Today is a big, wild, scary, intense, beautiful, brilliant, anticipated day for me. It is the day my first ever book is available for pre-order. My fingers are shaking (just slightly, could be from the caffeine) writing this because part of me still cannot believe it's real. If you’ve pre-ordered already, or are considering doing so, I thank you so deeply. Preorder is so beyond important for debut authors. Thank you thank you thank you.
As a child, I wrote fervently. It felt like the only thing I ever really did right. It felt easy. Therapeutic. An untangling of brain waves and ideas and stories nestled inside of me. I wrote an entire book in a horse notebook in the seventh grade about twin sisters named Isabella and Elizabeth who consistently switched places to their delight and everyone else’s detriment. I used to want to change my name to Isabella or Elizabeth because Eli just didn’t feel right.
I’m glad I never changed my name.
I’m glad I kept writing even when the words felt stuck somewhere inside someone I wished I wasn’t. I’m glad I lit myself on fire one thousand times just to keep myself warm. I’m glad I realized that my voice is strong enough as it is. I don’t need to change. I never needed to. I had to discard myself ten times before I found myself again. It was the same me. I was. I never thought I’d make it this far. Today, I have a book on a website of a publishing house I’ve admired for my whole entire life, with my name printed across the bottom.
Holy shit.
I’ve arrived somewhere I’ve wanted to be for so long—in the most unlikely of ways—and I am just getting started.
But I don’t want to talk about me today because you’ll get enough of that. This book is as much mine as it is ours. We did it together. So today, I’ve decided we’ll talk about you.
I’ve compiled two letters from my Ask Eli form that hit on similar themes, desires and needs. I’m going to address all of them—and all of you today—because while I don’t have all of the answers, and while I have close to nothing figured out (other than that I am going to have a glass of champagne with lunch today)—I have something to say. And I love you.
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Dear Eli, Your insta post about loving life as an artist in New York made me want to sob violently (in the best way possible <3) because that’s just about everything I want for my life, and I’m so beyond happy for you. Anyway, I’m a bit behind you age-wise (just turned 20 at the end of last year), and my current impression of my twenties is that they’re fucking terrifying. Little naive 18-year old me thinking she was finally an adult was so so wrong– it’s looking like the twenties are where the real adulting comes on, and it’s so scary because it’s like I’m being pushed off the deep end in terms of figuring life out, but also, I have to be the one to push me otherwise I won’t experience all the growth I want for myself? I’ve always been a really anxious person (clearly), and so being constantly terrified of this very real sense of independence before me but also having to actively make the choice to push myself into it just goes against everything in my being, yet I do it anyway. I’ll get to the point. I want to be a writer. I will be a writer…I’ve had this idea for a writing project for a while, and I’m in the process of getting funded for it, and I’m so excited about it. But I think this is the first big thing I’m doing entirely by myself. The project requires a lot of moving parts, and they’re all things that I believe that I can handle, but I’ve never done anything like this before. I’m second guessing, I’m questioning the validity of my ideas, I’m wondering if people will even take me seriously since I’ve never done this before. I’m pretty sure I’m just going to push myself into the deep end anyway, dive into this project, and hope I can swim like hell, but I feel like this constant doubt is so unproductive and could even prevent me from doing this as well as I really want to. Despite knowing damn well that I’m capable, putting myself in such a vulnerable solo position is so scary. How did you handle this era in your life? Why is this all so scary? How do I push through it?
Dear Eli, It’s been a year since I graduated college and I’m not happy with life. Without getting into too much detail, I had a really bad college experience and left excited to put that chapter behind me. The beginning was great and I felt happy to be moving on and be starting my dream ish job of being a scientist (emphasis on ish). However, since the Fall, I have been dealing with a lot of negativity surrounding my post grad life. I live at home to save money, so I rarely see my friends because they live further away. I rarely go out for that reason as well. Work is decent and can get me excited at times, but it doesn’t satisfy me, I struggle to feel as if I have progressed at all (it’s hard to feel smart when you’re someone with a bachelors surrounded only by PhDs), and I constantly find myself wondering if I should do this (my plan is to go back and get my PhD but it’s a constant battle now of feeling good about it and feeling bad). Unfortunately, I do not have a good relationship with my parents due to past trauma inflicted by them and - I kid not - it has come to the point where I have tried to move out for my independence but they will not let me move out. I constantly feel as if I am running out of time, due to health issues, but spend more time dreaming about what will happen down the line than living in the present. But now I am here - 1 year post graduation, and I have stopped chasing big things, doing things I love, and instead fallen more into mundane activities and can’t find anything to show as progress for being done for a year. I know this is a lot but from one twenty something year old to another - how do I make my post grad memorable? How do I redeem myself from 4 years of unhappiness and, for lack of better words, abuse? Lots of love!!
