A Guide for Anxious Humans
Readers of How To Be Everything—Emilie Wapnicks’s guidebook to life—will be familiar with the Phoenix Approach, which describes how people occasionally reinvent themselves like the legendary phoenix rising from its own ashes.
This sounds exciting—and it is. But it turns out burning up and rebirthing out of the remains can hurt.
I feel… weird.
After years of building my knowledge of “How To Self Care,” I’ve become well-versed in identifying my needs and fixing them. I know how to rest when I’m tired, or how to channel my energy when there’s an excess.
What emotion comes to your mind when you think of 2020-21?
For me, right now, it’s joy.
As in, “does anyone remember what joy feels like?”
I’ve never felt more useless than during covid. In my country, there ws a time when every Thursday evening everybody lined up outside to applaud health workers. Quite rightly, we recognised their bravery and heroism in frightening circumstances.
I, on the other hand, wasn’t saving lives. I’ve spent the last few years writing…
When you don’t know how long an unusual situation will last, it makes sense to wait for it to blow over. But if it goes on long enough, we must adapt.
Have you ever entered the doldrums? Not the literal doldrums—the tedious places at sea where winds are few and sailors struggled to escape. I mean those times in life when nothing at all feels interesting.
Making good choices is hard. In fact, there’s only one thing I hate more than not having any choice, and that’s having to make one at all.
You could make a strong argument that the universe is poorly designed.
Don’t get me wrong, I doubt I could do a better job. But, due to what appears to be a mistake in the grand universal design, nothing is purely, unequivocally good. There’s always a trade-off.
Last year, life was tedious. It was like my own personal Groundhog Day, except I actually got older and I barely learned anything. Each day was the same: I awoke, I worked in my little office, I slept.
And repeat.
[post status: a brief life update] When Walking on Custard came out in 2015 (aside: I cannot believe that was three years ago! What on EARTH is happening to the flow of time?!), I needed some sort of online home. I considered all kinds of wild, imaginative ideas, like interactive websites which would act as companions to the…