Pamela Adlon Makes It All Better

In wrapping up “Better Things,” Adlon gets candid with Shondaland about her journey creating the FX series and the value in talking to strangers.

Pamela Adlon feels familiar. Granted, legions of creative sandwich-generation Gen X women see so much of their lives depicted in Better Things, the oft-Emmy nominated and Peabody Award-winning FX series about a single mother and working actor raising her three teenage daughters, which Adlon co-created, show-runs, writes, directs, and stars in. It could also be because Adlon’s been on TV since she was 11, appearing in shows like The Facts of Life, Star Trek: The Next Generation, Californication, and Louie. Then again, it could likewise be because you’ve heard her voice on a list of animated shows that runs longer than any CVS receipt, among them King of the Hill, for which Adlon won an Emmy for her voice work.

Most likely, though, Adlon feels familiar because, just like her character-cum-alias Sam Fox on Better Things, she’s gifted with the “bartender vibe,” or the ability to forge emotional intimacy with perfect strangers in an instant. “That’s just the way I’ve always been,” she tells me during a speed date-style Zoom interview. “I’ll see somebody, and I’ll just talk to them. I have a friend, Robin, who, when I’d go into her building, would say, ‘Don’t talk to anybody as you walk through the lobby; just keep f--king moving toward my apartment!’”

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It’s this reverence for human connection — however random — that permeates every episode of Better Things. “It’s so profound when you speak to somebody, and you see them as a person, and acknowledge them, and you have a connection,” Adlon says. “It doesn’t matter if it’s a valet person taking your ticket or a crying guy at the Mattachine Steps [in Los Angeles, the site of a random encounter Sam has this season]. It becomes a bigger, more profound thing for everybody. So, that was always going to be part of [the show] because it’s a part of my madness.”

Adlon is grateful her “madness” resonates with so many. It’s no wonder: For the past five seasons, Better Things has taken us on a very realistic journey of what it means to be a mother, what it means to have lived and seen some s--t, what it means to be divorced, what it means to be a working actor, and what it means to be a human being trying to hang on to some semblance of yourself while spread wire-thin amongst the needs of kids, an eccentric mom, a career, a chosen family, and a one-legged dog or two. Gorgeously shot in and around Los Angeles, the show is also something of a love letter to the city.

Pamela Adlon (right) and Hannah Alligood (left) in Better Things.

FX

To say Sam Fox was made in Adlon’s image is something of an understatement. It seems as if Adlon’s own life has provided her with a treasure trove of fodder for Sam’s great adventures: Both are single, working actor mothers of three daughters who live next to their British mothers. It’s been written that Adlon’s own art adorns the set of the Fox home. Like Fox, Adlon is often in the kitchen preparing meals for those she loves, according to her own Instagram stories. The actual details about Adlon’s British-Jewish ancestry, which Adlon discovered on a recent episode of Finding Your Roots, made it onto this season of Better Things almost verbatim.

Many of my friends lost their s--t when I mentioned I’d be chatting with Adlon, so I thank her for making so many Gen X women feel seen. Though she’d likely heard this praise many times before, she thanked me and was genuinely, deeply appreciative. “The whole thing has been shocking to me, that people were able to see [Better Things] and feel seen by it,” Adlon says. “That was my goal because I needed a show like this when I was growing up, and I needed a show like this when I was a young mom.”

Yet if you told Adlon seven years ago that she’d be sitting on a couch chatting with journalist after journalist about her very own series, she might not have believed you. “I never thought it would go this far. It got out of control. I certainly never thought that people would really see it,” she says of how Better Things began. “I started the show seven years ago. My kids were all a lot younger, and they were all living at home. Now I just have the youngest living with me. I set out to make a show that would be good enough; I just didn’t want to make a terrible show. I set out to make a pilot. After one full season, I never imagined we’d be able to tell more stories.”

Getting Better Things off the ground required Adlon to take a big leap of faith in herself. “I didn’t have a picture in my head of what it was going to look like, but I did have to make sacrifices at the beginning in order to make my show,” she explains. “There were some very real opportunities that were being offered up to me, and I had to literally say no, keep my head down, and keep my focus because that was the time for me to create and make my show. When Sam in the show goes, ‘This is a shanda [Yiddish for a disgrace]! You don’t turn down work! What am I doing?’ she needed to do that in order to move forward. Even if she was making less money, and it meant less workdays, that was going to be the change for her. She had to make a sacrifice. That’s what happened to me with my entire show.”

Seven years later, Adlon’s leap of faith in herself and her show paid off. “Now I have this beautiful present for everybody,” Adlon says. “They [viewers] can take one [episode] out, and put one in if they want to feel a certain way,” she says. “It takes you on a ride emotionally, and makes you realize things, and it teaches you things — all this kind of stuff that I would’ve loved when I was coming up.”

Wrapping Better Things was a conscious decision for Adlon — not that it was an easy call, considering how grateful she is to FX for giving her the opportunity to do her show her way. “They built me and supported me as a filmmaker and a creator. That’s the greatest gift ever because I was able to really do my show the way I wanted to do my show. They gave me that freedom,” she says.

Without giving too much away, the final season of Better Things does what it does best — taking a magnifying glass to those poignant, uncomfortable, transformative moments of our lives that we rarely speak of, and wringing the humor and inexplicable humanity out of them. “I feel like it’s really important not to be too sanctimonious, but you want to have feelings,” Adlon explains. “Those feelings happen, and you see them.” When I ask her how she’s feeling with it all coming to an end, she doesn’t miss a beat: “I’m doing, like, victory laps!” she says. “I’m just running around and going, ‘I’m great! I’m fine!’ And then somebody asks how I feel, quotes the show to me, and I burst into tears.”

Robert Kerbeck’s American Dream

From Hollywood actor to corporate spy to author: Kerbeck’s new memoir speaks volumes about dedication to art and what we can do to support ourselves in pursuit of it.

It’s not everyone who can parlay their skills as an Actors Studio-caliber actor into a career of corporate espionage — and then turn around and realize their dream of becoming a published writer. But when reading the memoir RU$E: Lying the American Dream From Hollywood to Wall Street, you’ll be glad Robert Kerbeck felt compelled to put pen to paper.

Kerbeck’s story begins in suburban Philly, where Kerbeck dreamed of life as an actor. After an Ivy League education and a quick move to New York, he began a long career as a working actor, appearing alongside the likes of George Clooney and Calista Flockhart. But even working actors need side gigs, and soon Kerbeck found himself going from a mentorship in becoming a corporate spy to convincing Wall Street banks to give up some of their deepest-held secrets — which led to hundreds of thousands and eventually millions of dollars in paydays for Kerbeck.

It’s a story almost too good to be true, and Kerbeck winds every detail into an engaging, entertaining memoir. Kerbeck recently spoke with Shondaland about what it took to risk spilling his truth on the page, and the circular rhetoric that can come with chasing your passion.

VIVIAN MANNING-SCHAFFEL: You’ve written a tell-all about your life, leaving no stone unturned. What made you decide now is the time to come out with it all?

ROBERT KERBECK: I read an early chapter at a writers’ conference that focused more on my father and his passing, but some of the spying was in there. That was always a bone of contention in our relationship. I wanted to be an actor. He was a car dealer, and when I worked for him, I was uncomfortable with the dishonesty of car sales, so I followed my passion. I left that job to pursue acting and got a job as a corporate spy, which was far more dishonest. There was obviously some irony there! People were saying a lot of nice things about the stuff with my father, but they were fascinated by the corporate spying. They had no idea this world existed, told me it was incredible and that I should write it. I hesitated because I was worried I could get in trouble. Fortunately, there’s a statute of limitations for the things that I did in the past, and it has now passed, so I was able to tell the story freely because I don’t have that kind of [sword of] Damocles hanging over my head.

VMS: Did you consult with a lawyer first?

RK: I actually consulted with someone that worked for one of the very agencies that theoretically would prosecute me, and they very kindly advised me.

VMS: Between the “rusing” and acting, you have no shortage of wild stories. It’s all so vividly told! Did you keep a journal that whole time, or is your memory just that good?

RK: I didn’t keep a journal. I didn’t ever think I would write about my quasi-illegal activities because I didn’t want anybody to know. I stumbled into that rusing job because actors need to survive, right? Most of my stories were kind of easy to track because I could go on IMDb. I did Sisters with George Clooney in 1994, so I look it up and remember it was hot that day. One of the wonderful things about memoir is it’s all how you remember it. One of the challenging things about memoir is it’s just my recollection.

VMS: You were an English major at UPenn. How did the rigors of putting yourself through school shape your life?

RK: It had a profound and lasting impact because I was broke for so long. During my first two years of college, I never went out. I didn’t even have enough money to survive in school housing, so I had to live in a tiny one-bedroom apartment with three guys because it was far cheaper than the housing. I couldn’t afford a meal plan, so I lived on Kraft mac and cheese. I worked 32 hours a week while I was going to school. Frankly, those first two years were quite miserable, and that did leave a mark. As time went on, there was a part of me sometimes that said I’m never going back to that.

VMS: You started rusing as a way of supporting yourself as an actor without starving, writing that it required “ethical elasticity.” Looking back on it all, would you do it all over again?

RK: That’s a great question! I guess I don’t know the answer. You can’t drive through life while staring in the rearview mirror. There are plenty of things that I would have done differently and that I regret. Back then, $8 an hour is probably equivalent to maybe $16 an hour today, which is what most entry-level jobs pay. To answer your question, I wouldn’t do it today, nor would I recommend it to anyone else, but that’s the journey I went on. If I changed any part of that journey, I wouldn’t be where I am today. I wouldn’t have formed the Malibu Writers Circle. I wouldn’t be a good husband, knock on wood, or a good father most days of the week. I think there’s part of me that appreciates the journey because you learn so much along the way.

VMS: Did you struggle with rusing while you were in the midst of it, especially as you started to make real money?

RK: There was a part of me that justified what I did. Since the Great Recession, we’ve had this great wave of digital transparency, and what was private is now public. I got people to tell me secrets about their corporations: who the top people were, who their top clients were. At the end of the day, the vast majority of information I got was being used to offer people better job opportunities. Before the crash of 2008, there were very few ways for major corporations and for major executive recruiting firms to find out who was at a firm and who the top people were at a competitor. The actual, factual data that showed who the traders were at the top 15 investment banks on Wall Street was incredibly valuable information. At one point, there was an eight-person team at Morgan Stanley that did a trade that made a billion dollars. Shortly thereafter, one of my clients wanted to know the eight people on that team to try and steal them away so they could do the same. Today, you would think that couldn’t be difficult to find out, but back then it was impossible. While I did some rusing with assistants and receptionists, I tried to go after executives to tell me the information because they generally were far easier marks. Wall Street guys — because back in the day, it was definitely more male than female — were extremely arrogant and were often quite willing not only to talk but to brag about the deal. I’m like, this guy’s making 10 million dollars, so that was the excuse I gave myself to rationalize what I was doing.

VMS: For many, many years while you were rusing, you were also a successful working actor. What’s so interesting about your story is that it tells the truth about the ups and downs of show business. It was between you and Brad Pitt for Thelma & Louise. You always hear stories about the person who makes it big, but you rarely hear about the person who came close.

RK: You’re right! There are plenty of tell-all memoirs from successful, famous actors, singers, or even writers, but you don’t see too many stories about the person who was striving and giving everything they had to almost make it. I took an acting class every Saturday for a decade. I didn’t go out on Friday nights for 10 years because I had the class Saturday morning, and I was going to be fresh and sharp. So, if you called me and said you had tickets to the theater on a Friday night or told me about a party, I wasn’t going because I wanted to prepare for my acting class, and that’s how seriously I took it. There are so many stories of people who got so close and didn’t have it happen. For the vast majority of people, their life story is one of many disappointments — sometimes great disappointments. It was a great disappointment to me to not have a bigger career, but what I hope people get out of my story, besides the fun parts, is to recognize when you pursue these really difficult careers, things don’t always go the way you would hope. The good news is, I don’t regret that I [tried].

VMS: What was your process in writing this book? How did you approach it?

RK: I run this writers’ group in Malibu. Members have published books, screenplays, plays, short stories, and essays. Notes from the group helped so much. So many of their stories deserve to be heard. One of the reasons I wrote this book is I wanted to tell the story of somebody who tried but didn’t get quite where they wanted to be, and that’s okay because it’s really about the journey.

VMS: When did you realize you wanted to write?

