I Wrote a Story About My Life. If I Want Advice, I’ll Ask for It.

When did we decide everyone needed life advice?

Why do so many of us have this compulsion to fix people?

I’ll bet this happens to you, too. You write a story about a life challenge, or trying to lose weight, or whatever. Suddenly your inbox or your comments section is populated with unsolicited advice, some of it damned dangerous and un-vetted, from folks who, kindly, have no business doing such a thing.

They heard it on Fox. Their cousin’s sister’s brother’s second cousin’s aunt’s daughter tried this once. Because she met a shaman on the Tahuayo River in 1963 and he told her…

You know what I mean.

Covid-19 in particular seems to have exacerbated the problem. Suddenly everyone is an expert on prevention and cures.

Well I tried putting my daughter’s stuffed emu in my bed at night and I haven’t coughed for weeks. See?

I gargle with my own urine. Tastes like piss but I still haven’t got Covid. None of my friends come by any more either, but that’s a good thing, right?

Which has led to various professionals and government leaders -who possess a brain cell or two, not including our Orange Idiot- may he gargle bleach until his teeth fall out- to have to debunk shit so stupid it boggles the mind:

No really. We’re that gullible.

At least it gives us comedy fodder.

In the years I’ve been engaging social media, and in particular writing on Medium, I have noticed a trend. It’s not just me. When I read other people’s articles and then wander through the comments, seems like we’re all subject to the same thing: unsolicited, but mostly well-intentioned advice.

Still, unsolicited.

Okay so the comments that strongly encourage me to go fuck myself might not be so well-intentioned but hey. At least they read our stuff. Which means that while they’re getting pissed off, we’re getting paid.

God I love karma.

Besides, fucking myself is hard to do right now ‘cuz I burned out my buzzer. I just moved here so I haven’t found that store yet. But I will. Desperation is the mother of invention.

My ex once suggested a belt sander.

But I digress.

Years ago when I lived in Spokane WA, I formed a group of high-powered women. One was a gal I’ll call Kay. She had a habit of soliciting help and advice ALL the time.

Her followers(such as we had them back in the early aughts) would leap on the bandwagon and load her up. I’ve no clue if she used any of it, reported back to them or thanked them (we kinda need to). Several of us- then the rest of us- in the group disengaged, exhausted by the constant asks. The rest of us wanted better self-sufficiency, I guess.

It’s one thing to be supported.

It’ s another to be propped up all the damned time.

Kay disappeared, purportedly moving back in with her mother in central Washington. She was homing on sixty. Seems a little late in life to still so desperately need advice from anyone and everyone, but each to his own.

I am convinced that Kay’s phalanx of compulsive advice-givers simply moved elsewhere on line. Then replicated themselves ad nauseum.

They sure found me. And you, I’ll bet.

From telling me what to eat to how to gain weight to whether to let my hair go gray, which is mostly kind, to inviting me to walk off a cliff or stop telling them what to do with their lives (hardly, but that’s how folks decide to interpret some of my stories), a certain kind of person sure loves to Insert Nose Where Uninvited.

As someone who works with personality profiles, I get it that there are those types who feel the urge to tell others what to do and how to do it. To that, you might find this article about personalty profiles and unlicensed advice engaging if not helpful:

If you’re familiar with the Myers-Briggs profile, this might resonate. From the article:

INTJs are the Masterminds. They are logical, practical people who are often perfectionists. They can see the potential in all things and set very high standards for themselves and others. Unfortunately, they do not hesitate in pointing out when they believe others are wrong or not hitting the mark.

ENTJs are ambitious leaders who are interested in driving their careers forward and seeking power and control. They want to call the shots and put their well-thought out plans into action. Like their INTJ cousins, they are also perfectionists who can be frank and even arrogant about others’ shortcomings. All of this culminates in a person who frequently gives people advice, whether they want it or not.

While these two types may excel in the workplace with their love of ideas and thirst for excellence, they both lack an understanding and attention to emotion, both in themselves and others, and this can lead to problems in their relationships at work and at home. And while it may seem to the INTJ or ENTJ that they are only trying to help, it can be very annoying to the person on the receiving end who feels they can manage perfectly well on their own. What’s more, the person giving the advice may not actually have other person’s best interests at heart and are really more concerned with gaining control. (Author bolded)

Or more likely, their money. Same thing, basically.

To be fair, of course not ALL INTJs or ENTJs do this. Many of us grow out of it.

