#33: Be the shot of whiskey
reflections on individuality and impermanence after a conversation last night with author and artist, Mari Andrew
I went to a podcast mixer last night1 with the absolutely incredible special guest,
. Mari is an author, watercolor artist, and the type of person who walks into the room and immediately sets the tone for connection. Adorned in a long pink dress with her wavy blond hair and charmingly self-deprecating comments about her 3 different temperatures of water— flat, sparkling, and tea— Mari sat beside the also superb host of this event, , and was showered in compliments by the 15-20 guests.“I have been following Mari’s work for years and the question of what would Mari do? presents itself and provides me with clarity on a weekly basis,” shared a guest. And the rest followed with similarly valenced praise.
Mari first captured my attention with her post, “To Miss,” on Instagram.
She has the ability to put into language our most intimately mundane thoughts, emotions, and experiences. She shines a light on the little things that previously felt like such secret parts of ourselves that not only were we unconscious of their existence, but we definitely couldn't fathom anyone else feeling the same.
Her reflections on how good it can feel to miss made me think differently about impermanence.
“Missing follows no logic,” Mari says.2
“I miss not knowing what being this age would feel like. I miss all the unknowns of youth even though they’re excruciating. I miss aspects of awful times, like how a breakup makes everything feel 10000x more important and how being confused about my life made me a more fun dresser.”
Mari gave me a new frame for understanding what it means to miss and gave permission to the idea that missing— even the bad things— can sometimes feel good.
Last week, I talked about my experience of looking back at old photos. I asked why I made missing wrong and explored how the envy of past versions of ourselves or others can point us to clarity around what it is that we’re looking for in this chapter of life.
But after revisiting Mari’s work, I am reminded of an even deeper truth about impermanence. Sometimes missing points us in the direction of what we want more of. And sometimes missing requires no action at all. Sometimes missing is a reminder of our multiplicity, of our growth, of our awareness that other options do indeed exist but we are choosing to lean into the ones that feel most like freedom and most like ourselves right now. And only you have that information.
She closes this beautiful post by saying,
“A melancholy part of growing up is that you start realizing that missing doesn’t always have an action step. I used to think that if I missed a person, I should go back to him. If I missed a place, I should move back. Now I just have to let that feeling sit, and I’m not sure how to entertain it or calm it down. I have to tell it, “Yep it’s hard, huh?” and then keep doing what I’m doing. Or sometimes I miss someone I haven’t talked to in three years and text him ‘Come to NYC please?’”
Another key point Mari made last night was about learning how to listen to and heed the call of your own intuition. She followed by saying that she no longer reads self-help books. She loves them, but she has come to the realization that she doesn't need other people’s words and research to confirm what she already knows to be true for herself.
If you don’t like the way Stevia makes you feel— to use a silly personal example— you don’t need to read scientific research papers (read: ask ChatGPT) about the health risks or safety of Stevia to make the executive decision for yourself to stop consuming it. Your own physiological and intuitive wisdom is enough.
I think the importance that Mari placed on being guided by your own intuitive awareness is very related to why missing feels so good. It’s because when you are missing— even the bad— you feel closer to all versions of yourself, both the ones that exist now and the ones that have died off.
Only you know what it felt like to wake up in a new city as an adult and feel overcome by the childhood memory of disassociation that came moments after waking up at a sleepover and having to reacquaint yourself with where the hell you are, what your name is, who your parents are, and which direction is up. Only you know what it felt like in your own body to harbor the fear of going on the scary swing at your neighbor’s house but doing it anyway because you wanted to prove to yourself and others that you weren’t a chicken. Only you know what it felt like to walk through that one courtyard on a sunny day after having a small but profound realization that you don’t have to put prove yourself to that one person anymore.
It feels good to miss those parts of ourselves because they are the ones kept alive by your memory alone. In the missing of those moments, you feel connected to the evolution of how you arrived at where you are today. They have informed each of your idiosyncracies and taught your physical body how to know what feels like a yes and what feels like a no.
Mari was asked the question of how she was able to find resonance with her audience and she held the minds of the room captive with this response:
When a waiter comes to your table and asks if you’d like water, it’s an easy sell. Everyone tends to accept; it’s just water. When a waiter comes to ask if you’d like coffee, perhaps fewer people accept but no one is surprised by the suggestion. However, if someone were to walk over to the table with a really refined glass of whiskey, there are going to be far fewer takers but those who do appreciate it will do so with enthusiasm and fervor.
You wouldn't know it by her 929k followers on Instagram and the success of her 2 books, but Mari has put herself on the firing line for a massive amount of rejection and continues to to this day. She knows that she is not for everyone. Nor are you. Nor am I. And that is a damn good thing. If you are really true to who you are, you are going to face a massive amount of rejection in life. But when your message does resonate, it will be received with the appreciation of a whiskey connoisseur as opposed to the bland thanks that follows “yeah, tap water is fine.”