RK: When the crash of 2008 came, everything stopped on a proverbial dime, and business disappeared overnight. There was no income, and obviously there was no income for quite some time. I had bills, and so I began to worry about what I would do. I got hired to be an executive recruiter and took my first job in corporate America. The biggest irony for me is that those people were more dishonest than I ever was on the phone, except they’d lie to your face. Sometimes they would be lying to you when you knew they were lying, and they knew you knew they were lying. When that job eventually blew up, it enabled me to kick the mortgage can down the road for 18 months. I had opened this business because I thought this company was going to make it part of theirs, but instead I was stuck with this lease, all this equipment, and brand-new computers. I was so depressed. One day, I basically wrote a suicide note, but I was writing the suicide note as this character who decided to jump off a cruise ship. I wrote a book in the Notes program on my iPad. There was a lot wrong with it; other writers gave me positive feedback. I started the Malibu Writers Circle and going to writers’ conferences, like Bread Loaf and Tin House, and those conferences helped me immensely. I made a lot of friends with writers I keep in touch with and work with to this day. I started getting essays published, and then we had this terrible, terrible fire in my neighborhood of Malibu, where my house almost burned down — the Woolsey Fire, the worst wildfire in L.A. — so I wrote a book about it (Malibu Burning: The Real Story Behind LA’s Most Devastating Wildfire). It all made sense: from car sales to acting, to rusing, to storytelling.

VMS: There are a few lines at the end of your book that explain how going after your dreams can be the ultimate ruse: “The opportunity to pursue one’s passion is its own privilege, and yet nearly everyone who tries is chasing a mirage. The promise of ultimately reaching a destination that’s a place of professional fulfillment is, well, a lie.” It read like a eulogy for your acting career.

RK: I love that! When I started writing, one writer told me you just have to decide what kind of career you want. Writing for money and writing for fun are both completely acceptable. You just have to make the decision about what works for you and what you’re going to be happy with. The whole idea about striving is to create something that’s important to you, whatever that is.

VMS: If you could offer advice to anyone who wanted to attempt a memoir or write about their life, what would it be?

RK: Think of it as a greatest-hits album. I read a lot of memoirs. Everyone has some interesting stuff in their lives, but sometimes you need other people to read your personal stories to see what the most interesting parts of your life are. It’s not about every chronological detail. Braiding stories can make a memoir more fun and break up the chronological feeling. Just give us the most interesting things in the most interesting way you can imagine.

Fake It Till You Make It: Good Advice or a Setup for Failure?

Imitating confidence, competency, and drive may work for some, but what are the long-term professional implications?

“Fake it till you make it” — we’ve all likely heard the phrase muttered a time or two when it comes to getting through a tough personal or professional moment. We’ve maybe even used it with ourselves as a form of reassurance when we aren’t feeling confident in our abilities. In any case, the phrase is often used to convey acting as if you have more to offer than you do.

When used literally, the term can obviously become problematic, especially if you’re biting off way more than you can chew professionally, but doubly so if someone is a total impostor trying to lie or cheat their way to success, like, say, Anna Delvey, who defrauded countless victims out of hundreds of thousands of dollars in order to pose as a German heiress infiltrating the New York City elite. Perhaps that’s why Alan Ibbotson, a leadership coach, founder of the Trampoline Group, and host of the YouTube video series “Wisdom You Didn’t Ask For,” would love nothing more than to bury the phrase completely. “It literally means you can’t do it or be it, and you are pretending,” he puts it plainly. “For some, they are signing up to be a fake and a phony, a liar and a cheat, someone who isn’t concerned with what others think or even with being authentic in their success — they just want to get away with it, operating on the hope that eventually they’ll make it.”

But not everyone is out there trying to get ahead by nefarious means. Many of us have found ourselves in new roles and lacking certain experience that can only come with doing the job, like launching a new business or suddenly becoming the manager of 25 people. Sure, some expertise is required, but in such instances, there will always be a learning curve that can only come with throwing oneself into the deep end, figuring some of it out along the way, and going through the necessary motions to build confidence in a new position.

And then there’s a third category of faking it till you make it: the dreaded impostor syndrome. Impostor syndrome is loosely defined as the internal experience some, especially at high levels, have of believing that they are not as competent as others perceive them to be. Ibbotson refers to the “fake it till you make it” narrative as “literally the birthplace of impostor syndrome.” He does, however, offer this distinction: “I think someone suffering from impostor syndrome is someone who ultimately wants to succeed and has anxiety about whether they are good enough. They care about authentic success and will likely be doing what they can to learn and grow into the challenge until they feel comfortable.”

Rheeda Walker, Ph.D., a clinical psychologist, researcher, professor at the University of Houston, and the author of The Unapologetic Guide to Black Mental Health, says competent people can develop impostor syndrome by internalizing societal messages of “less than,” which only compounds impostor syndrome further. “With women and people who are members of certain racial-ethnic minority groups, we see it more often because society says, ‘We really don’t expect much from you. We don’t even think you have the capacity.’ My parents always said I was going to have to work twice as hard to get half as far — and I wasn’t the only Black girl who was told this. It was just part of the cultural narrative of what we have to do in order to achieve success,” she says.

Ibbotson refers to the “fake it till you make it” narrative as “literally the birthplace of impostor syndrome.”

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No matter how you’re faking it to make it, though, what “make it” actually means is ultimately highly subjective. “Very few of us actually stop to identify exactly how we’ll know when we’ve made it,” says Barbara Barna Abel, the multimedia coach and adviser of Abel Intermedia and the host of the Camera Ready & Abel podcast. “It’s a vague idea in the future, and our brains have no idea where we’re actually going, so we’re on a ‘faking it’ hamster wheel going as fast as we can to avoid being found out.”

Even without swindling others out of hundreds of thousands of dollars like Anna Delvey, many of us, when trapped in the cycle of trying to prove ourselves to ourselves, might start to feel like a fraud for no good reason. In fact, the phrase “fake it till you make it” itself harkens back to the term “self-fulfilling prophecy,” which was coined in 1948 by social psychologist Robert Merton to describe “a false definition of the situation evoking a new behavior which makes the originally false conception come true,” according to The Oxford Handbook of Analytical Sociology. In other words, if you say you’re faking it often enough, part of you holds the belief that you are indeed a fake, someone not fit for the opportunity you’re about to step into.

Perhaps, then, faking it till we make it needs a bit of reframing. Here’s how to keep pushing forward — for real — when it feels like faking it may be the only way to win.

Don’t expect too much of yourself from the start

Imagine you’ve just been hired at a new organization in a higher position than you’ve ever held before. Regardless of how prepared you are to step into that boardroom, there’s a first time for everything, and it’s rare for someone to approach their first time at anything exuding total confidence. Give yourself the grace of building up the confidence you need in the role, and allow yourself to sit back and learn from those around you. In this circumstance, though telling yourself you’ll “fake it till you make it” may seem like a means to come out of the gate strong — and indeed there are times when you have to relent to already established processes in order to reach a goal — starting out with the mindset of being fake is still a form of negative self-speak that could potentially be limiting and damaging to confidence and competence in the long run, says Ibbotson.

Shift the narrative

To break the negative self-speak cycle that can hold you hostage, it helps to shift your own narrative, says Walker. “From a psychological perspective, there’s a tremendous amount of empirical support with regard to how people think about things and how that impacts what they do and how they feel,” she explains. “If you’re telling yourself secretly, ‘I don’t deserve to be here. I’m not capable or competent,’ that’s going to affect behaviors. People are going to be anxious and worn out and sometimes depressed because they don’t think the reward that they’re getting matches the behavior and work they’re putting in. We have to interrupt the cycle and replace those maladaptive thoughts with adaptive thoughts and positive messages that make sense for us. Say things like ‘I’m confident. I’m doing the best that I can. I deserve to be here,’ because if you don’t, you’re kind of setting yourself up to miss out on the success that you actually deserve.”

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Consider why you feel like you’re faking it — then recognize when you’re not

Barna Abel says developing an awareness and consciousness of why you feel like you’re faking it is a great first step. “As soon as you give it a name and acknowledge it, it loses its power,” she says. “Next, knowing that these feelings are universal helps you to understand you’re not alone. Then you set the intention of challenging yourself to move through it, sit with your fear, and do the thing anyway. People will come to me when they’re asked to do something outside of their comfort zone. Confidence is an inside job, right? It comes from within. There are a lot of exercises where you can explore tapping into this. You just have to tell your brain where it’s going.” Once you get there, the next step is recognizing that you’re no longer in the perfunctory learning stage; now you can own the expertise you’ve picked up and lead with it on future goals and projects.

Before you can make it, you have to believe it

When trying to build and maintain the conviction you need to succeed, instead of faking it till you make it, Barna Abel says she prefers social psychologist Amy Cuddy’s concept: “Fake it till you believe it,” which speaks to how our neuropathways adapt to certain concepts over time through repetition. “In my opinion, this outlook is a more positive, productive, and beneficial version of ‘fake it till you make it,’” she explains. “It takes a long time — months or years — for us to believe in ourselves. The message has to become internalized and felt in your subconscious.”

Rather than faking it, try winging it

Ibbotson extols the virtues of winging it over faking it. “There’s only so much preparation that you can do for anything. Winging it is a skill set that refers to the ability to assess your situation and judge it accurately,” he says. “It’s about what it means to be open to learning how instead of pretending to be. It’s about how creatively, on the fly, you’re able to pull your resources together to find a solution to something or improvise. It’s about developing the level of confidence you need to trust the culmination of all you’ve learned over the years, step into the unknown, and trust that it will work out. You’ve got to have faith in yourself.”

There’s only so much preparation that you can do for anything. Winging it is a skill set that refers to the ability to assess your situation and judge it accurately.

10'000 Hours//Getty Images

Separate your thoughts from your feelings

Building faith in oneself can come with an understandable amount of anxiety, so Ibbotson advises his coaching clients to grab a pen and paper, draw a line down the middle, and jot down their thoughts on one side and their feelings on the other. “The idea is to cultivate emotional self-awareness and understand why you’re feeling the way you are and how it affects you so you can better act on the fly,” he advises. “It helps you to get out of the emotional tsunami that is your fear, accept it as a normal part of what’s happening to you at the time, and detach a little from your expectations of the end result. If you’re open-minded about what an end result looks like, you’ll be able to roll with things more nimbly.”

In the end, avoid “compare and despair”

Comparing yourself with others, especially via social media, is another unnecessary distraction from embracing your own capabilities on your way to success, says Walker. “We have to first accept that everyone feels like they don’t belong or they’re a fraud sometimes, and then focus on the fact that we have worked hard, regardless of what people say,” Walker says in regard to establishing your motivations for getting ahead. “It’s the hero’s journey from every popular narrative: They figure out who they are, tap into what makes them special, unique, and capable, then they are able to move on with whatever the mountain of the task is.”

5 Astrological Aspects in 2022 You Need to Know About

Astrological experts weigh in on how a few major celestial events could impact our vibe for the rest of this year.

Given the current state of the world, we could all use a little insight into what's to come, yes? So, to peek into what 2022 has in store for us, we consulted with a handful of esteemed astrologers for the scoop on five celestial events with the biggest potential for an impact on our personal business. These days, knowledge is certainly power.

Jupiter’s dance between Pisces and Aries

The good-fortune planet entered Pisces late last year on December 28, setting off a back-and-forth foray between Pisces and Aries that will last all year. Jupiter will remain in Pisces until May 10 and then take a spin through Aries from May 10 to October 27, only to then return to Pisces from October 28 to December 20. Jupiter then takes one more trip through Aries until May 16, 2023.

Chani Nicholas, the developer of the ever-popular CHANI astrology app and author of You Were Born for This, says Jupiter, the party planet of expansion, should lend some “wet and wild goodness” to all of 2022. “Because Jupiter is bestowed with the label of the fairy godmother of the cosmos, it has returned to Pisces (its home) and therefore is able to bring its overflowing chalices to the party,” she explains. “Here, Jupiter is well resourced to ply us with abundance and some much-needed ease.”

Nicholas says Jupiter’s dip in and out of Pisces throughout the year — it only circles through a sign once every 12 years — is “at its best, about more than accumulation or advancement. It’s about trust. About faith. About refilling our cups and the wisdom that finds you when you limber yourself up to give, receive, and believe.”

When Jupiter moves on to Aries on May 10, it “exchanges its wet suit for biker chaps and a flamethrower,” Nicholas describes. “In Aries, Jupiter is bold, brash, brave, and unapologetic. It barrels helmet-first into every endeavor, reminding us that even the most well-established people on the world stage are making it up as they go along. The spirit of Jupiter in Aries is intrepid, enterprising, and entrepreneurial, bringing a flush of fire to the Aries corner of your chart. Just make sure that you’re taking time to calculate those risks or at least educate yourself on potential consequences. Jupiter in Aries isn’t known for its prudence, but with practice, that’s exactly what you can bring to the equation.”

North Node in Taurus, South Node in Scorpio

January 18, 2022, through July 18, 2023

In astrology, the North Node — a node being the point in the sky where the Sun and Moon cross paths — represents the collective vibe or energy we’re moving toward, and the South Node represents the area of our lives that requires a releasing or letting go. Astrologer Colin Bedell of Queer Cosmos says the last time the North Node shifted to Taurus and the South Node shifted to Scorpio was in 2004 — it only happens once every 18 years. What does this mean? “We’re all looking to get grounded while the ground is moving,” explains Bedell of the Taurean influence. “If we could look back to the last time, it was post 9/11, and a lot of people were on edge, just like we are now. We’re all in this hypervigilant space in prolonged uncertainty.” He says the North Node in Taurus is a great time to clarify your values and determine which behaviors support how you live according to those values.