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Firstly—thank you all so much for being so vulnerable and honest with me. Your bravery inspires me, teaches me and guides me. Holding your words and stories in my heart is something I will never take lightly. Each of you is important to me. I am so indebted to your resilience. You are brave. Sit with that.
While I cannot claim that I’ve had identical experiences to any of yours, I’ve felt so similarly to both of you at very similar times in my life. Being (almost) 25 myself, I feel like I’m still deeply in the thick of what I see as the— ‘I thought when I was 18 that when I got to my 20s I’d have everything figured out and it would all just work out because I’m finally an adult and it seems like that’s what happens when you’re in your 20s but in reality there’s no such thing as having it figured all out and everyone is just faking it and privately panicking’ era. So I think we should start there.
I don’t feel like an adult. I feel like the teenage girl wishing she’d have bigger boobs and the 20 year old wishing he’d tell her to stay. Most days I do feel stuck either here or there. I’m still figuring it out.
As women, especially, when we’re teenagers, we look up to people in their early, mid and late 20s, who we believe ‘have it all figured out’. Curated Instagram pages, babies, engagements, houses, apartments, dream jobs and more felt like milestones I had to hit because that’s what other people were doing—and they seemed happy and well rounded (online, on Instagram and in public facing scenarios). There was no LinkedIn post that said ‘I’m pleased to announce I just orgasmed during sex for the first time even though I'm 24’. There was no FaceBook album of selfies of a girl I thought was beautiful ugly crying. It was just her trip to Positano, where she got engaged. Nobody showed the meltdowns or the brutal, and if they did, it was curated in such a way to be aesthetic and manicured. It just felt like to me, that when I graduated college and turned 22, everything would fall into place like it did for others. Society told me my whole life, that in my 20s I should have everything figured out and be done exploring and done trying new things. But society also never taught me how to get there, what I had to do to have it all figured out. It was an expectation without any teachings or any rubric. The expectation is to have it figured all out—but when you think about it deeply, having it all figured out is 1. Impossible and 2. Not something we should desire at all.
So let’s start with this: nobody has it figured out. Not Oprah. Not Rihanna. Not Taylor Swift. Not me. Not you. Because having it ‘all figured out’ suggests that we don’t hold worries, we don’t have wants, we don’t want to learn new things, try new things, move on to new people or places. Having it all figured out seems stifling and stagnant. And if you were to ask anyone you look up to—including the most famous, successful people on earth, they’d tell you that they don’t have it all figured out. Sure, they are successful and passionate and well rounded—but they too may want for more. They too may want something different. They too may be going through heartbreak, or new love, or loss of some kind. They too wake up some mornings and say, I’m not sure how I’ll get through the day living inside my own head.
There is no such thing as ‘having it all figured out’.
You could search to the ends of the earth, and you’d never find someone who claimed to have it all figured out.
This is yet another myth society tells women specifically. Yet another piece of phony, fragile scripture. And much like other scriptures we’ve been taught—beauty standards, purity culture and more—it is entirely impossible to attain. An ever changing scale with hurdles nobody—no matter who they are, can clear.
So anyone who you think has it all figured out is doing one of two things. One—curating an aesthetic online (TikTok, Instagram, both) where it appears as though they have it all figured out. Two—completely faking it, because that is what we feel we need to do to survive.
As a mechanism for survival, I tried to fake it throughout college and even in the first year or two of post grad. But now, I am casting that aside. Having it all figured out is bullshit. I am faking it until I make it every single day, but I am honest that half the time my confidence is not real, and half the time I am really fucking scared. And being really fucking scared is OK.
The line in the first letter— “why is it all so scary?”—really stuck out to me.
It's scary because it is new. It is scary because you care. It's scary because this is your life, and you’re so eager to just live it. When I was 8 years old I was in a production of Annie in a church basement. I told the director I was nervous as we huddled in the hallway behind the makeshift stage before our first show. I’ll never forget what he said to me.
