How to Celebrate and Support Your Decision to Live an Unusual Life

Yesterday someone said to me, But do you plan on living like this forever? Without a home of your own? Just sort of traveling around?

I felt myself deflate, and I thought about how easy it is to stick a pin into a balloon and how sudden the results are. Whooooooosh! The balloon goes from a wildly bouncy inflated thing to a sad piece of rubber. Like the after sex without the sex. Just the after.

I thought about how easily I deflate. One comment that doesn’t feel supportive, doesn’t feel encouraging, and I’m limp all over again.

The price of being a people pleaser is that you can lose your air in a heartbeat.

When you were a child who wanted more than anything, who believed your life depended on it, to please your parents, you have the perfect set-up for an easily-deflated life.

Harriet the Spy, not so much. Encyclopedia Brown, nope. Ramona the Brave, not so much. Pippi Longstocking, nope. Tom Sawyer, no way.

Those kids were cool. They did their own stuff and had adventures and made lots of friends.

If I asked you to write for thirty pages on the life of your dreams or thirty pages on all the bad things that happened to you in your life, which do you think you’d be quicker to accomplish? I am guessing #2, and here’s why: the brain likes to worry and to think of all the psychopaths hiding behind trees because the brain is proudly dedicated to keeping us safe, even if that means we live on Xanax and binge-watching Netflix as ways to numb out.

When I was living in New York to write my book, I was out walking one day in the East Village, and I was looking at my phone. I walked right into a runner, and she said, angrily, Why don’t you look while you’re going? I looked at her sweaty face, her tight pony-tail, and a surge of rage went through me, rage and love, for I had also been her at one time. Why don’t you fuck off? I said.

We went our separate ways and I excitedly texted my daughter. “I’m home!” I wrote.

I’m not advocating you walk around and tell people to fuck off because it’s generally a hurtful thing, but, gentle reader, at the time, at that moment, a wild love of life, of my right to be on the planet—my New Yorker roots—had flooded my body with pride and confidence and je ne sais quoi: assholery? that felt marvelous. I had landed on the moon. I had stepped out onto that gritty world and planted first one foot and then the other.

I had arrived.

I just said, Yes, maybe, to the woman who asked if I was going to continue my gypsy life forever. To her, my lifestyle meant instability and perhaps a lack of responsibility, but to me it meant success. I had chosen this life because it supported my top values: freedom and creativity. If you are a people pleaser it’s so easy to drop your own values and hold on to those of others. This leads to a crazy feeling in the brain: trying to live by both your values and someone else’s. This is called insanity. This is called the inability to make a choice. This is called If I don’t eat that whole bag of Doritos I may die.

The Yes, maybe, wasn’t good enough because I still felt deflated, so I’ve been working on a response for the next time something like that happens, a response I can use as a mantra, saying it to myself even when no one is around to questions my values, my life.

Hell to the yes.

Hell to the yes.

Hell to the yes.