Taurus is the bull, and thus, like a bull, we should consider basking in the simpler pleasures our five senses bring, says Celeste Brooks of Astrology by Celeste. “It’s a good time to let go of keeping up the Joneses and find new ways of valuing ourselves without acquiring the stuff that causes us to deplete the Earth of its resources.” She adds that, with the concurrent South Node in Scorpio — which rules control, covert ops, and secrets but is also cathartic and insightful — we might see a lot of news about money and wealth, as well as the unearthing of secrets about corruption.

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Venus’ meaningful meetups with Mars

In Capricorn, February 16; In Aquarius, March 6

When a planet goes retrograde, all actions it governs slow down. If you’re wondering why this year started off at a snail’s pace with a strong urge for us to hibernate (hello, omicron), it’s because Venus, the planet of love and human connection, went retrograde from Aquarius to Capricorn on December 28 until January 29. “Venus rules the clarity of values in relationships and our relational intelligence,” explains Bedell. “If anyone wonders why they didn’t gain the usual momentum in the beginning of the year, Capricorn is the sign of dot your i’s [and] cross your t’s, so January wasn’t the month to begin anything.”

Now that Venus is direct, she has a hot date planned (aka a conjunction) with Mars in Capricorn on Feb 16 and in Aquarius on March 6. “Venus is how we draw in things we desire; it rules self-esteem, money, love, and relationships,” explains Brooks. “Mars is focused on how we get what we want. Mars is a lot more primal — it’s the fighting and fornication planet. When you bring them together, it can be quite beautiful. Aquarius is a sign of our hopes and dreams; it’s like the bigger vision, with higher-level, forward-thinking wisdom. People might feel a connection to some of their deeper desires, and some instinctual understanding of how to move forward to get what they want. People have been so focused on others these past two years, they might find some footing with themselves again.”

Jupiter cozies up with Neptune

April 12

While in the spiritual sign of Pisces, Jupiter, the planet of expansion, will have, according to Nicholas, “one doozy” of a meet-cute with Neptune, the watery planet of dreaming and escapism that also rules Pisces. This hasn’t happened since the 1850s. “It’s going to be especially potent for artistic endeavors, forays into fantasy, and anything that inspires a mystic or divine love,” Nicholas explains. However, as Jupiter can overdo anything, and Neptune represents escapism, it’s an influence to be a little wary of. “Beware the delusional pipe dreams that seem too good to be true,” Nicholas says.

Big picture: This meetup might inspire us to feel a little more altruistic. “We’re going to consider the possibility of another way of living that’s more soulful and spiritual,” says Bedell. “Is there a different meaning-making lens that can help us think about ‘who am I? Who am I meant to be with? What is my meaning?’ We’ll investigate identity, relationships, business, and money from a more soulful lens. Not to be corny, but it’s about love. Isn’t it funny that love is considered anti-intellectual?”

Mercury retrogrades

May 10 through June 3; September 9 through October 2; December 29

If you’re into astrology at all, you’re well aware that when Mercury goes backward, your best-laid plans, communications, itineraries, and anything involving forward movement seems to go backward as well. When this happens, Bedell says, it gives us the opportunity to process whatever we’ve learned about our lives while Mercury was direct. He says it’s the perfect time to “re”: rethink, review, renegotiate, recharge, and rest.

When Mercury goes retrograde from Gemini through Taurus in May, Bedell says it might inspire us to rethink how we use words (ruled by Gemini) and consider “embodiment,” or how what we say is what we do (Taurus). When Mercury retrogrades from Libra to Virgo in September, we might find ourselves rethinking about where we fall into the either/or state (the cerebral pro/con cycle of Libra) and reconsider how our habits are serving us (the Virgo influence).

Overall, the astrology of 2022 holds many promising vibes. Between February 4 and April 29, all planets will be direct — a full-steam-ahead vibe, says Brooks. She says one snag that might wrinkle the fabric is a final square-off between Saturn (the planet of restriction) and Uranus (the planet of the unexpected) from late August through mid-November. Though it’s more of a close call than a direct hit astrologically, the three times these two met up in 2021 coincided with the emergence of new Covid variants. “It could reflect on the midterm elections in the U.S.,” Brooks mentions. Indeed, we’ll soon see what’s actually written in the stars.

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How to (Try to) Quit (Almost) Anything

Whether quitting candy or something stronger, the process starts with understanding why we lean on habits in the first place.

“New year, new you” is an adage that escapes almost no one. This shift in the Gregorian calendar often signals us to reboot our lives, and one way to do that is by leaving our not-so-good-for-us habits behind. But as we all know, the process of quitting — or more constructively put, changing — our habits isn’t easy.

Changing a habit starts with understanding how we form that habit. Timothy W. Fong, a clinical professor of psychiatry at the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior at UCLA, a co-director of the UCLA Gambling Studies Program, and the director of the UCLA Addiction Psychiatry Fellowship, says people come to rely on chocolate, food, coffee, alcohol, drugs, shopping, sex, or what have you because they aren’t sure how to self-soothe when experiencing uncomfortable emotions like anxiety.

“For whatever reason as a society, we’ve been told we should be able to learn to calm ourselves down on our own. We feel we deserve to feel pleasure 100 percent of the time, and the goal is to never experience any sort of pain,” Fong says. “Along the way, we learn that certain things feel really good because they help soothe pain. That’s where we’ve gone wrong over the last 30 years — to put a Band-Aid on any kind of anxiety. Everyone wants life to be fun 120 percent of the time, but it’s not going to be that way. We should not fight the fact that our bodies and our brains respond to little morsels of pleasure — that’s what it’s supposed to do. And we have to embrace that pain, anxiety, suffering, and all that stuff is part of human life, and we need that, probably more than we need pleasure.”

New York-based writer and professor Susan Shapiro says it was pivotal for her to recognize that addiction isn’t about pleasure-seeking as much as it is about pain denial when quitting alcohol, weed, and cigarettes. She wrote a few books about her journey, including — along with the therapist she says “changed her life,” clinical psychologist and addiction specialist Frederick Woolverton, PhD — Unhooked: How to Quit Anything.

As such, Fong says humans run into problems when quitting habits cold turkey. “That’s why New Year’s resolutions all fail — they’re always absolute,” Fong says. “It’s not that people don’t have willpower, it’s that they don’t know how to handle feeling emotionally distressed or emotionally vulnerable. Early arguments would say, ‘When you want to quit something, stay motivated!’ All that positive psychology sounds good, but it doesn’t work. It’s not about motivation and wanting to quit; it’s about learning how to manage both positive and negative emotions.”

It’s not about motivation and wanting to quit; it’s about learning how to manage both positive and negative emotions.

Peter Dazeley//Getty Images

Humanize your habits

To manage your feelings, Fong says it helps to humanize your relationship to your habit, accept that you’re drawn to it, and acknowledge there are limits to how much you can engage with it. “Don’t run from your emotions; embrace them,” says Fong. “It’s much better for you to indulge in smaller amounts of multiple things than to do one thing excessively. There’s a huge difference between people with pure addiction — they can’t have just one drink because one drink opens up the floodgates — and someone who doesn’t quite meet the clinical criteria for addiction.”

Shapiro did meet that criterion, and understanding her limits helped her to leave her addictions behind. “It’s endless. Nothing will fill in the hole,” says Shapiro. “I have such an addictive personality. The minute I quit one bad habit, I would get addicted to something else. So, I had to be hyperconscious of everything: eating, sleeping, exercise. Twenty years clean and sober, and I can still get hooked on things very quickly, so I have to take action. For example, I’m sick right now with a sore throat and was putting too much honey in my tea, so I threw it out. I know myself, and if it’s not in the apartment, I’m better off.” Shapiro adds that this reminder helps her stay on course: “Beware all excitement because it takes you out of yourself, and you always have to go back to yourself.”

Substitute one feel-good behavior for another

To leave bad habits behind, Fong says it helps to replace them with more constructive, pleasurable pursuits you genuinely enjoy, like an afternoon walk. “So many times, the first step in quitting X is to start Y,” Fong says. “These things won’t take away triggers or vulnerability, but they’ll add tools to your arsenal to help you deal with those feelings and provide you with another option. You might not have a choice about what you’re addicted to, but you do have a choice to build up your menu of options to cope with the s--t of life. It doesn’t necessarily feel good to cope with uncomfortable feelings, but it does feel good to know that you have different options to deal with stress and emotional pain.”

Goal-setting (she wanted to write a book — she’s since published 17) and walking (along with weekly therapy and nicotine patches) helped Shapiro stay on track. “I had to be more selfish and take care of myself first,” she explains. “Going out for drinks or to dinner all the time like I used to wasn’t good for me because it was too hard to be around drinkers, overeaters, and bread baskets. So instead, if a friend, colleague, or student wanted to get together, they could come over and speed walk with me for an hour around the local park. I started calling it my ‘walking office hours.’ That way, I felt much more happy and productive and could still devote time to connect with people I cared about.”

To leave bad habits behind, it helps to replace them with more constructive, pleasurable pursuits you genuinely enjoy, like an afternoon walk.

Susumu Yoshioka//Getty Images

Prioritize pleasure

Choose a positive, pleasurable behavior that will help you manage emotional pain or distress. “Walking versus reading, talking to a friend, taking a bath, smoking a joint — they’re not all the same neurobiologically or neurochemically; they do different things. That’s why we have to have a diverse set of human activities to maintain mental health and wellness. Instead of saying, ‘Instead of smoking, I’m going to needlepoint instead,’ it helps for the new positive habit to stick if it stands on its own without being tied to the more destructive habit,” says Fong. “Don’t worry about quitting X to start Y. If you do five different things that are Y, eventually that’s going to mean X may not be gone, but X will be less intense or prevalent. Eventually, you’ll strengthen your emotional core so that the situations that drive smoking are handled in a different way.”

Set attainable goals

Choose new pleasurable habits that are attainable and that you’re willing to invest time in. “Any time you want to change behavior, you’ve got to start really slow with something you know you can master. Let’s say you want to start running. Instead of saying, ‘I’m going to go out there and run three miles right now’ — you’re not good at it, you haven’t done it, why would you be able to do it? It’s going to be painful, unpleasant, and it’s not going to be a fun experience. But you can go out right now, and you can run for three minutes. That’s the starting point of making the behavioral change to add something to your life,” says Fong. Eventually, with effort and time (like a month), he says these new practices will become habits themselves.

Don’t beat yourself up

Fong says if you slip, it’s counterproductive to beat yourself up. “When you try to quit anything, the goal shouldn’t necessarily be to quit 100 percent,” Fong explains. “It should be to reduce the harm that the behavior has been doing to you down to as little as possible. Ten cigarettes a year isn’t going to be harmful to you in the long run — it’s not going to raise your level of cancer or create an elevated risk of heart attacks. If you went from a thousand cigarettes a year to 10 a year, your habit of smoking isn’t gone, but the harm is. Your focus should not be so much about winning or losing, but when you’re making changes, reducing the harm from that habit.”

Take it from Shapiro. “I wrote a piece about quitting guilt that started, ‘I spent the last two years saying no,’ and in those two years I got everything I wanted,” she says. “Here’s a line that helped me: ‘When you get rid of a toxic habit, you’re leaving room for something more beautiful to take its place.’”

Why Art Can Offer Us Catharsis and Healing

Artists like Adele and Taylor Swift channeled their pain into their work for us all to relate to. Here’s how making and enjoying art can also help heal us.

Adele's latest, long-awaited album, 30, is far more than just another gorgeous piece of work from the songstress. It’s referred to as her “divorce album” because she admittedly used her talent to express her feelings and heal from her separation from Simon Konecki, with whom she has a son, Angelo. When it was released in November 2021, 30 resonated so deeply with the zeitgeist that tweets galore validated how, yet again, Adele was able to reduce an audience to emotional rubble via her music.

Likewise, when Taylor Swift released her re-do of the break-up record Red (Taylor’s Version) last month, she not only invalidated an earlier version of the album that profited famed music manager/executive Scooter Braun — who managed Kanye West during his feud with Swift and came to own all of Swift’s masters — but rerecording her music and marketing it to her (very) loyal audience afforded Swift the opportunity to take back her power and heal the injustice. In its early weeks, Red sold over 600,000 units, staggering for a rerelease, and found listeners floored by Swift’s emotive, honest lyricism, on full display in tracks like the 10-minute version of breakup song “All too Well.”

