episodes of distressed emails and tweets.

JF: Somebody called me a terrible human being on Twitter after that episode.

JC: And we’ve gotten called “monster” a lot. Between “The Visitor” episode with Khoshekh and then the last two episodes with “Company Picnic” and “Parade Day,” those three episodes I think have gotten us the most all-caps tweets and emails sent to us.

CB: I love the variation on the more “traditional” “Night Vale” episodes. By adding new voices to the show, it expands the world of Night Vale and allows the listeners to view the characters and world from varying points of view. The fans have definitely been very vocal about their desire to have Cecil return to the radio booth, either out of love of myself, the character, or because Kevin, Lauren and the rest of the Desert Bluffs crew are so creepy and unsettling in their corporate cheeriness.

When we spoke last year, a large part of the show’s funding came from donations. Now you have the merch store, which is evolving/expanding, and live shows. I wanted to know if the infrastructure supporting the show is more formalized?

JF: Yes and no? We have more people now. We have Jodi, our literary agent, who’s amazing, and we have our booking agent, because it could be really hard when you’re two people who have no experience in this to book a 23-city tour. That’s very difficult to do. And we did actually most of it last tour and it was… unpleasant, so we didn’t want to do that again. We’ve gotten approached about all sorts of things, but for the most part we really just want to make sure that everything we do with Night Vale is something we can do and and we can make sure we’re doing it well, that we’re doing something worth experiencing.

JC: Yeah, we’ve kept it fairly independent. The donations we’ve kept that going because we’ve kept that show free, but I mean that in the sense that we don’t charge money for it and also in the sense that we don’t put ads in the middle of it. And I think having to look at an ad, whether it’s in the middle of the highway or on a TV screen or on a radio show, it’s a cost. It’s not a financial cost, but it’s a cost to the listener or the viewer or the driver. We’ve never taken like an active political stance against podcast advertising, it’s a great source of revenue for people, but for our show it never fit. So the donations have been really nice and people have been very generous to help us pay the artist involved and to keep the show hosted and the merchandise helps in that way.

You could probably get Taco Bell or Irish Spring to pay you for your “a word from our sponsor.”

JC: Listen, I’m telling you, we’ve actually written an email to a sponsor that kept asking us to consider a sponsorship on the show and we kept saying, “Great, we would happily do it. But we maintain total control.” And they kept coming back with, “Yeah yeah, sure sure absolutely, you guys are creative writers, do that. Here are some talking points.”

JF: If Taco Bell or Irish Spring wanted to pay us for those ads exactly as we had written them, that would be totally fine with us. The chance of that happening is very slim.

JC: That was kind of what it came down to is: You’re welcome to pay us. The ad won’t mention your product other than the name and will be something very weird or possibly grotesque or existential.

JF: And we would not charge them at all if, say, Irish Spring wanted to go with a “whose hands are these?” campaign. I think if that’s a thing that they want, they’re welcome to have it.

Adam Carlson lives in Georgia. He writes.

This interview has been edited and condensed from a series of phone calls and emails.

★★★ The blue spaces between the clouds narrowed through the morning. People took their lunches out on the plaza off the street, styrofoam clamshells hanging open. A hot white glow edged the remaining blue. The old summery reek of garbage was on the air; the ice cream truck smelled of ice cream garbage. It was not too hot yet, still, but too cold indoors and on the train. The afternoon brightened for a while. Barbecue smoke or lighter-fluid smoke was on the air. The glare from the southwest brought tears to the eyes. By rush hour, things had grayed over again; the atmosphere was humid and vegetal, like the inside of a pitcher plant. People took selfies in pairs at either end of Jersey Street west of Lafayette. At the top of the subway steps uptown was a glimpse of golden light, then a foreboding gust of wind and a darkening that seemed conclusive. But the golden or white-gold light faded in for another one more moment. Then, in the dusk clouds, pale blue cracks appeared, and off to the northwest red ones.

