The point is: The feeling part of this is good. Your desires are good. So what you want to be careful NOT to do is smother all those feelings under a giant blanket of shame. Because shame won’t just blot out all of your desire, it will also repeat the core message that desire itself makes you a filthy piece of shit. Now maybe that’s just my former-Catholic, very married, very moralistic self-hating core talking, but I don’t think so. My suspicion, based on what I’ve observed in real life, experienced for myself, and read in countless letters from strangers, is that human beings blame themselves for being regular animals with needs and ideas and imaginations. We blame ourselves repeatedly and excessively, and all of that punitive self-flogging leads us off a steep cliff of shame. We end up flattened like Wile E. Coyote and then we cannot function or connect with others. When you see people shouting on TV, and they’re not standing up for justice of any kind beyond the freedom to do whatever the fuck they want and feel comfy about it? That’s some buried self-hatred and shame and flattened coyote bullshit right there. So let’s not kick up your shame if we can help it. Let’s take the desires and the imagination and the longing and the fun and try to slowly but surely coax them out of the tight grip of your mind, which keeps telling you, over and over again, like a prayer, like a mantra, that these things belong to this particular (partially imaginary!) man, and when you give up on him, you give up on your desire, your imagination, your longing, your fun, AND — MOST IMPORTANTLY! — your protection from all of the heavy shit in your life that you don’t want to face. You don’t have to face everything at once, remember. It’s not all or nothing! You can be good to yourself and take your time. ... And also — significantly! — a real person doesn’t shield you from the reality of a global pandemic, mixed with your struggles to write stuff you don’t hate. A real person makes you sit with those realities because a real person can’t fix that shit for you. All a real person can do is listen and support you and make irritating suggestions that will never fucking work because he’s a fucking idiot who doesn’t know shit about writing. A real person is not a ladder to the heavens the same way an imaginary crush is. A real person brings you back to yourself — the one person you don’t want to see or think about or feel right now. ... What you need instead is to conjure your own bluster around who you are and what you want from this life. You have to start thinking carefully about the things that you bring to the table with your writing. What do you do well? What do you have that’s special? That’s something all writers have to figure out and remind themselves of constantly. The word “special” is used very loosely and broadly here. Most of the time what’s special doesn’t sound that special to the person who owns it. I always want my skills and talents to be rare and exotic, but I’d say most of my writing talent can be reduced to some very ordinary traits: I’m compulsively honest and I like working hard. That’s it. Not that magical. If you want to get a little more specific, you might add “enjoys ripping herself a new asshole in front of an audience.” Most talents have dysfunctional or disordered roots. We overcompensate, adapt, navigate, obsess, swerve, dodge, and voilà! We develop into humans with bizarre proclivities and skill sets. What makes you who you are? What makes you a weirdo? What do you do well? What do you love the most? ... Please notice that your crush doesn’t help that much on the writing front. As long as you’re living in some realm of comparison and approval-seeking, where you “get” his shiny life by becoming GOOD ENOUGH FOR HIM, that’s all very fraught and it mostly works against your creative process. Crushes can make you very self-conscious about who you are, so a lot your writing will end up feeling a little performative — good for some genres, bad for others. What you need, more than anything else, is to BE GOOD ENOUGH FOR YOURSELF. That means you stop trying to mold yourself into a worthy shape. You just do what you do well without measuring it against what other people do or searching for a pat on the head from some charismatic, withholding source. You work hard to please yourself. You value your own instincts and opinions about your work. ... Right now, people across this broken land of ours are cultivating obsessions of all stripes. A lot of people are lonely and longing for a rich, full life, the kind of life that’s not easily cultivated in the middle of a global pandemic. The main thing I want to impress upon you is that your path begins with a return to your own measurement system, your private values, your secret desires, your relationship to yourself. You have to stop imagining yourself through your crush’s eyes and start to see yourself clearly, through your own eyes, without judgment. You have to learn to emboss your raw materials with elaborate, imaginative designs of your own making. That doesn’t mean aiming for grandiosity, necessarily. It’s just a creative way of aiming for YOU. Compared to obsessing about some charismatic man far away, that probably sounds pretty dull. We are so surrounded by ourselves right now. What I mean is, you have to dare to accept everything you have onboard, and work with it. When you’re blocked as a writer, nine times out of ten you’re aiming for shortcuts. You’re trying to churn out some preapproved, charming CONTENT while ignoring your emotional state and your reigning preoccupations. But when you try to navigate around a big, vulnerable, honest piece of who you are, you block your gifts. You aren’t really communicating with the page. It’s almost like lying to a therapist: What’s the point? It’s time to face yourself. That doesn’t have to be drudgery. Because you own the fun that you found with this crush, don’t you? That’s why he likes you in the first place. You’re weird and charming and funny and full of ideas. You don’t need him to be those things. Find yourself on the page. Let the ugly, rejected, sullen, escapist parts of you in, too (you can always edit them out later, lol). Accept who you are. Make peace with your longing, without forcing it into the hot, airless jar of this crush. Sit with your loneliness until it smoothly transitions into a satisfying form of solitude. Honor your full, complicated, wild self — even here, in this dusty room, even now, at this excruciating time. Have compassion for your burning desires. Use them to cultivate your sunshine.

https://www.thecut.com/2020/09/ask-polly-help-my-pandemic-crush-feels-so-real.html