Since the Lascaux cave paintings, artists have used their preferred artistic media to work through interpersonal issues and find catharsis and healing through the process. “As mammals, we are inherently social, and we rely on information from each other to survive and enhance our ability to make sense of the world,” says Girija Kaimal, Associate Professor in the PhD program in Creative Arts Therapies at the Drexel University College of Nursing and Health Professions in Philadelphia. “In order to do that, we have to keep communicating with each other and express ourselves.”

Kaimal says the expression of pain through art is a way of seeking connection and validation while externalizing complicated feelings. “We take some of the sting, and incomprehensibility and pain, and convert these intense emotions into a container outside of ourselves so it can be shared with others,” she says. “We invite empathy and compassion — all the things you need when you're struggling. A big part of what any kind of artistic expression does is, when you've had a life experience that makes you feel really alone and isolated, the art sort of pulls you back and reminds you that you're not the first person to have been through it. It might not replace the feeling of loss, but it may bring you comfort from those who respond to the work.”

Expressing pain through art is a way of seeking connection and validation while externalizing complicated feelings.

Marina Parahina / EyeEm//Getty Images

Another benefit of channeling your emotions into your creativity is what you can learn about yourself in the process. “The upset or the stress we put into art serves as sort of a mirror, telling us about some aspect of our experience that we haven't addressed or is probably still a trigger — something we haven’t figured out,” Kaimal says.

The process of using art to work through challenging emotional issues is reflected in Kaimal’s thoughts about Adaptive Response Theory (ART), a framework for the practice of art therapy. She theorizes that creative endeavors allow our brains to use the information to make predictions about what we might do next. “Art-making — or any creative-expressive activity — helps us to concretize and externalize an idea we have imagined in our minds,” Kaimal says. “When we do this frequently, we keep practicing our ability to imagine the future and feel a sense of control over our ability to make things happen.” In other words, we may not be able to control the outcome of our situation, but we can control how what we make inspired by those emotions comes out, and that, in turn, empowers us with a sense of agency we didn’t otherwise have.

Along with gaining a sense of control over emotions, we can make art to gain a feeling of catharsis, or an aha moment in the processing of our emotions, which offers us some clarity and distance from the situation. Rod Thomas, known musically as Bright Light, Bright Light, says channeling difficult or trying emotional states into his music has helped him find balance while bringing him to a more positive and healthy place. “I used my last album, Fun City, as a way to express troubles facing the LGBTQ+ community as well as celebrating some of our love and achievements,” says Thomas. “Rather than screaming into a void, I was able to make a record that focused on what is happening, what I want to happen, and how history repeats for both better and worse. I found that making the album infinitely helped my mental health during those months and years, turning deep negatives into eventual positives. I guess it's the ability of music to flip a switch! Creating something out of despair adds a tiny silver lining to darkness, and creating something that others can be involved in helps relieve loneliness, so music is in many ways a savior for me.”

“When you can channel emotion into a piece of work, it draws in others and they get what you are going through. It brings us back to a feeling of not being alone.”

Another benefit of channeling your anger, sadness, misery, or frustration into your art is the ability to lower stress — and if you’re coming out of a stressful situation, that’s a good thing. In one small study, Kaimal and a group of researchers measured the cortisol levels — cortisol being the hormone that helps the body respond to stress — of 39 healthy adults while creating art, and found the process significantly lowered cortisol levels regardless of ability.

As far as those of us who viscerally weep along when listening to Taylor, Adele, or Bright Light, Bright Light, Kaimal says we can pick up on the depth of emotion that goes into a piece of art, which helps us to further connect with it. “It's almost like a magnet,” she explains, “because when you can channel emotion into a piece of work, it draws in others and they get what you are going through. It brings us back to a feeling of not being alone.”

Some theorize that art brings on a visceral emotional response because mirror neurons are pinging around our brains; we reflexively reflect back whatever emotional landscape we’re subjected to. Though Kaimal describes mirror neurons as an overused concept, she says they work as a “primitive mechanism” that incite a reflexive, unconscious mirroring of behaviors.

“The purpose of our brain is to keep us alive from moment to moment. Mirror neurons evolved as a way to attune ourselves to our surroundings and each other from that evolutionary need to be really quickly responsive, which means that it's not connected to our sort of motor systems — it activates and fires almost instinctively,” she explains.

Using this theory, without being conscious of it, we sense the deepest of feelings in the music we listen to, the art we observe, the films we watch, and the writing we read and reflexively feel those feelings ourselves. And, in the end, that can be an incredibly healing experience. “What happens when we cry is we release endorphins along with our tears,” Kaimal says. “Endorphins are the body's natural painkiller, so crying actually reduces the feeling of pain. It's really important for us to allow ourselves these emotions. All emotions are transient anyway.”

Rax King’s ‘Tacky’ Is About Getting Real

King’s debut essay collection is a testament to how pop culture shapes how we see ourselves.

The cover of Rax King’s debut essay tome, Tacky: Love Letters to the Worst Culture We Have to Offer, foreshadows the vibe: Against a stark black backdrop, a shapely plastic brunette drink-marker doll wearing a wry smirk balances an olive on her high-kicking heel while basking inside an empty martini glass. Enter the confines of its pages, and you’ll find King deftly defending her “tacky” pop-culture predilections — which, rooted in her coming of age in the early 2000s, run the gamut from Creed to Cheesecake Factory — and the sexual milestones she ties to them with a wink and a clink.

In an early chapter, she writes: “Being tacky was the opposite of being right. To be proudly tacky, your aperture for all the too-much feelings — angst, desire, joy — must be all the way open.” Thus, this book is King’s opportunity to wrestle with the residual mess of “too-much” feelings. To dive deeper into all of it, we got on the horn with King to discuss the process of writing Tacky, her various inspirations, and how it feels to be judged for what you’re into.

VIVIAN MANNING-SCHAFFEL: Did you always want to be a writer? Were you “birthed” this way?

RAX KING: [Laughs] I definitely was birthed this way. I did always want to be a writer. During recess, I would go outside with my little notebooks and would write my little stories and poems. I hardly talked to anyone because I was antisocial. I’ve learned to talk to people and act like a human being, but I definitely still have that side of myself where, in any given situation, I’m thinking I just want to be at home writing.

VMS: As a writer, there’s always a part of yourself that lurks outside of your body as the observer.

RK: Yeah, exactly. I’m always thinking up my little quips about things that are actually happening. It’s kind of a bad habit, actually. I should try and be more present, but I don’t think I can at this point.

VMS: It’s a blessing and a curse — at least you’re monetizing it! So, who did you read who made you a writer?

RK: When I was in college, I discovered the essays of Lisa Carver and became obsessed. I think she really never got her due. She was one of those writers who in the late ’90s and early aughts was always poised to become a star, but circumstances always seemed to intervene. It’s really a shame. I’ve been saying her name in every interview because her work was really, really important and formative for me. Anybody who reads my book and enjoys it should absolutely read everything she’s ever written.

VMS: Early in writing the book, did you know that you were going to write about your nascent sexual awakening and how we judge one another through music, for example, or were you like, “I’m going to write about Creed and just see what comes out”?

RK: It was closer to the former. I pretty much never know where something is going when I sit down with it. As silly as it is, those nascent sexual feelings are really inseparable for me from the experience of falling in love with their music, and the two were so completely intertwined that I can’t think about the one without the other anymore. Of course, there’s a bunch of defensiveness built in because, as it turns out, the vast majority of people that I interact with think that Creed is terrible. So, I’m always beating back that instinct to agree. I just wanted to take away that option from myself and be like, okay, this was something that was really important to you, and you have to treat that with respect and care.

With my essays, there’s this sense that this is about Guy Fieri, but it’s also about my ex-husband, and the two subjects don’t really seem to have much in common with each other. I think the reason that so many of these essays are shaped that way is I would sit down thinking, “Okay, I’m going to write about such-and-such piece of pop culture important to me,” and in doing that I end up excavating all these memories I associate with them. That’s pretty much what all of these essays look like, an excavation of memory alongside some light pop-culture analysis.

VMS: In that first chapter, you ask why Lou Reed’s pain is more valid than [Creed lead singer] Scott Stapp’s pain, but that thought really underlines how subjective taste is.

RK: I came up with groups of friends for whom taste was very important. I kept finding myself at odds. I wanted to wear the things that weren’t the prescribed things. I wanted to listen to music that I had to hide, to an extent. So, I guess probably a lot of that old defensiveness does come out in these essays. But, yeah, I think the point is that taste is subjective, and this judgmental attitude about it is often really juvenile — posing as a matter of intellectual bona fides when really it’s just this desire to claim the things that one likes and say, “This is the right stuff, and the things you like are the wrong things, and in this way, I know more than you,” if that makes sense.

VMS: Who gets to decide, right? This has been happening forever. A predilection toward highbrow culture can trickle down to socioeconomics. I don’t know if it’s generational, but did you have shame thrown at you for digging what was considered lowbrow?

RK: Oh, yeah, completely. I grew up in D.C., which has a very staunch punk rock, DIY tradition and scene. I went to this private high school where I clearly had, by far, the least money of anyone that I was associated with. I was like their little scholarship kid. So, it did end up feeling like when I was trying to defend my taste. I was also trying to defend all this stuff staring into my background that I thought my friends must have been disapproving of if they also disapproved of my taste. I’m sure none of that disapproval was ever that consciously about class on their part.

VMS: It isn’t. That’s why it’s insidious.

RK: And that’s why it hurts so much. You can’t really say to somebody you feel you’re close friends with like, “Hey, by the way, the way that you talk to me is super fucked up” — that’s such a hard conversation to have as an insecure teenager. You end up just bottling stuff up and learning what sorts of things you’re supposed to like and the dances you’re supposed to do for people’s approval, and you do them. You learn to do them really well. Or you learn to do them ironically.

VMS: You’re pretending to be yourself when you’re actually being yourself.

RK: There were so many layers of, like, transference, discomfort, and shame. I am now 30 years old and don’t have the time or inclination to wear so many layers of performance. Every time I try and talk about something I like, you either like it, and you agree with me, or you don’t, and you don’t. Either way, it’s fine by me at this point.

VMS: You have a podcast called Low Culture Boil. Is it empowering to draw the line between high- and lowbrow for yourself?

RK: It feels really good, on my podcast, to take a step back. We’re always doing something similar to what I’m doing in my book, which is trying to make cases for things that we love, not because those things don’t have anything wrong with them, but because we just don’t think they’re responsible for the ills of our culture and s--t like that. So, yeah, I try to take the critical eye to the prescriptions that are made for us, culturally speaking, and to the ways that people use taste to designate who’s in the “in” group and who’s in the “out.” It’s TV, and it’s movies, and it’s not that deep.

VMS: What you like has nothing to do with how smart you are. I watched an interview with you in which you said that you made a name for yourself on Twitter. How does Twitter feed you as a writer, or do you feed it? How does it work for you?

RK: Poorly! I hate Twitter so goddamn much, and yet I can’t stay away. A big part of my relationship with Twitter right now is compulsory. From where most people sit, it’s not a big deal whether you’re on Twitter or not — if it makes you unhappy, just leave. It’s probably true I could leave Twitter right now and just try and make this new book work on its own, but that’s making things so much harder for my life and is so much more anxiety-inducing. The function of Twitter for me right now is a) promote my book — whether people are clicking my links and buying my book based on my constant promotion of it, I don’t know, but it feels like I’m doing something important for myself, and b) it makes me feel like I’m in control of my own career, and this way if my book doesn’t sell, then at least it’s my fault for not doing Twitter correctly. I feel that if right now I wasn’t on Twitter, I wouldn’t be able to say that — it would feel very much like someone else’s fault that my book wasn’t doing well. So, I feel like being on Twitter feels a lot like taking matters into my own hands, even though there’s really no way for me to do that. All of this stuff is outside of my control completely.

Every time I try and talk about something I like, you either like it, and you agree with me, or you don’t, and you don’t. Either way, it’s fine by me at this point.

VMS: That’s so high stakes! To me, Twitter can feel like pissing in the wind.

RK: You know how when you’re trying to quit drinking, people always say that it’s easier to just quit full stop than it is to try and drink a tiny bit once in a while and control it that way? I have this addictive relationship with Twitter. It’s like being in a casino without windows, and it’s just smoky and dark all the time.

VMS: You get that dopamine hit every time you get a couple in a row, and you win 10 bucks.

RK: Right! Then I feel good for nine seconds, and that’s nine seconds that I would have just felt normal. God! The cost-benefit analysis of Twitter use is so f--ked.

VMS: Your chapter about Sex and the City discusses how you discovered your natural power over men and then veers into your own sexual experiences. Did you intend to use Tacky as a way to write about them?