You return from war, or maybe you’re still fighting it. Either something in your psyche has gone dark or you’re too dazed to tell. You are told to seek help and you agree. You don’t feel guilty or embarrassed; the least the government can do for you is give you someone to talk to. You schedule an appointment or one is scheduled for you. You already feel lighter. The date approaches. The date arrives. You… turn on your webcam. Hmm, fine. You meet your doctor. Ok. Wait — no.

Ellie is an avatar, a virtual therapist developed at USC with funding from DARPA, the Defense Department’s advanced research center. And “people love interacting with her,” says Louis-Philippe Morency, a research assistant professor at USC’s Institute for Creative Technologies. Morency has been working with Ellie — part of the university’s SimSensei project — for several years now. In that, he has helped to build a program capable of reading and responding to human emotion in real time. And capable, more to the point, of offering those responses via a human-like animation.

Why not just replace military recruiters with robots? Why not close the loop all the way and let robot therapists conspire with drones to hide violence from their operators? It’s as if the people nominally in charge of preventing dystopia turned around and started racing toward it all at once, because getting there seemed inevitable and nobody wanted to arrive second. Who will win, and how may I demonstrate my undying loyalty?

Dear Polly,

I have sort of a backwards problem, in that the better things are going in my life, the worse I feel. I know a good bit, or think I do, about why this happens. My mother committed suicide; my brother who tried to; and my father taught me that my sole purpose and value in life was to make them feel better and stop them from killing themselves. When I tried to care about myself and my needs as much as theirs, I was told this made me a terrible person, and no one would ever love me.

So I grew up to be extremely empathetic and supportive and really good at making my life about everyone other than myself. At some point, I realized that living that way was actually not doing me any favors, was pretty self-destructive, and a way I would never want people I care about to live. I tried to change, to put myself first; I went to therapy, and a lot of Al-Anon meetings, and vented a lot of grief and rage at my family, who were damaged beings doing the best they could but were incapable of being truthful about what happened or acknowledging how badly it hurt me.

I have been successful: I have a job I love, am married to a man I love, and am living a life I love in a place I love with a cat I love. And yet, the better things are, the worse I feel: terrified I will lose everything, because I don’t deserve to be happy, because secretly, fundamentally, I am still a terrible person who must be punished for not following the rules, or because that’s what happens when you relax and feel safe — the shit comes down and people die.

The net result is that now, despite a lucky, blessed and happy life, I am overcome with crippling anxiety, guilt, and self-doubt. I’m extremely ashamed about this, because it seems ridiculous; I’m scared, because I don’t understand. I have been in so much therapy. I was better. But magically now I’m the age my mother was when she and my brother started really falling apart, and even though life is better than it’s ever been, I’m worse than I’ve been for a long time, maybe ever. I’m losing friends; my work is suffering; I’m pushing my husband away, who sees that I’m falling apart. I want to believe that this is because I’m getting closer to the core of the doubt and guilt and feelings of wrongness and worthlessness that is at the heart of all of this. But when I reach that core, I still don’t seem to know what to do about it. I know I’m not worthless. I even thought I genuinely felt and believed that. But it still seems to be there, and it’s starting to poison my job and my marriage and my friendships… to try to make everything as black as it believes it should be.

I know I need to go back into therapy, but I don’t believe it will truly help me, since it had helped me before, and yet here I am again. I don’t need to believe I’m flawless; I’m fine with being flawed. I’m not fine with hating myself, giving myself palpitations from constant fear and anxiety, and worrying I’m going to sabotage everything that matters to me so that I won’t have to deal with the guilt of having what I’m not supposed to / allowed to have, or the agony of being obsessed that I’m going to lose it all at any moment. I have lived with the specter of being a depressed, suicidal failure hanging over me my whole life, and I’d like it to go away. It turns out it’s so fucking hard to kill ghosts. Any ideas?