So, kinda, yeah, it’s a control thing. Makes sense to me. When I read comments that bark at me for what I should try, eat, where I should live, blah blah blah, my first reactions include:

1. Get the fuck outta here. Kindly, my life, not yours. My body, not yours.
2. Honey, get your own life in order. First and foremost. And, kindly, that’s going to take the rest of your life, and if you’re really serious about it, getting your own life in order will be a full-time job.
3. Which means, kindly, you’ll be way too preoccupied to tell me what the fuck to do with my life.

Number three, natch, is the crux of the matter.

Look, gentle suggestions and ideas are pretty useful, and well-received. It’s being shat on by all the SHOULDs that I struggle with.

Back in 2018, when I had the monumentally poor judgment to allow Last BF back into my life (we all suffer brain farts, clearly I eat too many emotional lentils), I got a nasty viral something-or-other while in Borneo. It was because some very ill Asian man one seat row behind me in steerage coughed without covering his mouth the entire way from Vancouver to Taiwan.

Asshole. Good chance that I was hardly alone. My guess is that likely two hundred other souls were just as bad off as I was. But I digress.

The BF at the time decided to offer me some advice:

“You don’t need to be doing this,” he penned, most unhelpfully. I was at that time settled into a perfectly lovely five-dollar-a night hotel in Palangkaraya, with a lovely family complete with happy pittie puppy, and a very VERY bright daughter about to head to the US on scholarship. People who drove me to the urgent care clinic, organized trips to make up for what I’d been too sick to enjoy but had paid for. I could go on. This is the pittie puppy I fell in love with:

Yeah. I do need to be doing this. Because I am still friends with Jesika and her family and am welcomed back ANY TIME. I plan to do that too. We just wrote each other this morning.

I am not in the market for advice on how to avoid life’s vicissitudes.

If for no other reason, and there are many, that I’d have no comedy material whatsoever if shit didn’t happen.

The BF was, and may well still be if research serves, out of control in his own life. He’s an INTJ. He’s had to move in and live with a survivalist brother, a nut job with 300,000 rounds of ammo in his basement. A guy who, along with his wife, marches around the house with pistols on his hip. Great way to mistakenly kill the kid selling chocolate bars for the school band.

And he tells ME “you don’t need to be doing this?”

My point precisely.

I would have missed out on this family:

Oh, and so very much more, had I followed the BF’s advice.

Nope. His life was and still is a mess (last I checked he’d had to move back in with the brother HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA) because of Covid.

I can’t even imagine, if he has a significant other in his life right now, what kind of helpful advice he’s offering her.

See what we do?

You and I, if we’re not mindful (and most of us aren’t), are subject to the same compulsion. There is, I’ve noticed-but-not-researched (feels like it) that there is a direct, inverse relationship between feeling dis-ease and out of control in our lives and the amount of (unsolicited, wildly un-helpful) advise we insert into others’ lives.

I’ve done it too. These days I’ve been using that knee-jerk compulsion to tell others what to do to mind my own beeswax. It is a perfect indicator of where I am — feeling out of control, discomfort. I get it. Others don’t need to have that cascaded on them.

No. Wait. Kay did.

Well, shit. I think I just found her business model. She fakes helplessness, asks for help, discovers who is in trouble by reading people’s unsolicited advice, figures out (probably with some accuracy) whose life is up Shit Creek, then sells them a paddle.

Fucking genius.

Why didn’t I think of that?

I’m too stupid, I guess. Not only would I prefer to take personal responsibility, I would prefer others do too.

Hey, look, someone has to live in LaLa Land.

This is different- well sorta- from the piece I wrote the other day:

…which points out peoples’ deeply unfortunate propensity to heap shit on others for their suffering. That’s insufferable.

It falls into the deeply unfortunate category of White folks intoning to Black folks What They Just Don’t Understand. You Don’t Get It. Really?

Again, I digress. But you get it.

This is more along the lines of those endless comments that I sometimes get which are so helpful in pointing out how to get a man (and I need one right now why?) how to eat (and you live in this body, when?) how to have a better life (and you’re what, twenty-three?). I could go on.

All that life advice about how to do shit from folks that have no clue how to do shit because many of them are still shitting in their diapers.

Okay okay, I exaggerate. But if I see one more article on how to make a million on Medium in three days or less by someone who wouldn’t write such a foolish clickbait headline if they weren’t delivering for Doordash whilst living with twelve roommates….you get it.

Perhaps my fave to date- but oh there are SO many examples- are advice articles on productivity by 21-year-old recent college graduates who have copied them out of someone else’s copyrighted college texts.

