People Who Give Unsolicited Advice Secretly Want One Thing
Spoiler alert: It’s about them, not you.
People love telling me about my life. Over the eighteen years I’ve been publishing books and essays, online and in print, strangers have elbowed their way into my comments section and book events instructing me on how to live my life. As if I’m a small, feeble child, they tell me how to love my dead mother more, my friends more, my significant others more, and my dead cat more. They tell me how to write, what to write, when to write, how to feel, what to say, what to do. Every time I commit thought to type, there’s always someone climbing out of the bushes informing me how they would’ve done things differently.
These uninvited armchair psychologists, gameday commentators, and shamans serve up medical advice and mental health cures — though I’ve never asked for, wanted, or needed a manual for living my life.
And although I know most offer their advice from a kind and compassionate place, their words still intrude, come into my home uninvited. Their words blithely ignore my boundaries. When I write, I share parts of my story, never the whole, because if I did my life would be less mine. Holding a small shard of my story in your hands, how do you even feel qualified to instruct me on the whole?
