http://nymag.com/thecut/2016/06/ask-polly-im-having-a-midlife-crisis.html

I am demanding your indulgence this week, talking about myself too much. It’s my birthday, bitches, and you will indulge me. I am showing you how to indulge, Polluted Waters, because this is what you need to relearn at such a bone-deep level that you never lose it again. You don’t have to be the good one, the capable one in the background, or risk being too big, too vain, too spoiled and flighty and wild and petulant. Your kid is old enough now to need a role model in wild petulance. He’s had his generous, solid role model, and now he needs his Mother of Dragons. He needs to see you emerge from this burning building with a calm smile on your face and announce to the world, “The next time you raise a hand to me will be the last time you have hands.” But you also need someone to remind you of how far you’ve come, the way Jorah does for the Mother of Dragons, the way Ilana does for Abbi on Broad City, the way my husband does for me. It’s absolutely true that single mothers do twice the work, but that’s not what would break me about being a single mother. What would break me is not having another voice there to remind me that everything is going to be okay when it feels like the wheels are coming off. So you have to enlist a few trusted friends and feed them their lines when they can’t remember them. You have to be explicit. They have to look you in the eyes and say, “I see how hard you work. I know how much you’ve accomplished so far, just living here, just doing what you do, just raising your boy in this wild place, so far away from home.” Ask them to say it with feeling, while you sit there feeling it. And you will practice looking them right in the eyes as they say it. You will practice saying “Thank you” and feeling that gratitude in your heart. You also have to say it to yourself. You will wake up in the morning and you will say in the mirror, “I see how hard you work. I know how far you’ve come. You can feel proud of yourself, and enjoy this day, because you are strong and brave and generous.” I know that saying these things out loud will feel a little dorky. Dorkiness is emancipation. You can have your flowing white hair and your dragons and you can be imperfect, too. That’s what no one tells you. We’re all supposed to be shiny and perfect on the inside and out. Fuck no, my friends! Be soft and sloppy on the inside. Be sloppy on the outside, too, if you want to, or do what I’m doing lately and shellac the mother-fucking shit out of yourself, because it’s fun and you’re hot and Goddamn it, how many more years are you going to walk around making yourself smaller and smaller and smaller, all for the sake of the threatened, wobbly egos around you? You have made yourself smaller and smaller because secretly, you know how big you are. You hide from everyone because you know that if you actually dared to get on top of that fucking dragon, you might just scare an enormous, unwieldy tribe of Dothraki enough that they’ll bow down in the dirt, on their knees, or shake their fists at the sky to praise you. But don’t ride that dragon just because you want to see your enemies on their knees. Maybe that’ll be a tiny, you know, pleasant side effect of the whole thing. But don’t make that your motivation. Do it because IT JUST FEELS RIGHT. You were born to ride dragons, that’s all. You were born to be wild and fierce and haughty. You can be fragile and be haughty, too. You can be humble and be arrogant. You can grow potatoes and raise your son and also sip a pricey wine with your new bossy, high-maintenance friend. You can live in your mud hut and fly your dragon into the sun. And while you love and take care of and provide for your son, who will love you and take care of you and give you everything you need? You will. You are not becoming one with the sewage. You are not swimming upstream. You are living your fucking life with courage and dignity, you are following your dreams, and now you’re going to really feel that for the first time.