Don’t Deserve Goodness

Dear Don’t Deserve Goodness,

Christ Almighty, do I feel you on this one. The crazy thing about everything being great is that it makes it really easy to PROVE that the problem is you. “Look, everybody. I have everything I ever wanted, and I’m still freaking out. You were right about me, world! Watch how I push people away! Even though I have love now, eventually the truth will out and I’ll show that I’m a terrible person who no one could ever love for very long!”

The challenging thing for you is that you’re talking about this awful legacy, but because you have it pretty good on the surface, you feel like you don’t have a right to be struggling (which exactly matches your experience as a kid, when you didn’t have a right to feel ANYTHING). Fear and anxiety are these really crazy forces that are incredibly difficult to own up to, because our society tends to paint them as pointless worrying and neuroticism and stress, implied to be the fault of the person who’s doing the worrying. Instead of being treated with compassion and understanding, anxious people are more often than not labeled as neurotics or control freaks — particularly when their lives look pretty good from the outside. “Look at what you have. Things SHOULD BE coming up roses for you, so why do you act like you’re fucking dying?”

Basically, it’s tough to put this kind of trouble into words without sounding like a fucking first-world-problems wildebeest that should be shot down where it stands and then butchered and hung up in the smokehouse to make wildebeest jerky that could sustain a far more deserving family of four through a long, cold winter.

People grow up and they get anxious, whether they admit it or not. It happens to the most laid back among us, and it’s an incredibly common affliction. We’ll get to your very daunting specifics in a second, trust me, I just want to start, though, by pointing out that anxiety is very common. And do you know how most people handle the escalating anxiety that comes with moving toward middle age? They drink more, watch more TV, turn off, power down. Others, who have plenty of money and are also determined to STAY OPEN AND STAY AWARE, tend to overachieve in the self-improvement department. They go to $250 therapy sessions three times a week, and then there’s acupuncture and nutritionists and yoga retreats. And even the do-it-yourself websites exhort you to funnel all of that energy into monitoring every single dimension of your life. Make charts to keep track of your exercise, alcohol intake, triggers, bonding time in your significant relationships! To hear some of these type-A gurus tell it, happiness is a fucking sound board that requires a audio engineer to operate. Happiness is a complicated budget that only a certified CPA can understand. Happiness is a symphony orchestra and you have to read complicated time signatures and master 15 different instruments to even touch it.

Obviously I don’t think that naturally anxious/depressed/deeply scarred people should either power everything down (via booze or living at the office or watching five hours of TV every night) or power everything up (via self-help books and charts and constant fucking monitoring). To know a lot of smart, complicated adults is to know a lot of escapists and a lot of social media/booze/TV addicts and a lot of moms who obsess about every dimension of their kids’ development and a lot of hothouse flowers with insanely complicated, expensive needs.

I don’t mean to lump you into any of these categories. I think you’ve got a very specific, very haunting family history that makes you feel particularly damned. If I had a similar story to pair with my volatile chemistry, I would struggle with that MIGHTILY. Instead, I have no clear excuse for my weirdness. I can look at other people with personalities like mine and say, “Well, people like me seem to take a lot of psychotropic drugs, and all I do is eat kale. Why should I feel guilty that I’m so moody?” But I still feel angry at myself when I get moody.

I think that’s close to the heart of this for you, too. You say you’re ok with being flawed, it’s just that you’re not ok with freaking out and pushing people away. The only reason you’re pushing people away is because you’re pretty sure that these FEELINGS YOU’RE FEELING signal that you’re deeply fucked and unlovable and damned for all time. As long as every negative, fearful, anxious, upsetting feeling means that you’re cut from the same cloth as your mother, of course you’re going to battle your feelings, battle yourself, and present those feelings and yourself to others as either FINE GREAT TOTALLY FINE or as inherently fucked and bad and deserving of scorn and alienation and rejection. Some deep, dark piece of you believes that you are not allowed to experience unforeseen bumps in the emotional road and acknowledge them and let them show. You are STILL not allowed to be a full person in the room. You are STILL supposed to be a supporting player. You THINK you’re getting closer to the core, but you’re not letting yourself really go there, because you’re too ashamed of yourself. You’re not giving yourself room to feel things without shame, and your soul is fucking pissed at you for this, and it’s raising hell. It’s saying “YOU NEED SPACE, YOU WILL HAVE SPACE EVEN IF I HAVE TO SET THIS WHOLE LIFE OF YOURS ON FIRE.”