RK: I found myself thinking the way we talk about people who have a lot of sex — especially women who have a lot of sex — really closely mirrors the way that we talk about people, especially women, who we think have bad or gaudy taste. It’s this judgment that feels like it could be coming from a place of jealousy or from a place of pity. Either way, it’s a judgment that you, the object of the judgment, are offended by and annoyed by because it doesn’t really have much to do with the facts of your own life and the facts of your own taste, or sexuality. So, I kept finding myself returning to that when I was writing these essays that lean pretty heavily on sex, the idea that someone’s sex life can be offensive somehow — even when it doesn’t involve you. Either way, the answer to me is who cares? It’s not something that we should feel the need to opine about, and yet we often do. So much of the criticism industry isn’t even talking about work a lot of the time; it’s talking about the person way too often for my taste.

VMS: This becomes challenging when your work is about your experiences as a person because they’re inextricably linked, and it’s harder to pull the two apart. I’m curious to learn if writing about things that are so highly personal and giving them to the world was cathartic for you in any way.

RK: I finished the book just before Covid — there really wasn’t so much catharsis to be had because the events happened so long ago. That’s a big part of what allows me to speak about them with humor and self-deprecation. There’s an essay in there about an affair that I had with a married man — that happened more recently relative to when I was writing this book. It was the last essay I wrote. Any time a reviewer mentions that essay, I do cringe and get a little squirmy because those events are still pretty close. It’s a little harder to divorce the events as they appear in my book from criticism of the events as they happened in my life. That has been something to grapple with.

VMS: Bat Out of Hell was a great way to conclude because it’s such an unabashedly theatrical, who-gives-a-f--k album that went balls-to-the-wall. You use that opportunity to talk about the eventual intellectual distance we put between ourselves and taste. That said, isn’t Tacky an exploration of authenticity, which underlines the whole concept of taste and the life decisions that we make in relation to what influences us?

RK: I would like it to be. I think that it’s my own small contribution to a theory of authenticity. It’s very much a product of my own corner of the world and my own experience, as limited as it is. If it’s going to be any one thing, that’s what I want it to be.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

In Defense of a Low-Key NYE at Home

Why one writer chooses a quiet night in over a raucous night of parties.

I have no plans for New Year’s Eve this year, just like last year, when virtually none of us did. Some years ago, there was a five-year run when my husband and I would go see these friends of ours who threw the kind of bangin’ New Year’s Eve party you just had to dress up for, complete with punch, great food, and the warmth of true friendship. But life takes you through changes — those friends moved away, and so did we. In the present, Omicron has begun its spread, even among the vaxxed. Some nearby friends we’ve celebrated with in New Year’s past may not be up for it this year. A raucous end-of-year party, then, seems unlikely. But never say never: If I get a tempting (and safe-feeling) invite, we’ll see. But as of now, I’ve decided to embrace reinventing New Year’s Eve and make it about celebrating myself (and my family) instead — just like last year, when we were just grateful to be able to ring it in.

Years ago, if I didn’t have a New Year’s plan by now, I’d be deeply bummed. Having spent my 20s as a party girl in Boston and New York, a fabulous New Year’s Eve celebration was my finely honed ritual. I’d gather my chosen family, and we’d go to town in every possible way. Somehow, I’d developed an odd superstition: If I didn’t wear the right thing, in the right place, with the right vibe and the right people, it would mirror the vibe of the year I was about to bring in. So, a chill night at home meant being doomed to a year of boredom — a tedious, torturous 12-month sentence I just couldn’t bear.

Irrational, I know. Some of us cling to a ridiculous ritual or two simply because they make us feel better. But this concept loomed large in my subconscious. A mental-health expert, had I made time to see one back then, might’ve said I was spending so much time and money rushing around town in search of whimsy and entertainment to avoid facing how unhappy I was in my career. Instead of taking a step back to hear myself think and figure things out, I did my best to drown out this innermost truth with a vast array of raunchy guitars, shimmering synths, and pounding beats.

A chill night at home meant being doomed to a year of boredom — a tedious, torturous 12-month sentence I just couldn’t bear.

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That is, until New Year’s Eve 1998, when I was really sick with the flu. My FOMO finally flipped me off. A fever of 103° depleted me from any desire to put on festive clothing and spackle on makeup. Instead of bidding the year good riddance by bouncing from one party to the next with my people, my gray-faced, sweaty, sickly self could barely scrape up the verve to drag my body to the bathroom 10 feet away from my bed.

Canceling my plans consumed me with disappointment. It broke my heart to bail, but I could barely speak. There was just no way. All the air in my tires hissed out. So, I took to my bed, and something told me to lean into the restful ritual of it all — not that I had a choice. I think I watched Sex and the City, and eventually Dick Clark made 1998 a memory while I rang in 1999 with my mother on the landline and one of my best friends on my cell.

After sweating it out that night, I woke up feeling tons better. By the end of the day, I almost felt up to going outside. But instead of pushing myself, I took a shower, swapped sweats and sheets, ordered delivery, and got right back into bed. I realized I didn’t mind being alone with my cat and my remote. I also realized that the best way to celebrate anything was to make yourself happy. If that meant missing out on all the hot brunch gossip and the hair-of-the-dog cocktail hour that typically anchored my New Year’s Day, so be it.

The best way to celebrate anything is to make yourself happy.

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Looking back, there’s no doubt in my mind I got sick because I was burnt to a crisp. I was running on fumes. That year was a sh--ty one, complete with a sh--ty breakup and sh--ty professional roadblocks. I took the time I needed to properly get over the guy, but didn’t take the time I needed to get over myself. Though I’d slowed down a little after 30, I still worked hard and played a little harder than I really had the energy for. Had I not rallied so hard to go out and see people the night before that New Year’s Eve and the night before that (and maybe even the night before that) when my body sent signals of distress, I might’ve been able to head that flu off at the pass. But karma, or Mother Nature, or who/what have you, decided to bench me from the seemingly endless schedule of distractions I’d scheduled for myself.

It’s been decades since then. I’m older and wiser now. I’ve come to understand that, sometimes, you have to do the benching yourself. The reward? Now I know, definitively, that where I am is the place I’m meant to be.

So, if your plans fall through for whatever reason or you just aren’t feeling like jumping through your usual New Year’s Eve hoops this year, there’s nothing wrong with leaning into those feelings and claiming it as a self-care celebratory holiday. Whether that constitutes chugging wine out of a box while watching the ball drop in sweats, cooking up a couture meal of your choosing, sitting in your tub for a full hour or more, or indulging in every relaxation ritual you lament never having the time to do, a New Year’s Eve spent on your own terms is a prime moment to reconnect with yourself. Because, if the essence of my suspicion still holds true, you’ll be ringing in the new year with your best friend.

Stacy London’s Change of Life

London talks to Shondaland about how an existential crisis inspired her transition from style host to CEO, and how she plans on helping women move through their own changes.

Whether sharply and candidly examining the indignities of an outfit on TLC’s What Not to Wear or the indignities experienced by women in our culture, Stacy London always tells it like it really is. A warm and hilarious straight shooter, she’s unflinchingly honest about the winding road that was her post-What Not to Wear journey. A deft essayist, she’s written about how, in 2016, she found herself in financial hot water and coping with depression during a difficult recovery from spinal fusion surgery, what it was like to deal with the loss of her beloved dad in 2018, and, most recently, taking over as the CEO of a lifestyle brand called State Of — a company created to address the needs of women in menopause, which was born out of what she calls an “existential crisis.”

“No one was asking me to be on television anymore. I wasn’t the flavor of the month or a social-media influencer. I felt a loss of identity in terms of decreased earning potential,” London tells Shondaland. “I really felt like I didn’t know who I was anymore. I thought, I’m either going to lie down and not get up again, or I’m going to figure out another purpose for my life. This pivot was as much about my being engaged and having purpose as much as anything else. When I look back at my career, if I’m being really honest, I feel very lucky that a lot of things fell in my lap. That doesn’t mean I didn’t work hard. Those opportunities came very fast and furiously for me. Working with other women on What Not to Wear trained me to be empathetic and compassionate, and I knew I could put that empathy and compassion somewhere else. Walking a mile in someone else’s shoes really does make all the difference — even if they’re flats.”

It was London’s own experience with and the conversations she had around menopause that led her to discover State Of. “I don’t sugarcoat this like, ‘You got this! Go, girl!’ A lot of the issues in menopause are difficult,” she explains. “They affect you in terms of your capacity to work, in terms of your capacity to love and be loved. There’s a lot here at stake, but none of it is impossible. I still have hot flashes; I still have night sweats. My brain fog is worse than ever, and I’m 52. I stopped getting my period at 47. The issues last a lot longer than most people understand. It can take six months to 20 years, but there’s a light at the end of the tunnel. Like every transition we go through, change is scary, change is weird, but once you relax into it, you can see the opportunity that surrounds it.”

When the State Of opportunity knocked, London was stuck at home during Covid and had the space and time to listen. She noticed a gaping hole in the marketplace for products that help women cope with the long list of physical symptoms that come with menopause. So, London connected with State Of, began beta testing its products, and eventually took over the joint.

“The more I learned, I was like, wait, there’s not menopausal anything,” she says. “There are very few companies that are trying to address menopause that aren’t medical, that are over-the-counter, and are easily accessible in trying to address this. There’s nothing in the market that isn’t about vanity. What about function? What about all the things we can do to help mitigate some of the issues that you experience in menopause? I can’t stop them from happening to you, but I can certainly make a cooling spray that’s going to make your hot flash a lot easier.”

With State Of, London’s larger goal is to provide women with a contextual commerce platform that shifts the current narrative crammed down women’s throats since, well, forever. “Part of the reason I feel so strongly about the information and education part of this is I’m not just building a company for us; I’m building a company for Gen Z,” she says. “When they get here, they’ll have plenty of options and will know exactly what to do. We are a baby company, yet I have a big bullhorn, and I want to use it as much as I can, not just for the sake of the company but for the sake of the issues that surround [menopause]: sexism, racism, ableism, socioeconomic disparity.”

“Everyone keeps talking about ‘middle age’ — it’s not the Middle Ages! It’s not a dark time. Middle age is just the middle of the book — it’s the best part of the plot.”

“I want to turn my crisis into a renaissance. I want to be a curator for menopause,” London says. Everyone keeps talking about ‘middle age’ — it’s not the Middle Ages! It’s not a dark time. Middle age is just the middle of the book — it’s the best part of the plot. Why aren’t we behaving that way? It’s all through this bulls--t patriarchal lens. You are culturally taught that you are no longer relevant, and while you’re having this external invalidation, your body starts to wreak havoc in a way that makes you believe that invalidation is valid. It’s a double whammy.”

London continues, “All these women who are like, ‘Bulls--t! I’m a baller!’ Yes, we’re healthier and wealthier now at 50 than we were in the ’80s. The Rue McClanahan/J.Lo meme, I get. The fact is, any woman who says they haven’t had to reckon with the aging process is lying. Whether you’ve done it and succeeded and feel better or it’s something you’re still reckoning with, that reckoning comes whether you want it or not. That isn’t just menopause. It’s everything about the way we look at age in our society.”

I ask London what scared her most about helming a company. “Everything!” she replies. “I’m not a traditional CEO, I didn’t go to business school, I don’t know that much about e-commerce. I do know something about B2C [business to consumer]; I’ve done a lot of creative brand direction. But I would say everything about this terrified me, and it was part of the reason to do it. It’s been a long time since I’ve been terrified and had to do anything challenging.”

Now immersed in the world of women’s health, London is understandably frustrated at the paltry research and funding devoted to menopause. “The FDA categorizes menopause as a disease, yet there’s literally no medical support system for it. Look at erectile dysfunction and hair loss. When you think about the medical equivalents available to women, they’re hardly used. Women don’t ask for them, doctors don’t prescribe them — it’s insane, the lack of funding. The FDA approved Viagra within 6 months, while it’s taken years to get approval for any kind of menopausal drug. If you’re going to talk about limp dicks, I’m going to talk about dry vaginas. This, to me, is the bigger fight. There’s something about the social and gendered inequity of this that is not just about getting the care that we need — it’s that the dollars aren’t being put behind us. Our health-care system for women is broken, and it’s worse for women of color and women below the poverty line. It’s astounding to me that we don’t get the care we need at all, and that has to change.”

So, what advice would she offer women in the midst of their own existential crisis? “A midlife pivot does not have to be an abandonment of everything you know or have done thus far in your life. It can be small, incremental changes that take you from where you were to where you want to go,” she says. “Even if you have involuntarily been taken out of a position, take your time to notice. Notice the things you love to do. Notice the things you’re good at. Sometimes they are the same thing; sometimes not. The point is, at this stage of your life, you have more agency and know yourself well enough to draw outside the lines. Our lives are no longer linear. The one thing that it took me a while to get over was I had an incredible amount of success in my 30s and 40s, and I thought once you make it there, you just get to stay there. It never occurred to me that I would somehow not be in the same position, not have the same amount of choices, and not make the same amount of money. The path you take does not have to be permanent, nor does it have to be singular. A midlife pivot should feel like an adventure and a challenge. I truly believe that’s what purpose is about and what we seek to create in new ways at this stage of life,” she says. “I know that the only way to do this company, the only message worth imparting, is you do have to let go of who you were to become who you are. Not just become who you are — be who you are. That’s why I took on menopause. It’s a stigmatized, icky, ugly subject that nobody, certainly with my background or platform, is going to take up. Which is all the more reason to do it.”