He said “You’re nervous because you care. If you weren’t nervous, it would mean this didn’t matter to you. Sometimes fear is a good thing.”
Sometimes fear is a good thing. What a gift to feel something so huge about something you love so much. You are scared because you want to be a writer and you won’t forgive yourself if you don’t try. You are scared because the structures that upheld your life throughout young adulthood have faded from view—the only hand you can really hold is your own. You are scared because you care. You are scared because you expected to feel like an adult and instead you feel like you’re 7 years old trying on your mom’s high heels. You care so very much, and that care is going to take you from one side of your own world to the other. You just have to trust it.
Let’s just say you’re pretty comfortable and stable in a job you like. You don’t love this job, you’re not passionate about this job, but it pays the bills, you don’t mind it, and while it isn’t your favorite thing in the world, you can tolerate it. As humans, we crave comfort. It’s natural, it’s normal, it’s necessary. Even sometimes, when comfort causes mundanity or sacrifice, we choose it because we feel safe.
Now let’s say you don’t like your job at all. You feel bored, unmotivated and uninspired. You’re uncomfortable because you want for more. There’s nothing about this job that’s necessarily toxic or harmful to you, you just don’t feel right, you don’t feel passionate, you don’t feel inspired at all. This discomfort eats away at you until one day you get brave enough to look for something that makes you feel the opposite—inspired, on fire, motivated, challenged and passionate. This discomfort that you’ve been held in for so long has taught you things—about resilience, about what you truly want. Without this job, without this discomfort, you never would’ve realized that it is in your power to rewrite your own script. You leave the job you hate and you follow something that you’ve always wanted to follow. The world becomes your yellow brick road.
What I’m trying to say is that being uncomfortable sucks. We hate it and we wish to be anywhere else. But swimming in the thick of discomfort teaches us things. It causes us to reconsider, reprioritize and go after a worthwhile challenge. While we don’t want to live in discomfort forever, a healthy balance of comfort and discomfort is where we should truly make our bed.
Discomfort is where change happens. Discomfort is where we truly step into ourselves. We should honor her the same way we do her more mild twin. Nobody talks about being uncomfortable because we loathe it so much we don’t even want to think about it. I try to approach feelings that we deem to be negative (discomfort, heartbreak, loneliness) the same way I do the positive ones. I let them into my house and I make them a drink. I shake their hand. I give them a hug. I say, ‘it's nice to meet you. One day I won’t really know you anymore, but if you come around, I’ll know exactly what to do.”
When I was in high school I had a cross country coach that would always tell us that running is a mental sport. When you’re in a race, the people in front of you and behind you do not know how you’re feeling or what’s going on in your brain. It is in your best interest to keep your form tall and firm, to take deep (almost intimidating breaths) and tell yourself you feel fucking great even when you feel like dying. Fake it ‘til you make it—she’d always say. I’m not suggesting that you should ignore all your negative emotions. Feel them, especially the hard ones, always. But if you’ve felt them for days or weeks or months and you’re ready to no longer feel them—fake it ‘til you make it. Our conscious thoughts become our subconscious actions. Consciously tell yourself you’re worthy. Consciously tell yourself you deserve to be here. Consciously tell yourself you’re a good writer and a creative who deserves to be heard. Eventually, you’ll believe it and so will everyone else.
In the second letter, the writer asks about making her post grad life memorable—and to me, making something memorable isn’t possible without making something joyful, and without, primarily, making it yours.
Firstly, I want to extend to you my love and my care for what you’ve endured. Remember: you are brave.
Of course we want our lives to be memorable. But we cannot make memories if we’ve clouded our own space to store them with negativity, self loathing and self doubt. We have to make space for these memories to build their little cottages and have their nice gardens and install central AC.
There is a place for negativity and self loathing too. We should let ourselves have those days where we’re in a bad mood. Because those emotions have something to say. Give them their microphone. Let them get it all out. They’re going to leave when they realize they have no reason to stick around anymore. There is a time and a place for a shitty day. Or a shitty week. But a day or a week isn’t your life—and a feeling or an emotion isn’t your soul.
I want you to start by getting a clean notebook. One that’s only been written in a handful of times, if at all. I want you to write out the most beautiful version of your life you can possibly conceive. Where are you? What are you doing? Who are you with? And most importantly—how do you feel?