You need therapy. The fact that you say “I had therapy and I thought it worked so why should I go back?” points to the stubbornness and oversimplified nature of your thinking about this whole thing. You’re very impatient with yourself, and THAT is what leads you to push people away. You are unkind to yourself, as if you can snap yourself out of this. And yet, your fears and anxieties grow. You’re regressing. You’re taking on the voice of your father. You’re saying, “FUCK YOU WHY ARE YOU DOING THIS AGAIN? HOW DARE YOU TAKE UP SPACE HERE WHEN EVERYONE ELSE’S NEEDS ARE SUPPOSED TO COME FIRST!” That doesn’t mean you’re going to destroy everything. Mostly, you need to admit that you’re going through something right now. If you don’t acknowledge it and say it out loud and make room for it, you’re going to keep feeling all clenched and confused and angry.

So get a therapist, and say to that therapist: “I’m going through something right now and I need your help.” You may need to take something for anxiety for a while. I’ll bet a lot of people who DO take something for anxiety are probably reading this and thinking “DUDE TAKE SOMETHING FOR ANXIETY ALREADY!” Maybe they’re right, and maybe they’re wrong. You need to see a therapist either way. Don’t put it off.

You also need to sit down with your husband and say to him, “I’m going through something right now. I don’t know what it is, exactly. But it’s big, and I need your help. I really, really need your help.” You have to tell your husband how you feel. He needs to listen and hear you out without telling you to stop feeling the way you feel. Sometimes you really do have to say bleak, bleak shit. Personally, I think it helps to have your partner understand exactly how dark it can get. This is not you “falling apart.” This does not make you weak or bad. This is you connecting with another human being when things are tough. The more you both engage and look at the darkness, and accept that it’s there, the easier it is to see that it doesn’t rule everything or blot out the sun, not really. My husband and I both have our dark times, and the more we talk about them and put them in perspective in each other’s presence, the better we feel. That’s the way it should be.

Again, getting everything you’ve ever wanted is sometimes the fertile soil that allows your worst anxieties to bloom like never before. (Go watch Safe with Julianne Moore if you want to see what happens to damaged people when they have plenty of time and space to go insane.) For someone with a rough past, being in survival mode is sometimes easier than enjoying the luxury of support and care and time and space. If you’re not ENJOYING these things, if you’re just waiting for the shit to come down instead? That must be your fault. You must be sick inside.

And yet? So many people with so much less damage than you feel this way. So: Please forgive yourself straight out of the gate for the fact that you are human. You’re going through something right now. Going back into therapy will support you in your ability to claim this vulnerable space for yourself.

And when you’re pretty sure you’re terrible at some core level, you really need to pat yourself on the back often. For example: My mom was just visiting for a while and I was around my family A LOT this past week. I did not act like a giant asshole during that time. The one day I felt really angry, I went on a four-mile run and came back feeling ok again. But the first part of my run was just like this cartoon with me saying “MOTHERFUCKER! MOTHERFUCKER! MOTHERFUCKER!” with every step. And in between steps, I was thinking, “Why am I so angry over such small shit? Why do I have to be such a fucking first-world-problems wildebeest? The years roll by, and look, I’m still just a big baby!”