The reason that Mari has become such a shot of whiskey is because she has shed many layers of herself. There are many parts of herself missing, many experiences that are stored only by her, and many memories kept alive by the somber moments of missing things that she didn’t like in the first place. She is not for everyone because she chooses in every moment to be exclusively for herself.
Those moments and parts of ourselves that we miss are the reason for who we are today. They require no action, no revisiting, no reaching out to the people of our past. We can reap the benefits of knowing that the missing feels good because you are acknowledging your multi-dimensionality without having to do anything about it at all.
In this same “To Miss” post, Mari says,
“Italian and French (probably others?) say “I miss you” in a way that translates to “you are missing from me.” This framing doesn’t quite resonate with me, because missing doesn’t make me feel decreased; it makes me feel like a fuller person with a bigger life.”
The things that you miss are representations of the unthinkable amount of roads that we could have gone down but didn’t, and the new forks that opened as a result.
I saw a post yesterday about a couple celebrating their divorce. Even though divorce is so common nowadays, it’s still widely feared and sometimes frowned upon. Never in my single life have I so badly wanted to get a divorce than while reading the meaning and intention that this couple was able to find in separating from each other for the greatest good of all involved. It made me think of a quote that I recently came across in reading When Things Fall Apart by Pema Chodron:
Impermanence is the goodness of reality. Just as the four seasons are in continual flux, winter changing to spring to summer to autumn; just as day becomes night, light becoming dark becoming light again— in the same way, everything is constantly evolving. Impermanence is the essence of everything. It is babies becoming children, then teenagers, then adults, then old people, and somewhere along the way dropping dead. Impermanence is meeting and parting. It’s falling in love and falling out of love. Impermanence is bittersweet, like buying a new shirt and years later finding it as part of a patchwork quilt. People have no respect for impermanence. We take no delight in it; in fact, we despair of it. We regard it as pain. We try to resist it by making things that will last— forever, we say— things that we don’t have to wash, things that we don’t have to iron. Somehow, in the process of trying to deny that things are always changing, we lose our sense of the sacredness of life. We tend to forget that we are part of the natural scheme of things. Impermanence is a principle of harmony.3
We have so much fear around getting things wrong, around not being liked, around the big, bad, scary moments that we label as the worst of the worst. Divorce, death, rejection, getting laid off, heartbreak, cancer, filing our taxes wrong. These are the things we fear most, the things that we spend our entire lives stockpiling metaphorical acorns so that we will have the strength, discipline, and willpower to fight them in the case that they arrive.
But this reflection on impermanence, coupled with my musings on missing, has recently reminded me that spending our time worrying about the future does not indeed prevent the worst from coming into fruition nor does it make you a happier and more harmonious present version of you.
We miss because we are expansive and there are parts of ourselves that no one remembers besides us. We fear because there are future versions of ourselves that we haven’t yet experienced and we so desperately want to be ready.
But, truly, the only thing we are capable of being right now is the version of ourselves that listens. That can sit in the pain of rejection because you were guided there by an even stronger intuitive conviction. The version of ourselves that takes Mari’s words to heart, “If you want a special life, special things are going to happen to you.” Both special in the sense of peak life experiences and the pitfalls of rare tragedies, in her case, losing her father and developing temporary full-body paralysis.
Mari’s entire talk was an invitation for everyone to be more comfortable in expressing their most unapologetic versions of themselves such that they attract perhaps fewer people but people of pristine resonance, nonetheless.
To miss is to acknowledge the past fluffier versions of you that once existed and to feel the levity of trimming the fat such that you now get to embody the lightest, clearest, and most expressive upgrade of you.
And there is peace to be found in the realization that you, too, will look back on this chapter of life and miss all of it. The good, the bad, the weird, the inexplicable.
To my new readers that I met last night and to those of you who have been here since the beginning, thank you all so much for getting
this week! I will catch you here next week, same time.**And an always thank you to my brilliant curator and friend, Xandra Beverlin, for tying this whole newsletter together with her recommendations of Naudine Cluvie Pierre and William Eggleston this week. For those of you who don’t know, I send Xandra a cryptic blurb about key themes for the week and she responds with the wizardry of her always-on-the-nose recommendations.**
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This podcast mixer was hosted by
(host of the Portfolio Career podcast and author of ), in collaboration with Rachel and Kyle of Oddly Specific.Pema Chodrön, When Things Fall Apart, pages 59-60.
beautiful Char... and i especially enjoyed this week's art choices as well as the subject matter. I'm missing it already :)
Thank you for coming and this post, Charlotte!