“a writer is someone for whom writing is harder than it is for other people”

thomas mann

“say who you are”

charlie kaufman

i want to talk about advice, and how, in my experience, the giving of unsolicited advice has turned into an epidemic in our culture.

i recently engaged in a lengthy and laborious email debate with someone close to me concerning their habit of correcting my choice of words, and my delivery of those words. this person regularly shushed me, in addition to frequently telling me what to say, what not to say, and how to talk (usually, apparently, i should talk in a less animated way; in other words, i should be less like myself). i explained to them that i am prepared to take full responsibility for my words, and for my style of communication, and told them that I don’t want any guidance on these matters. to my surprise, this resulted in them accusing me of criticising them! after two further long and thoughtful emails: in which i worked hard to explain how undermining and insulting it is to endure instructions on what i ought and ought not say; in which i called on the wisdom of the buddha in an attempt to illuminate my path and enliven my skills at getting my point across; and in which finally i ended up on my knees, pleading; only after all of these efforts did i receive an acknowledgement that the person involved would try not to offer such instructions in future.

during the debate, when my advisor was still insisting that their position was correct, they explained that they wanted to let me know when i was making “wrong choices”, and also asserted that they were sure that i give advice too. i assured them that i really, really don’t. i think that advice is massively overrated. i only give it when i am invited to, and even then i tend to say things like “i suggest that…”, rather than proffer certainty.

i witnessed a beautiful example of emotional intelligence and communication skills a couple of years ago from an M.E. comrade. i had sent him a message outlining various recent challenges. in response, he asked whether i would be up for some advice on a specific physical problem. then he waited for me to reply. and only after i said yes please did he give his advice, which was expertly knowledgeable and practical. i tried the remedy he suggested, but unfortunately, as a consequence of decades of stage 4 endometriosis and over thirty years of M.E., my body is so dysregulated that it didn’t help me. nonetheless i was glad to have given it a bash. this piece of advice has stayed with me more than any other from recent times because of the gentle and respectful spirit in which it was given. in particular because i was offered a choice in the matter. with all the other advice, i recall primarily how physically uncomfortable i felt receiving it, as it were waiting for the onslaught to pass. when someone starts telling me what to do, i tighten up inside, it seems as if a sizeable piece of wooden furniture has taken the place of my guts and reproductive organs, and i brace myself against what i experience as an attack on my integrity. gosh it feels bad. bad and exhausting. even when i am the messenger, asked to pass an instruction on to another, i experience this bodily disturbance deep within my core. i am a mother tiger protecting her cub, whether that cub is my inner child, or my friend’s self esteem.

i know a handful of people whose default setting is one where they assume they are the only human who has been appraised of some extremely basic bits of information, the kinds of things we all need to know in order to get through a day without stuff going seriously wrong. and they have assigned to themself the role of explaining to the rest of us idiots these fundamental facts of life. i mean things in the area of: take your keys with you when you leave your home in order to be able to regain access on your return; purchase tickets to that film you want to see before they sell out rather than after; or prevent a small child from running into the road while cars are driving along that road at speed. i find these folk’s assumption that they are the only one who knows what they are doing truly baffling. i try to imagine the chaos they presumably envisage taking place whenever they are not present to tell everyone else how to act: cars crashing into each other left right and centre; children being mown down willy-nilly; everyone spending every night sitting shivering on the pavement outside their home, cursing their stupidity in having yet again left their keys indoors. not to mention all the items of knitwear shrunk from everybody repeatedly running their washing machine at an inappropriate temperature.

there are a number of contenders for my least favourite type of advice, but i think that the winner, above even the stating of the bleeding obvious, is when a person asks how you feel about a thing, and you reply by telling them how you feel about the thing, then they tell you not to feel the way you feel about the thing. they tell you to feel something else entirely. why did they ask if they didn’t want to know? and what has given them the impression that it is possible to choose how we feel? how can they have been around all this time, feeling all these emotions, and not noticed that their own emotions don’t have an off switch?

this evening i’ve been thinking about what the model citizen (my moral compass, or alongside the genius, one of my moral compasses), who is currently abroad, will say regarding all this when he reads or hears it. he will say that most advice comes from good intentions. the model citizen’s opinions on the behaviour of others is based quite heavily on his remarkable ability to project onto almost anybody else his own characteristics. so let’s say that i am prepared to acknowledge that his own advice, if he was prone to giving advice, which he isn’t – but for the sake of argument – his hypothetical advice comes from good intentions. i am not convinced that is true of everyone else’s. which isn’t the same as saying that theirs comes from bad intentions. but i think that many in our culture are so uncomfortable around other people’s distress that it is beyond them to put much thought into the advice they push at humans who report suffering. i think that because so many of us are so frightened by other people’s difficult stuff, advice is usually aimed at closing the conversation down as quickly as possible.

unfortunately i am cursed with a need to be honest. the federer fan calls me a truth-seeking missile, a quote he borrows from miranda richardson. this causes all kinds of difficulties for me. last year i had two catastrophic mental breakdowns, and i found it impossible not to tell people about them when they asked how i was doing. i didn’t go into detail, but i responded to enquiries after my wellbeing with words along the lines of “i am very unwell with depression”. this was a bad idea. few people were able to just hear me and believe me. nearly everyone found it necessary to try to offer solutions. but a central symptom of these crashing depressions was that they had no solution, not until the medication kicked in. that was kind of the point. my only option was to ride them out. this having to ride them out induced panic reactions in all but my closest circle of friends. i’m not saying we weren’t panicked too; we absolutely were. but we were down with the simply waiting it out plan, since it was clear that no other strategy was available. my partner and my closest friends were fucking amazing. thinking back on how they rode it out by my side brings tears of gratitude and humility to my eyes. how lucky i am to have such incredible people in my life.

just to be clear, lest i should risk hypocrisy, there are a couple of sorts of advice which i’m in favour of. i very much enjoy handy household hints. for example, i read an article about how you can clean silver using tin foil, bicarbonate of soda, and boiling water, and the results are so satisfying. i cleaned my charm bracelet using this method, and something magical occurs when you pour the boiling water into a bowl lined with foil, shiny side up, containing your jewellery and a big spoonful of bicarbonate of soda. for reasons i don’t understand (and actually don’t want to understand, since it would spoil the magic), a chemical reaction causes the tarnish from your silver to lift itself off then make contact with, and adhere to, the foil. i also appreciate grammatical proficiency, since the moment i begin to try to think about grammar the useful parts of my brain seize up and freeze over. i think i probably use something called an oxford comma from time to time, and if anyone challenged me on that i would need to search for specialist guidance in order to back up my flouting of traditional grammatical conventions.

my strongest reason for disliking advice is that i find it blocks authentic communication. i think that advice is almost always given for the benefit of the advisor, rather than the advisee. i think it is usually a lazy, fearful, knee-jerk response to the inevitable chaos of life, the gorgeous messiness. when someone honours you by trusting you enough to tell you that they are finding an aspect of their life difficult, why not simply be with them in their difficult state, respecting and giving it space, rather than try to shut it down and shut them up? most human problems don’t have straightforward solutions. with many human problems, the most liberating and comforting reaction is validation: it is a gift to receive the words “i believe that you are feeling the way you are telling me you feel. i hear you”.