How to Deal With the Chronic Bailer in Your Life

Coping with the other kind of “cancel” culture.

Bailing on plans with friends once in a while is unavoidable and perfectly understandable. We’ve all had good reasons to bail on occasion — we might feel sick (emotionally or physically), a kid or partner might need us, we might be really run-down or overscheduled, or we might be dealing with a legit emergency. Then again, we’ve all got that chronic “bailer” in our lives who takes the bailing a little too far: You make plans with mutual enthusiasm, you arrange your schedule accordingly, you look forward to said plans, then the bailer cancels, predictably, with an unceremonious text. For every time you actually manage to see each other, there are three rescheduled attempts to see each other.

It’s almost at the point where most plans with friends have an implied bailing caveat. Though bailing has been normalized and even celebrated on social media and in a vast assortment of memes, to leave the same friend hanging more than a couple of times in a row without adequate lead time, an expression of regret, or an offer of an alternate date and time that might work is still disrespectful of the friendship and the friend’s time.

“Most of us realize that life happens and that people need to cancel on occasion, but when one friend does it habitually, it’s a problem,” says Sanam Hafeez, a neuropsychologist based in New York City who teaches at Columbia University. “Texting has made canceling less of a personal dilemma for those who don’t value the time or feelings of others.” She says those who chronically bail for a better offer are “flaky” and “self-centered.” Whatever the reason, chronic canceling isn’t a good look.

It wasn’t always easy — or acceptable — to bail at the last minute. Once upon a time in the days of yore before cell phones, you absolutely had to show up if you made plans, or call to cancel or reschedule with enough notice so the bailee wouldn’t be left standing on a street corner or in a restaurant somewhere. Today, the option to bail has become a socially acceptable, built-in, de facto escape hatch from commitment. “When you don’t see people face-to-face, there’s more of a psychological distance, and it’s easier to do something that could potentially hurt someone’s feelings,” says Mahzad Hojjat, PhD, a professor of social psychology and the director of the master’s program in research psychology in the department of psychology at the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth. “Now you just send a text, and it’s much easier to do it because you don’t have to face the person. But it really doesn’t help your friendship.”

But what do you do if you’ve found yourself with a friend who is constantly canceling plans? If you’re fed up with the flakiness, here are some steps to try to rectify noncommittal behavior.

Consider your relationship

When you’ve been bailed on by the same person a couple of times, you can’t help but wonder if there’s something more going on. “The first question to ask yourself is how much does this person mean to me in my life? Is this chronic bailing the person’s only flaw, and are they otherwise a good friend?” says Hafeez. Though it can feel awkward to hold a close friend accountable for a behavior that’s become kind of socially acceptable, if their chronic bailing puts you out, a close friend deserves to know.

Whatever you do, don’t call a constant bailer out over text. “It is so easy for emotions or words to be misconstrued via text.”

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Have a talk

“Instead of accusing them, see if their behavior is something they’re cognizant of. Say something like, ‘Do you realize that whenever we have plans, you almost always end up canceling on me?’” recommends Hafeez. “Stress how much you value your friendship and that when they perpetually cancel on you, it hurts your feelings and poses an inconvenience.” But whatever you do, don’t start this conversation over text. “It is so easy for emotions or words to be misconstrued via text,” she says. Then, both Hojjat and Hafeez recommend asking your close friend if there’s something else going on that’s causing them to withdraw socially. “Maybe they’re going through a hard time, and they may not want to discuss it unless you ask,” says Hojjat.

Wait and see

Ultimately, it’s not worth sweating a chronic bailer if they’re a casual friend — after two strikes, it’s time to lay back and let the bailer come to you, says Hojjat. “After that, honestly, they’re probably not interested in hanging out with you or don’t care so much about the relationship. I probably wouldn’t say anything or pursue it. I may not want to make plans with them, because instead of building a friendship, they’re not committing,” she says. If the bailer apologizes but doesn’t give a reason for the bailing, Hafeez recommends accepting the apology and adopting a wait-and-see approach. “You need to reevaluate if you want that friend in your life. Friends need to be dependable,” she says.

If you’re guilty of chronic bailing, Hojjat says the best approach is to apologize, offer to make up for it — and make a point of keeping your word. “Friendship is kind of like a garden,” says Hojjat. “If you want to maintain your garden, you need to regularly water your plants and remove the dead leaves. If you leave it unattended, it’s going to get out of hand. You can’t neglect your friends. People are very busy, but you can’t make promises and break them continuously — it’s better not to make them and just explain that it’s a hard time, but show you still care in other ways.”

The Emotional Security Blanket Afforded by Holiday Movies

There’s a reason some people watch them throughout the year.

My mom is obsessed with Hallmark Christmas movie marathons — she even watches them in July! They play on loop whenever she’s bored or can’t sleep and swears it helps. And this obsession is more popular than one might think. Though these festive flicks are generally predictable and formulaic, with the past couple of years we’ve had, who could blame her for leaning into the cozy comfort and simple pleasure afforded by a seemingly endless loop of holiday cheer?

She’s hardly the first person I know to watch a holiday movie in July — holiday movies are, indeed, a vibe. Regardless of what you celebrate religiously, the predictable plots involving unexpected romances, family reconciliations, or friendships lost and found, all with snowy backdrops and lots of green and red, represent various forms of redemption, and bearing witness to redemption can be comforting.

“Although holiday movies are notorious for their over-the-top acting, cheesy tropes, and predictable story arcs, there’s a certain comfort in knowing that the ending will always be happy,” says Sanam Hafeez, a neuropsychologist based in New York City who teaches at Columbia University. “At any point throughout the year when things may feel overwhelming or chaotic, you can always count on a Hallmark movie to end not only in happily ever after but bring hope for what’s to come. The guaranteed happily ever after can offer a break from chaotic realities.”

Holiday movies also provide viewers with the opportunity to ease into a warm bath of personal nostalgia. “I think people experience feelings of positive emotions connected with celebrating holidays,” says Mahzad Hojjat, PhD, a professor of social psychology and the director of the master’s program in research psychology at the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth. “Holidays can put people into a good mood. They might bring you back to a time when things were simpler. You just want to go somewhere else, think about something else, and be completely absorbed into this movie and give your mind a rest from stress.”

And all that predictability? While it might deter some people from watching these films regularly or even during the festive season, believe it or not, holiday movies actually work on our brains in the same way as antidepressants. “Holiday movies can release something referred to as the ‘feel-good’ hormone or dopamine,” Hafeez explains. “There’s a neurological shift that occurs in our minds during these films that can actually produce happiness.”

This is all to say that, as corny as you might think these movies are (and, indeed, sometimes that’s the point), romantic epiphanies under the mistletoe, holiday miracles involving Santa and his reindeer, and a small town coming together to save the local candy-cane shop can cheer you up while soothing you into a half-lidded puddle beneath an emotional weighted blanket. And doesn’t that sound kind of nice right now?

Because, let’s face it, sometimes we just need an escape hatch from reality, and because holiday movies aren’t nearly as messy as real life, we can count on the Hallmark Channel, Lifetime, Netflix, and countless other networks and streaming services to provide that for us. For a few hours, we get to suspend disbelief and bear witness to simplistic solutions to problems we may be facing ourselves: the unrequited crush finally returning affection; some form of a grinch having a magical change of heart in a single moment; the parent and child in a long-estranged standoff somehow becoming so bewitched by the holiday spirit, they at last manage to finagle a moving reconciliation. It all ties up trauma neatly with a big red bow. Is that how it normally goes in life? No, probably not. But all the better, then, to disappear into the hope and happiness these movies provide for an hour and a half, maybe right when we need it most. “These movies can also reduce stress and anxiety by making us feel more optimistic, especially when depression rates are at their highest,” Hafeez explains.

So, if you can’t get enough of The Preacher’s Wife or Love, Actually or are psyched to hunker down with the Hallmark Channel, know that you’re doing your part to perpetuate a ritual of serious self-care. After all, it’s the biggest gift we can give ourselves.

How to Psych Yourself Up to Get Back Out There

Ready to reenter the dating pool but not sure how? Online dating specialist Alyssa Dineen shares tips in her new book, “The Art of Online Dating.”

Dating is hard enough these days. The swiping, the matching, the messaging — it’s a slog. But coming out of a long-term relationship and sticking a proverbial toe back into the dating pool? Now that’s daunting.

Luckily, Alyssa Dineen, a dating coach and the founder of Style My Profile, is here to help, thanks to her new book that covers every stage of the process, The Art of Online Dating: Style Your Most Authentic Self and Cultivate a Mindful Dating Life. As Dineen — who, after 18 years in a relationship, 11 of those married, found herself divorced, single, and the mother of two — notes in the forward, the goal of her book is to provide “a practical guide to the world of online dating, pep talks to keep you going, and the knowledge that you aren’t alone.” Because as scary as it can seem, there are plenty of people out there who are looking for exactly what you want in a new relationship. So, if you’re ready, we asked Dineen for tips on how to psych yourself up to get out there again.

List the qualities you’d like in a partner

Writing down the qualities of the kind of person you’d like to date can help you get clear on what it is you’re looking for in a person and in a relationship. “A lot of us have an idea of the type of person we want to be with, but really what it comes down to is how you feel around them and how they treat you,” Dineen says. “A mindful approach to this list can help you decide what is negotiable or not negotiable.” What’s more, this exercise is also a great profile-writing prep.

Manage your expectations

After her divorce, Dineen had to figure out how to cultivate a healthy dating mindset and found it best to take things moment by moment. “I didn’t go into dating thinking, I’m going to get back out there and meet the one. I thought, I’m going to just have a good time, experience a new restaurant, and discover new parts of the city. If you can put yourself in that place, dating is so much more enjoyable. If you’re going into every date thinking, ugh, it’s probably not going to work out, you’re not going to have a good experience, and you won’t give people more of a chance than just the first date.”

It’s important to list what's essential to you in a partner as you dive into dating.

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Keep it light

Before dating again, Dineen says it’s easy for other people’s horror stories to ring in your ears. When this happens, push through the noise and stay positive. “Go into every date thinking, I’m meeting a new person. I’m going to have a fun night. I’m going to learn something new, as if it’s a social event rather than this weighted, heavy thing. It’s really important to just try to keep a positive attitude — I think people pick up on that,” she says.

Tweak your profile

If you haven’t been out there in a while, it can be difficult to wrap your mind around how to create an online dating profile. After coming up with your list of negotiables and non-negotiables, the best thing to do is just bite the bullet and get a profile made. Nothing is written in stone, and these profiles can be adjusted as you go along as you learn not only what works for your own profile, but what you respond to in others. Dineen recommends leaning on trusted friends to take your profile pic and provide feedback. Remember — it can always be tweaked, and you don’t have to go on every date. Dineen says it can take a lot of interaction before finding someone you might actually want to meet up with in real life, so be patient and understand it’s a process.

Consider tweaking your profile.

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Put together a “first date uniform”

Deciding what to wear on a first date can be stressful. Assembling a look in advance really helps because a) you’ll feel confident, and b) it’s one less thing to think about, says Dineen. “It doesn’t matter if you wear that same thing for every first date! I had these jeans I felt so great in, a really simple black button-down, and black boots. It’s so much better than having a pile of clothes on your floor, still not knowing what to wear, and running late,” says Dineen.

The most important nugget of advice Dineen has for getting back out there is “putting one foot in front of the other. Just getting that first date out of the way is huge,” she says. “Remember, everybody’s super-nervous. It helps to be honest. I remember telling the person that I was meeting it was my first date in 20 years. Just be real and authentic. Most people, like my date, will be understanding.”

7 Artists You Should Know Now

From photographers to painters to multimedia creators, these artists are ready to make their indelible impressions on the art world.

From paintings and photographs to film and fashion, art is a fully sensory form of storytelling — and the best of it doesn’t just make us feel something; it says something. Like anything that’s been around for millennia, art continually changes, grows, and takes on new shapes and forms. In this series, Shondaland steps into today’s world of art and gets a taste for the trends, themes, and people who are making contemporary art what it is — now and for centuries to come.

Visual art serves as a portal into an artist’s mind, a gateway to their belief systems about the subjects that transfix them. To pluck a narrative from the veritable merry-go-round of impressions that exist only in their minds, then to gather the necessary materials required to bring those impressions to life, is a miraculous feat of brain-eye and hand-eye coordination. Thus, the visual art world is a conceptual wonder-ground of ideologies and executions — when we gaze at an artist’s work, we gaze into their intentions.