No. Not making that up. It boggles the mind, but it didn’t boggle theirs to ask me to sign up and pay for their list of Ten Ways to Be More Productive when their mother still sticks her head into the room and shrieks

CLEAN UP THIS GODDAMNED MESS OR I’M TAKING AWAY YOUR PHONE!

Look, I get it. However, suggesting that I ingest stir-fried snails’ anuses as a way to put on the pounds that are sliding off me as though I am in a Swedish sauna is, well, not helpful.

If I want to know how to eat, for example, given my recent kidney issues, all due respect, I will:

1. Do my own research. Funny, but what’s on the Internet is just as available to me as it is to you. Now, why didn’t I think of that? (whack head with Stillson wrench)
2. Contact people I like and trust, whose credentials are legit, and who know better than to dictate what I should do, but help me think shit through. People like Ann Litts who is a nurse, who has some of the same issues I do, who is close to my age, and kindly, who has worked with specialists in the areas where I have challenges.
3. Carefully test and then curate what I find. And kindly, not impose what works for me on others. God help them, they are lucky enough not to have this body.

People have written me to solicit advice on workouts and weight loss. While that’s very flattering, kindly, it’s also foolish. Why?

You don’t have this body (thank your lucky stars you don’t have to face off with MY face pre-denture insertion every morning. I’ve had to replace that mirror a thousand times; it cracks every time I walk into the bathroom)

You don’t live this life. You don’t wanna life this life. Because this:

This of course doesn’t include the scientific research I quote, the thoughtful articles I link and the like. There is well-founded, general information that I will reference because it’s solid- for now anyway. But you can find that yourself. You can put those habits into place yourself. There is no secret hack that I use to live vibrantly at 67. I write about a lot of things that could be considered suggestive of advice but kindly, I provide places to find material that Dear Reader can verify, then choose to use said information. This is not Be Like Me. Dear god. One of me is bad enough.

I’ve learned, if I am hell bent on offering anything, to put in this preface: I can only speak for myself.

Or, All I know is that this worked for me, but you might want to do your research.

But this is what we do: My ex-husband had a twin brother. His life was a godawful, horrific mess. Still is, for what I can tell. Yet one day, I heard him offer to my then-husband that he was going to become a coach, a mentor. He was going to go help lots and lots of young men live better lives.

Oh Jesus Fucking Christ.

Will you kindly. That compulsion to spread advice, which he didn’t live, to people his example would damage, is exactly what I see all over Medium.

The compulsion to fix others is little more than shrieking to the world through a megaphone that our lives are a bloody mess, we’re in complete denial of it, and oh, by the way, that’ll be $500 an hour for my (mostly useless) advice.

Now, to end on a high note (as long as you began in a deep ditch) there are these two. First, from P.G. Barnett: whose treatise on a monumentally stupid piece of advice to fellow writers led to this article:

That vividly reminds me of how Dr Mehmet Yildiz got complaints from folks early on at Illumination stating that poetry wasn’t about real life. We need stories about real life.

And of course there was the guy who wrote on Medium in all seriousness to never read anyone else’s shit.

Ever notice that your stuff is stuff and other people’s stuff is shit? (with thanks to George Carlin. Note to writers: ALWAYS ATTRIBUTE).

You will forgive me whilst I puke.

And finally, because I prefer laughter to regurgitation, there’s this:

If I may off my unsolicited advice to all those new noobs (I stole that from PG and no I didn’t ask permission) on Medium, the above might be good essential reading before you bark at us about following our passion, being kind, don’t listen to the haters.

Respectfully, it makes sense to live for a while, learn our own lessons, write about them,

and laugh like a fucking banshee at the mindless corrective advice you receive about your life and what you SHOULD do to have it all, have it better, be a billionaire in three easy steps.

Folks, as better writers than I am have pointed out, if you were a goddamned billionaire you wouldn’t be writing for pennies on Medium.

Just saying.

So please. Before you weigh in on my weight loss, or Shannon Ashley’s weight struggles, or offer advice on what we SHOULD do ( a word which I deeply wish would be struck from ALL Medium articles IMMEDIATELY),

Kindly. Go look in the mirror. Mine cracks when I do that, which cracks me up, which gives me comedy material. But you shouldn’t have to pay the prices I did and continue to do to find your funny. However, at least looking in the mirror will allow you to locate the person who so badly needs your advice.

Tagging Nicole Chardenet. Because. She’ll know.