But why should I beat myself up for my feelings, when I handled myself perfectly well all week? We feel what we feel. What the fuck are you gonna do? It’s so easy to believe that there’s a moral to this story. “THIS PROVES THAT YOU’RE TERRIBLE! YOU SUCK! YOU’RE UNLOVABLE!” But that’s bullshit.

Maybe you’re in the habit of telling one story — “I went through the fire and emerged, triumphant!” — that doesn’t feel quite right anymore. Maybe you want to adjust your story, in order to make more room for reality, for mood swings, for challenging days, for challenging years. Maybe the new story is “I am so happy with what I have, but I’m still struggling with how to be happy.” Maybe the new story is, “I love my life, but I don’t know how to feel all of this sadness I have inside.” Sadness and happiness do not exist on different planets. They go hand in hand. Learning to feel sadness without shame is a pretty crucial prerequisite for happiness. The story doesn’t have to be, “I should be happy but I’m miserable.” You don’t deserve to be wildebeest jerky. You just need a few adjustments, to your habits, your life, your support systems, and your story. But in order to make those adjustments, you have to take the fact that you’re going through something RIGHT NOW — something BIG! — very very seriously.

Being alive is amazing. It’s also a huge challenge. Having a quick mind that latches onto everything and anything and runs with it, when paired with unpredictable fucking chemistry, is not a smooth ride, ever. The more you can accept that a rocky ride does NOT mean that you’re a mutant, the better. It doesn’t mean you need to map out a detailed plan and make 15 Excel charts to address every dimension of HOW YOU FAIL YOURSELF EVERY FUCKING DAY OF YOUR SORRY LIFE. It also doesn’t mean that simply saying “I’M FLAWED, OK?” is enough. This is about your feelings.

Your feelings do not make you some kind of deadly poison in human form that will send everyone running away from you. In fact, I’d like to know a little bit more about these friends that are backing away. Do they understand that you’re working through something? Are you vulnerable with them? Are they allergic to heaviness? Be sure to separate the supportive friends who were a little curt with you from the scaredy cats. Don’t lump them all together. And separate your weepy moments from your cussing-people-out moments. Not the same thing, at all. Do you have friends who can tolerate weeping? Can your husband tolerate it? Because if he can’t, maybe you need to drag him into therapy, too. I’d also like to know HOW you push your husband and other people away. When you start to feel like lashing out, you need to try to switch gears and really push yourself to reach the crying phase, to get to the vulnerable part of the picture. You should explain to your husband that this is a challenge for you, and that TEARS ARE ACTUALLY A SUCCESS. If you’re sitting there saying “Fuck off, you don’t get it” and thinking, “No one fucking gets it!” but you’re refusing to look at the fact that a layer of “OH FUCK I AM SO ROTTEN I HATE ME” is underneath it all? Then you have to dig deeper and let yourself feel some sadness, and you have to let people in. Don’t assume they can’t handle it. Let them in.

It’s frightening to stay open and stay vulnerable instead of escaping. That’s why so many people choose escape. Feelings are really fucking hard, particularly when you’ve always been told that they make you unlovable.

Keep feeling. Accept that it will get ugly. Stand up for your right to feel. Feel and feel and feel and you will get more and more beautiful. Those who don’t see that clearly can’t see clearly at all. You are going through something. That’s all. You’re dark now. This is how you’re going to let in the light. Believe it, and so will everyone else. Love yourself for it, and so will everyone else. BE PROUD of this fear and sadness, because it will lead you to sustainable happiness and love. Be patient with yourself, and you’ll come out on the other side of this stronger than ever. Your vulnerability is courageous.

Polly

Are you sugar coated on the outside and a pulsing ball of darkness on the inside? Write to Polly and discuss!

Heather Havrilesky (aka Polly Esther) is The Awl’s existential advice columnist. She’s also a regular contributor to The New York Times Magazine, and is the author of the memoir Disaster Preparedness (Riverhead 2011). She blogs here about scratchy pants, personality disorders, and aged cheeses.

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