Fortunately, the digital marketplace has exposed art tastemakers and curators to more unexpected and diverse artists than in decades past, and those artists are seizing the opportunity to forge a path to notability more rapidly than ever before. We wanted to make you aware of seven visual artists who intend to make an indelible impression on the art world — and have already made great strides.

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Diana Markosian, Photographer, Videographer

From Diana Markosian’s "Quince" series.

Diana Markosian

Markosian’s photography and videography is deeply personal even when it isn’t autobiographical. Her evocative, cinematic approach captures the essence of her subjects so intimately, we can practically hear their innermost thoughts. Born in Moscow, Markosian has traveled to the ends of the Earth to tell stories of faith, displacement, estrangement, illness — stories that otherwise wouldn’t have been told, including her very own. A Cuban girl’s quinceañera after surviving a brain tumor; a gathering of villagers in Bosnia and Herzegovina for a glimpse of the Virgin Mary. These subjects are treated as intimately as photographs capturing a visit with the Armenian father Markosian hadn’t seen in 20 years, or Santa Barbara, a film about her own mother’s story of survival in leaving Russia for the United States with her and her brother in tow. Like many artists, Markosian also works commercially, with her photographs having been featured in The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, and Vogue. She’s also published two photography books, won numerous illustrious photography awards, and has shown her work in such spaces as the International Center of Photography in New York, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and Les Rencontres d’Arles, an annual French photography festival.

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Tawny Chatmon, Photo-Based Multimedia Artist

Joy, 2020, 24k gold leaf and acrylic paint on archival pigment print, 30" x 20″

Tawny Chatmon

Tokyo-born, Maryland-based Chatmon’s stunning portraiture combines photography, digital collage, illustration, semiprecious stones, and paint while also employing 24-karat gold-leaf accents that nod toward Byzantine religious paintings and art nouveau master Gustav Klimt. A self-taught commercial photographer, Chatmon captured her father’s battle with cancer until the end of his life, which inspired her to use her camera to create art in lieu of commerce. Today, Chatmon’s portraits are holy, regal presentations of Black women and children (many works feature her three children, relatives, or models she knows well), reverently framed in golden antique frames she either collects from estate sales, galleries, auctions, and private sellers or purpose-built contemporary baroque frames custom created for each piece. Chatmon tells Shondaland that she would love those who see her work to walk away with feelings of “grace, beauty, pride, and love.” She continues, “I want my work to be viewed as a celebration of who we are. I want the viewer to be deeply touched by the work and to look further than the beauty and more into the meaningful intentions and messages embedded in each piece. I think that art in all forms has a way of penetrating our hearts and minds, and that is what I hope my work does for anyone who experiences it.”

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Umar Rashid (Frohawk Two Feathers), Multimedia Artist

Sombre Vengeance. An equestrian death dance born out of desperation and lack of functioning diplomacy. The end result of not really trying but it’s difficult to look away; acrylic and spray paint on canvas; 6’ X 6’; 2018

Umar Rashid

Born in Chicago and based in Los Angeles, Rashid (also known as Frohawk Two Feathers) is a multifaceted storyteller who captions his works — comprised of illustration, painting, and sculpture — to construct alternative historical narratives of the Frenglish (a portmanteau of France and England) Empire (1648-1880). Spotlighting marginalized people and women of history within reimagined colonial scenes, Rashid uses his own take on Egyptian hieroglyphs, tea-stained Spanish colonial manuscripts, and Persian miniature painting to mark the timing of his works. His goal is to “give a face to the marginalized people of history because history is not the binary that people think it is. It’s very nuanced,” Rashid tells Shondaland. “All the stuff that we think that we know is not really true. Basically, I just remade history in a place where minorities, people of color, and women are seen. I’m not trying to change history — all the horrible stuff is still in there, like slavery, violence against women — all these things are still inherent in my narrative. It’s just different. There are some joys and some victories, and not from people with powdered wigs and pink skin.” With upcoming shows at Half Gallery in New York and Blum & Poe gallery in Los Angeles, Rashid hopes his work inspires people to reconsider historical narratives. “I just want to be more honest with people, and I want people to be more honest with themselves,” he says. “Ultimately, what I hope they take from this is that the world is always going, and it only ends once. You can always change the narrative — you don’t have to control the narrative to change it, but everybody has that power, and nobody can take that power away from you.”

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Jen Stark, Designer, Sculptural and Digital Artist

Drip Cascade, 2021

Jen Stark

Florida-born and Los Angeles-based, Stark uses optical illusions inspired by mathematical pattern systems and fractals to immerse viewers in her own brand of organic psychedelia. She plays with shapes mimicking molecular structures, using bold, vivid patterns of primary colors and black and white that morph and meld into shapes that hypnotize you while challenging your perceptions of movement, dimension, and space via sculpture, sculptural installations, installations, and NFTs. Recently on view at the William Vale Hotel in Brooklyn, New York, Stark’s creation Cascade is a 6,000-square-foot interactive and immersive installation exhibit that’s the ultimate Instagram capture. What’s more, three Cascade moving digital images have been auctioned off as NFTs at quite a decent price point. Stark’s hypnotic vision has extended to pens, phone cases, T-shirts, holographs, wine labels, murals — any surface you can imagine. Along with the William Vale, you can find her work in the collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the West Collection, the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, the Museum of Art Fort Lauderdale, and MOCA Miami, among others.

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Michaela Yearwood-Dan, Painter, Multimedia Artist, Ceramist

The only way is up; 2021; Marianne Boesky Gallery

Michaela Yearwood-Dan

This painter and collage artist’s large, lush, lyrical works of fertile, disjointed botanicals and landscapes utilize layers of paint, ink, and embroidery to express her frustrations about marginalization. Based in London and inspired by Western, Japanese, and Chinese historical painting, Yearwood-Dan creates messages that are delivered through the lens of modern-day impressionism of sorts. Her vibrant scenery is seemingly captured in movement with a blend of deliberate, delicate strokes and expressive lines, augmented by embroidered observations about racial or gendered notions of collective identity and history that lend context to the romantic tumult. “My hope is that people engage with the understanding that Black women are nuanced, and that’s also reflected in the work they make and wide variety of subject matters and aesthetics they explore,” Yearwood-Dan tells Shondaland. “I want the viewer to really just look and spend time with the work, finding snippets of text and allowing those and the colorful motifs to mean something personal to them. I want them to trust what they feel when they look at the work and, of course, honor my intentions but also sit with how introspective it makes them feel.” A graduate of the University of Brighton, Yearwood-Dan did a Harper’s Bazaar UK cover using Margaret Atwood’s poetry in a collaboration with the writer last year, and has shown at galleries including London’s Tiwani Contemporary and, most recently, at Marianne Boesky in New York.

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Clare Celeste, Installation Artist, Illustrator, Environmentalist

Biodiversity, an immersive installation by Clare Celeste

Patricia Schichl

Celeste’s immersive work reflects her commitment to raising awareness about our many looming environmental crises through honoring nature and history. Each installation is something of a biosphere — immense, delicate, and intricate inter-weavings of collaged flora and fauna comprised of hundreds, maybe thousands, of hand-cut vintage naturalist illustrations from the 1900s. The result is a safe, beautiful world in which Mother Nature is revered, not punished. It’s Berlin-based Celeste’s form of environmental activism, her way of preserving life as we know it before it goes extinct. “I use pre-industrial illustrations to both inspire viewers with the beauty of the natural world as it was before the extinction crisis and also to highlight how very threatened our biodiversity is,” Celeste says. “Many species are extinct or going extinct in my artworks. Additionally, I also want to remind people that we are all interconnected with biodiversity and that we are part of these ecosystems — we are nature, not separate from it — and our survival and futures are intertwined.” Her whimsical work has been featured in O, the Oprah Magazine and The Guardian, licensed by Crate & Barrel, and can be seen on wine bottles and in storefronts.

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Jean Smith, Painter

Clockwise from top left: No Hat #1076 (11 x 14” acrylic on canvas panel) 2021; Bathing Cap #16 (11 x 14” acrylic on canvas panel) 2021; No Hat #1175 (11 x 14” acrylic on canvas panel) 2021; No Hat #1161 (11 x 14” acrylic on canvas panel) 2021

Jean Smith

Smith is a self-made artist in every sense of the phrase. Her evolution as a painter is as much of a disruptive and feminist DIY tale as the establishment of her former punk band, Mecca Normal. Every day, she produces a haunting, hundred-dollar 11-inch by 14-inch acrylic-on-canvas board headshot of a woman exclusively available to Facebook bidders — all they have to do is post “Mine!” or “Me!” for a shot at one, and she handpicks the lucky recipient. These paintings sell within five minutes of her posts, with sometimes hundreds of bidders chomping at the bit. Profits from groupings of larger portraits and the occasional poetic, moody, blurry landscape go to her soon-to-be-established Free Artists Residency for Progressive Social Change, a place where artists can stay for free as long as they intend to “change the world.” Smith tells Shondaland she started painting self-portraits at 13 — both of her parents were professional painters — but in art school painting was regarded as a bit “passé.” “I got sidetracked, started a DIY feminist punk band, and developed an attitude that my paintings weren’t for other people to see, let alone buy,” she explains. During an arduous part-time retail stint in 2015, she got the idea to do what she’s now doing, and, in a profile of the artist in The New York Times, she’s aptly described as “subverting art-world economics, $100 at a time.” In her own words, Smith says, “I have no interest in painting likenesses of specific people, or in documenting smiling faces attempting to be attractive. I paint more complicated expressions and emotions. The faces are the subject, but there’s a lot going on with composition, technique, and color.” Though she’s thrilled for the media coverage, Smith was most excited when a former museum director from the Smithsonian and Guggenheim praised her technique. Never underestimate the power of a punk pedigree.

How and Why a Change of Scenery Can Shift Your Outlook

The science behind mixing up your physical locations.

During a phase of my life when I felt as if I were stuck on a hamster wheel (we all had one last year!), a friend of mine mentioned an old Hebrew adage that translates to “Change your place, change your luck.” It basically means shifting your actual physical location can help shift your qi — your energy — or your state of mind, if you will.

I couldn’t deny that travel always infused me with enthusiasm and a new and improved outlook — not just because I had a break from my daily responsibilities, though I don’t deny the obvious psychological benefits that also come with that. I started to notice how even incremental shifts in routine, like working in a coffee shop for part of the day instead of at home, or walking home from errands a different way, could have a positive effect on my perspective.

As it turns out, a recent study co-led by Catherine Hartley, an assistant professor in New York University’s department of psychology, and Aaron Heller, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Miami, found daily variability in physical location to be associated with increased positive affect (kind of where attitude meets mood) in humans. Basically, for most people, the more variety of experiences in your daily routine, the happier you are.

How your brain processes “novelty”

How did it work? Hartley told Shondaland that she and Heller had a large number of people in New York City and Miami install an app on their mobile phones and tracked them on their daily activities to measure the daily variability in their locations, or their “roaming entropy.” The more they moved around town, the higher their “roaming entropy.” The participants also had to rate how happy they were. On days when individuals had more variability in their daily movement patterns (according to their own histories), they reported being happier. The researchers also looked at how often the participants visited new locations within four to five months and found more-novel locations were associated with a higher degree of positive affect, or feeling happier.

“In some ways, it’s consistent with what we know about what novelty does to the brain,” says Hartley. “There are regions of the brain, the hippocampus in particular, that are extremely sensitive to environmental novelty. This region of the brain has projections to the ventral striatum, another region of the brain involved in reward processing. It’s thought that this circuitry enables novel things to be experienced as rewarding. It may be that I walk a new route through my neighborhood, and the new things I see there make me happier. But it could also be that I wake up in a good mood, and that drives me to go explore more and walk a novel route around my neighborhood. It could be that happiness drives exploration, or novelty drives our positive affect — our data suggests it’s a little bit of both,” Hartley says.

When she said this, I felt so seen.

On days when individuals had more variability in their daily movement patterns (according to their own histories), they reported being happier.

Tim Robberts//Getty Images

Change “wakes up” your brain

Amy Johnson, a psychologist and the author of the upcoming book Just a Thought, suggests that the idea of switching things up in your daily routine can “wake up” the brain. “Suddenly, our brain has to work a bit more to take in the new sights and sounds of our new environment, to scan for potential threats, and to make sense of, and tell a story about, what’s going on,” she explains. “When you change things up, your brain is forced to be a little more open, receptive, and outside of the box to some degree. This can absolutely affect our mood and our outlook. You’re thinking thoughts you didn’t think yesterday. This is why something as simple as working from a new room in your home can feel like it brings on a burst of creativity, or walking outside during a heated argument can feel like it clears your mind and brings new perspective,” she explains.