When you're done I want you to read that over. Read it out loud. Read it like future you is already there. And then I want you to make a list of everything you have to change or alter in order to get there. Afterwards I want you to close the notebook and go have a glass of wine. Or take a nap. Or go on a nice walk. This is just the beginning. You’re going somewhere and you’re going to get there.
We won’t get there tomorrow and we probably won’t get there next month, but little by little. Step by step. And one day, maybe in a few months or a year, you’re going to look back and realize you can’t even see the spot where you began. Not even with binoculars or a trip on an airplane.
But we don’t have to wait for our next destination to make memories, to derive joy or to honor our lives. While we’re taking our steps forward (and admiring the view) we’re going to spark joy every single day (or at least every other). Your life is yours. It is an amalgamation of everything that happens to you and that you happen to.
You are not in a perpetual waiting room. Just because some aspects of your life are not the way that you wish them to be, doesn’t mean everything has to be that way. You are not a passenger on a Greyhound bus, going somewhere you don’t want to go. You are here. You are alive. You deserve to go to sleep at night believing that your day was more good than bad.
For a while my second semester of my freshman year of college I went out as little as possible. I mean at all. I hated going anywhere that I could be perceived. To class, to see friends, to parties and bars—I loathed myself and I loathed the world and I told myself every day that once I was thinner, more beautiful, more interesting, I’d be worthy of the life waiting for me outside. That was a silly way to think. If I could I’d take that poor girl in my arms and braid her long hair. I’d tell her she was worth the world because she’s here. With her feet planted on the earth. That is enough.
By way of your existing, you are worthy of a memorable life—a joyful one. It does not need to be expensive or intangible either. You don’t need to buy anything or completely change who you are, you just have to start a second draft of the story that you tell yourself, and make that story a little brighter. Some days will feel like doomsday, sometimes our head will feel too heavy for the world but not the pillow—but the hope is not all of them do.
Maybe you’re not in control of all your circumstances—your living situation, your family life or even your career. But you’re in control of the route you take to get from here to there. You’re in control of your coffee order and what you’ll have for breakfast. You’re in control of the TV episode you watch before bed, the book you read on a Saturday, the plans you make and the texts you answer. You’re in control of the art you make and the words you string together in response. You’re in control of the shower temperature, the podcast you listen to on the subway, what you wear today, the way you unwind, the flavor of ice cream you have for dessert. And maybe these feel like simple things to be in control of—but we so often forget about our autonomy—which is dazzling and bright. We so often forget about our voice—which is important and valid. We so often forget we can make things as simple as possible so they seem more manageable.
Tomorrow morning is a morning you’ve never lived before. Tomorrow is a day for you to decide you want to get to know yourself so earnestly that you start feeling like your own lover and your own champion. You only get less than 5,000 Saturdays on this earth if you are so lucky. So on this one, try something new. Try something joyful. Try something that is yours.
The memories come flooding in after.
My dream for all of us is that we don’t have to endure the scary or the uncomfortable or the shitty. But the reality is that stuff comes. And it also goes. We might not know when or how or why, but I do know a few things that I’ll share with you now.
A phone call to a good female friend can turn around an entire day.
Master your personal chocolate chip cookie recipe in case of emotional emergencies.
You are not your job. You are a full person.
Champagne is not occasion dependent, somedays are just worth celebrating.
If you want to be a writer, you just gotta fuckin’ write.
A beautiful day should never be taken for granted, the sun is your biggest ally.
You don’t look bad today. You look really good.
You don’t need to have your whole life figured out. Just today is enough.
Your notebook is your daily therapy. Supplement with weekly therapy for good measure.
And most importantly, you deserve to live a life that sparks joy. So go where you are wanted, go where you feel set on fire. Check in with yourself and ask yourself how you feel after spending time with someone. After being somewhere or doing something. Go after the good. Fill yourself with the good. You deserve the good. Because you my dears, are the good too.
And my biggest hope of all is that you believe it.
I love you. Xx,
Eli
Hi - letter number two here. I am so so grateful for you Eli Rallo. You are a gem in the rock, a raisin in the sun, a green light across the water, etcetera. Thank you for your kind words, your love, and your advice. I am the oldest, so I don’t have an older sibling - this was the big sister advice I needed all along. And yes, I WILL go buy a journal don’t worry. And also a frame, because I printed this newsletter out to have with me as a reminder. Wishing you a safe and speedy recovery post op - thank you thank you thank you!!!