For or Against: Turning 40 (Part 1)

On declining shots, belated apologies, making bad art, and getting faster at emails.

I turned 40 this month, which made me think: What have I learned in all that time, besides how to tell when avocados are ripe and part of a TikTok dance to a Meghan Trainor song?

In a break from the usual For or Against format, and inspired by New York Magazine’s recent viral story on the new rules of 21st-century etiquette, I thought I’d share 40 personal rules I’ve learned the hard way over the years and now try to live by. But because 40 rules are a lot to read (or write) all at once, I’m breaking this series into four parts.

What are some of your own personal rules? Write me and maybe I’ll include them in a future installment (with your permission!). Either way, I’d love to hear them.

40 years, 40 rules for living (Part 1)

1) If someone at a wedding wants you to take a shot with them but you don’t want to, the easiest way out is to accept the shot, take a tiny sip, and then put it down somewhere behind you or pawn it off on another wedding guest.

Chances are the person who wanted to do shots in the first place is already too drunk to notice, and this way you don’t get stuck arguing with them or vomiting in the tiny moss terrarium centerpieces that nine bridesmaids crafted over the course of a delirious 24 hours. 

2) It’s never too late to apologize. If you’re still worried you hurt another person days, weeks, months, years later, go ahead and say you’re sorry. There’s no statute of limitations on trying to make things right.

A while back, I apologized to one of my best friends for something that had happened in college about 15 years earlier. I’d let her down when she needed support, and I’d felt guilty about it ever since. It was good for us to talk about that period openly, and it even turned out that she had a different (kinder) read on the situation than I did. That’s something I would never have known if I hadn’t spoken up. 

3) Want a dog? Get a dog. For a long time, I wanted a dog, but talked myself out of it for various practical reasons — I traveled too much! I wasn’t home enough! These were all valid concerns: I would need to change my lifestyle to be a responsible dog owner. But ultimately I realized, What’s so great about my lifestyle? I wanted a dog more than I wanted everything in my life to stay exactly the same. Here’s Daisy:

4) When someone tells you they went to a fancy school or work at a prestigious company, nod and say “heard of it.” I don’t know, I just always find this response personally amusing? It kind of throws the other person off-kilter, but not in a mean way. My friend Olivia also told me recently that she had a dream where my impulse whenever anyone told me they went to Harvard was to muss up their hair. That’s a pretty accurate assessment, but I’d never touch people’s hair uninvited in real life. It’s rude! 

5) If you want to see something more clearly, try drawing it. I like drawing because it forces me to look closely at the world around me, rather than relying on the sort of clip-art images of wine bottles and washing machines and hummingbirds and human faces that I have in my head. Even flowers don’t look how I think they look! They’re twisted.

6) It’s okay to make bad art. I think what holds a lot of people, myself included, back from starting and finishing projects is that we’re worried our writing/music/comics/podcast/etc. will be terrible and other people won’t like it. And it’s true, this is a risk! But just because you make a bad thing doesn’t mean you’ll never again make a good thing, and sometimes the bad thing can even become good if you keep working on it.

I also once read an Edith Zimmerman comic where she talked about how making bad art can be helpful to other people who are also making art, because they’ll see what you’ve done and say to themselves, No, not that way, this way! So even if your poetry is maudlin and cliched, by sharing it, you’re potentially helping to pave the way for the next Emily Dickinson. 

7) When you’re introducing two people, tell them one thing they have in common and/or one fact about each of them. I think I learned this from Bridget Jones’s Diary, and it really has helped me out at parties over the years.

8) If you’re slow with emails and texts, the solution is to write like Channing Tatum would. When I was younger, I used to agonize over word choice. “Writing ‘OK’ sounds more casual — too casual, like I’m some kind of surfer? ‘Okay’ seems warmer,” I would mumble to myself, deleting each sentence in a work email dozens of times. This approach made electronic communication a) very stressful and b) very slow. 

What I’ve come to realize is that if I’m ever going to initiate plans via text or respond to a freelancer email or talk to my coworkers on Slack, I need to write as quickly as possible, before paralyzing self-doubt has time to creep in. I use as my model Channing Tatum’s famous email from the Sony hacks, which clearly involved him writing his exact thoughts and emotions as he experienced them in real time (“SECOND OF ALLLL TIMMMMME BEEEOTCH!!!!) and sounds like it was written by the golden retriever in Air Bud. Now, when I’m exchanging everyday messages, I don’t try to be particularly clever. I don’t worry that my boss is parsing my use of conjunctions. I just try to be truthful and fast. I channel Channing.

9) Never assume anything is going right when it comes to the U.S. healthcare system. Okay, this is an extremely dry one, but: If the doctor’s office can forget to send in a prescription, or the insurer can lose a prior authorization fax, or the specialty pharmacy can shuffle you between departments, or FedEx can lose the package, they absolutely will screw things up. If it’s been more than a day or two that something was supposed to happen and you haven’t heard anything, always call to check in. And dealing with insurance is one situation where it is absolutely okay to ask to speak to the manager.

10) A big part of pushing back against anxiety and self-criticism is continuing the conversation inside your head. This is something I’ve learned with the help of cognitive behavioral therapy. When I tell my therapist I’m worried that, say, all my friends will think I’m too needy and demanding if I invite them to a dinner party, she’ll ask me what kind of evidence I have that this would be the case. Do my friends generally seem aggrieved by invitations to hang out? Do I rule dinner parties with an iron fist, insisting that everyone construct their own pilgrim hats out of folded napkins before we begin the meal? Most of the time, the evidence supporting my worst fears is actually pretty weak or non-existent. 

So now, when I find myself thinking that I’m not talented or lovable and I’ll never get the things I want in life, I try to ask myself, “Why do you think that?” Usually, after a few more follow-up questions, the answer comes down to, “No reason.” My inner critic is loud and harsh, but — it turns out — not that smart at all.