Even small novel experiences can give you a boost

I asked Hartley if incremental changes of scenery (working at a coffee shop) could have as much of an impact on your outlook as larger changes (visiting another country). “It didn’t matter how far you traveled,” she said, referring to her study. “What did matter was that you were visiting new places, so it suggests that walking a different route to the subway on your commute, that taking a walk around your neighborhood and not going the same path that you might [take] on a Saturday afternoon, that introducing some degree of novelty into your daily routine should be capable of producing these kinds of boosts in positive emotion. The question of whether this extends to other kinds of novelty — eating new foods, reading a new book, learning about some new topic — there’s no reason to believe that those forms of novelty shouldn’t produce the same effect.”

Forcing a little change of scenery can help us feel invigorated and more creative, as it forces our brain to process new surroundings and think in new ways.

Novelty isn’t for everyone

I ask Johnson if the reverse holds true — if getting into ruts, or visiting the same places, or doing the same kinds of things every single day (hello, pandemic!), could bum us out or dull our senses after a while.

“It could,” she says. “But I also want to say that it doesn’t necessarily, and it doesn’t for everyone. Our brain is an incredibly efficient machine. In order to be as efficient as possible, it habituates most of what it does, and it loves to go back to the same familiar, safe, efficient thoughts and ideas it recognizes from the day before. When we feel like we’re on autopilot, this is what’s happening. Our brain is staying in its comfort zone. Nudging it out of its comfort zone is scary for the brain but can be really great for the human’s creativity, perspective, and mood. If you find yourself feeling uninspired, bored, or fantasizing about getting out, try it! At the very least, forcing a little change of scenery can help us feel invigorated and more creative, as it forces our brain to process new surroundings and think in new ways.” She also mentioned that she sometimes tries to work in a coffee shop when she feels her brain waves stagnating.

Hartley also mentioned a smaller subset of people for whom this type of variability had the opposite effect — it made them less happy. She plans on looking into whether this discomfort with the unknown might be related to our overall emotional health in some way.

So, if you’re feeling like you’re figuratively asleep at the wheel, be it at your desk or in some aspect of your life, do what you can to change things up — whether it’s something you wear, some place you go, or something you eat. See how you feel, and let us know. You might just get a boost of well-being and a flash of inspiration you didn’t know you needed.

Swimming Gives Me the Weightlessness I Crave

One writer on the healing power of water.

Though I’m a fire sign — an Aries — I have what’s known in astrology as a water-dominant chart, which in celestial speak means I have more prominent planets and placements in water signs than in any other element. To me, this designation makes perfect sense because a) I can be empathic and sensitive, and b) I’ve always felt happiest near and when immersed in water, as if I’m finally in my natural habitat.

I consider the pruned fingers that come with being waterlogged a personal win. Nothing parallels the euphoria I feel when immersed in a body of water. Once it hits 77 degrees, every weekend without fail I plan how, where, and when I can pull off a swim. Otherwise, I feel like a fish flopping on pavement, gasping for breath.

To me, swimming isn’t just about splashing around after being hot and sweaty, though that is a total blast for most people. It’s more about the sudden ease I feel that pulling my limbs through water gives me — and ease of movement is a high I chase with determination every single chance I get.

I once tried to describe how much joy swimming gave me to a friend. “You get to be weightless,” she said. “With all of the responsibilities that weigh you down as a mother, a writer, a partner, and a human being in this crazy world, swimming is a chance for you to feel weightless — even if just for a few moments or hours.”

"Still, I’m grateful for everything I can do, so I stay focused on those things and count my metaphorical blessings."

Matt Henry Gunther//Getty Images

She was absolutely right about the emotional weightlessness I so desperately needed. But I wasn’t only addicted to swimming because I was chasing the metaphorical feeling of weightlessness it gave me. While floating, I feel free, not only from the myriad responsibilities that come with a couple of dependents, a business, and a partner, but free from the burden of pain.

My (usually) invisible disability is caused by something called degenerative disc disease (DDD), which basically means the gel in the discs of my spine are drying out as my spine becomes arthritic and atrophies, as it can with old age. Generally, DDD really isn’t a big deal unless your discs start popping out of place, sometimes hitting or squashing the nerve roots that run along your spine. Possibly aggravated by a shift in the shape of my cervical spine from a car accident in my early 20s, the degenerative process began early for me, in my late 30s. No one really tells you why DDD can get out of control for some people, but there’s no question you feel it when it does.

While floating, I feel free, not only from the myriad responsibilities that come with a couple of dependents, a business, and a partner, but free from the burden of pain.

Unfortunately, my first severely slipped disc happened during a quick grocery run just two weeks after the birth of my second kid, rendering me unable to walk home and in relentless, excruciating, brain-searing, beg-for-mercy pain. I couldn’t use my right leg. The only solution was surgery. I was instructed not to lift anything over five pounds, so we had to hire a helper we couldn’t afford to lift our premature newborn out of her crib and hand her to me to nurse.

Just a couple of years later, I wouldn’t be able to pick her up again. I would go on to have three more spinal surgeries in the span of 10 years, including a cervical fusion, which means I have titanium screws holding my neck upright and my bones off my spinal cord, sparing me from quadriplegia. An innovation called disc replacement has gained prominence since my surgeries, providing patients with more mobility and a faster recovery, but each surgery took about three months to bounce back from, and even longer pain-wise.

Fortunately, some forms of mild nerve damage can heal over time (a long, long time), and I’m so much better now. Luckily, there’s a lot I can do physically, but there are also many things that are too risky for me to ever attempt again. Jumping out of a plane and riding roller-coasters are out. Attempting the black diamond as a novice skier may not be the best idea. Deadlifting is off my agenda. I can’t even carry a heavy suitcase or heavy bags of groceries. Though these types of activities don’t exactly top my bucket list to begin with, knowing I can never do them again feels restrictive. Still, I’m grateful for everything I can do, so I stay focused on those things and count my metaphorical blessings.

"With all of the responsibilities that weigh you down as a mother, a writer, a partner, and a human being in this crazy world, swimming is a chance for you to feel weightless."

Peter Cade//Getty Images

By all expert accounts, swimming is one of the safest and best forms of exercise to build strength and increase mobility for someone like me. The thing I love most about swimming is that it’s something I can work on improving. In the pool, I’m just as capable as everyone else. I can swim just as fast and tread just as long without being in pain, which I feel after just about any other intense physical activity. Swimming also works out the kinks in my back while building back muscle, so I stand a little taller and walk the Earth in less pain while the effects of a good swim last.

The fusion surgery happened unexpectedly, forcing us to reschedule a long-awaited trip to New Orleans during spring break. It seemed like every single one of my friends and neighbors was scuba diving in Turks and Caicos or afloat with a festive drink in a pool in Palm Springs. New York was how it always is in April — damp, a little chilly, and rainy. When I was recovering from the fusion, as I sat upright in bed (recovery only allows for sitting straight upright or flat on your back) weaning myself off heavy painkillers, I perused New Orleans hotels with pools, transfixed by the ease of movement I would finally feel by the time I got in them. It was the biggest lesson I’ve learned about endurance and keeping your eye on the prize. After three months of slow, deliberate movements, awkwardly trained muscles, and feeling like a dried-out Tin Man, the elation I felt when finally easing into the glorious pool we settled on was akin to winning a whole lot of money. My husband honed our kids’ diving technique while I spent hours in between thunderstorms and sightseeing afloat in chlorinated bliss, weightless again at last.

Intelligence Doesn't Just Boil Down to IQ and EQ

A look at multiple intelligence theory, and how it can help you utilize your deepest talents and passions.

In the immortal words of soul songstress Nikka Costa, everybody’s got their something. For decades, researchers have worked to debunk the antiquated notion that there is a single way to be intelligent — known as IQ (intelligence quotient) — which was often defined by academic excellence or mathematical and linguistic fluency. There's been much emphasis on emotional intelligence (EQ) in recent years as a predictor of success in the classroom, the workplace, and life in general, perhaps even more so than IQ. But the reality is we are all likely to possess not just one intelligence, but a platter of many.

For example: Learning instruments or even just understanding the concept of song structure may come naturally to you, while your kid can instantly solve math problems that make your eyes roll back into your head. Your partner effortlessly manages to inspire a group of people to team up and run a marathon, while your sister can compose an email in five minutes that takes you two hours.

Musical ability, kinesthetic proficiency, and interpersonal skills are among the skills, or “intelligences,” defined by Howard Gardner, an esteemed research professor of cognition and education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, in his widely celebrated theory that distinguishes eight types of intelligence called “Multiple Intelligence Theory.”

“Multiple intelligences are a set of computers, which, I hypothesize, all human beings have in their head,” Gardner explains in a Harvard Graduate School of Education video. On his website, Gardner elaborates: “The intelligences constitute the human intellectual tool kit. Unless grossly impaired, all human beings possess the capacity to develop the several intelligences. At any one moment, a human being will have a unique profile because of both genetic (heritability) and experiential factors.”

Thomas Hoerr, PhD, a scholar in residence at the University of Missouri, St. Louis, Gardner’s colleague, and a “master educator,” says that for too long, there was a “small path” to being seen as smart. Gardner’s theory changed the way educators looked at their students — and teaching in general.

“What Howard Gardner did with his conceptualization of the theory of multiple intelligences has widened what it means to be smart,” Hoerr explains. “It’s a very pragmatic theory: Intelligence is problem-solving, and there are lots of different kinds of problems. When you write a song, that’s solving a problem. When you are nurturing animals or working in the garden, that’s solving a problem — even though they don’t require coding like in math, or syllables like in English.”

To be clear, we all have varying intelligence in every single one of these areas, and, like with our skill sets, some areas simply get more practice or are more developed than others.

“I think we have this mindset that there’s one way to succeed,” Hoerr says. “The more we look at multiple intelligences as a way of portraying what strengths we might have, the better off we are because we can use those strengths to succeed.”

The types of intelligence Gardner outlines in his theory

Linguistic Intelligence

Poets, editors, avid readers, writers, and Words With Friends obsessives are considered among the linguistically gifted, as are those who pick up languages easily.

Logical/Mathematical Intelligence

This is about the capacity to conceptualize the logical relations among actions or symbols. Scientists, accountants, mathematicians, physicists, and people who generally do well on standardized tests are strong in this type of intelligence.

Intelligence can also lean into the more logical and rational.

JESPER KLAUSEN / SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY//Getty Images

Musical Intelligence

Have a decent pitch? Those with an ear for melodies, tones, and rhythms who make and/or deeply appreciate music are considered musically intelligent.

Spatial Intelligence

Good at Tetris or chess? Can you draw and/or sculpt? Architects, visual artists, surgeons, chess players, and pilots can easily conceptualize and manipulate large-scale spatial arrays.

Bodily/Kinesthetic Intelligence

Athletes, dancers, swimmers, artisans who use their hands, and those who have natural physical ability are considered to have kinesthetic intelligence.

Interpersonal Intelligence

This type of intelligence relates to how you play, read, motivate, and cooperate with others. Interpersonal intelligence can be used to manipulate (upsell) or to motivate (encourage).

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Intrapersonal Intelligence

This has to do with how well you know yourself and use that knowledge to navigate the world and create your own happiness.

Naturalist Intelligence

This type of intelligence is embodied by pet whisperers and those with green thumbs, as well as those who have an empirical view about living things — Darwin had naturalist intelligence, says Hoerr.

Hoerr says educators (like him) have embraced Gardner’s theory to teach children in different ways. “Too often there is a very narrow pathway to learning, and we wonder why kids get turned off from school and they’re not motivated. If I’m a teacher who gets multiple intelligence, I don’t just look at who’s the best reader and who’s the best writer. I also look at who’s the good artist. Who’s a good musician? Who’s really good with their hands? And how can I use that to help children learn? If we say the goal is to learn about the causes of the Civil War, there are lots of different ways to do that — you can learn that through dance, song, art, building things. If you do, you’re going to find more kids learning, motivated, and excited about school.”

What’s more, figuring out your intelligence requires no online quiz — it’s as simple as considering what you’re into doing in your spare time. “When you look at what you choose to do and use those strengths at work, you’re probably going to prosper. We should all reflect on what are our intelligences. What do we do well? How can we bring that to bear with our daily tasks, whether that’s at work getting a paycheck, raising kids, or being a friend?” says Hoerr.

“If you’ve got a day job that doesn’t allow you to use your strengths, you’re probably going to feel like you’re beating your head against the wall. We need to look at what we do for fun and ask ourselves, is there a way that could be a part of what I do during the day as well? How can I use what I like to do to succeed?”

On how best to use these insights, Gardner says on Big Think that the answer lies within: “If we lived forever, we could probably develop each intelligence to a very high degree — but life’s very short. If you devote too much attention to one intelligence, you’re not going to have much time to work on other kinds of intelligences. The big question is, should you play to strength, or should you bolster weakness? That’s a value judgment — scientists cannot give you an answer to that. If you want to be a jack of all trades and be very well-rounded, then you’re probably going to want to nurture the intelligences which aren’t that strong. On the other hand, if you’re dead set on really coming to the top of some particular heap, you’re probably going to find the intelligences that you’re strongest at and push those. It’s a question of values, not of science.”