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Michelle Tea on “How to Grow Up” and life advice with Nicole Georges

Michelle Tea gives great advice.

I have known her for almost a decade. When we first met, we both wore cat-eye glasses and I offered her a space on the floor of my punk house, undoubtedly within feet of a ripe ferret cage.

In the intervening years, Michelle and I have traveled together as part of her queer literary tour, Sister Spit, and written alongside one another in Mexico as part of her nonprofit’s free writing retreat, the RADAR Lab. To say I value her advice would be an understatement.

From Michelle, I learned how to moisturize. I learned that being paid as an artist was a class issue, and I learned to change my relationship with money by casting a spell.

I should also tell you that I love advice in general. I am a fan of Ann Landers and Dan Savage, Dear Sugar, and of course the fearsome Dr. Laura.

I write an advice column for Bitch Media, and my dedication to the genre is so great, I was once fired from a middle school once my romantic advice for adults went viral amongst the snoopy sixth graders who tracked it down.

I was thrilled to hear that Michelle Tea was putting out a new memoir that combined both my love of an artist’s life and trajectory with the scrappy wisdom that comes from building a life from the ground floor up.

How to Grow Up tells the story of Michelle’s beginnings as a scruffy goth girl in Catholic school, takes us through the manic streets of 1990s San Francisco and delivers us to now, where the now-married Michelle exists in life as a writer and champion of fellow artists. She is happy. Some would say she is even blissed out. In her new book, Michelle details the lessons that led her to this life.

We spoke over the telephone, me sitting with Ponyo, a chihuahua in Portland, and Michelle slowly spinning a mobile over the crib of her new baby, Atticus. “He’s kicking his feet with joy,” Michelle said. “He frickin’ loves it.”

Nicole Georges: I was getting an advice boner reading your book (again). What is that the best way to put it-an advice “boner”?

Michelle Tea: What does an advice boner mean to you?

NG: I love advice, and I love hearing other people’s advice. How to Grow Up took us from point A to point B in your life, and I love that there is advice in between. Your breakup advice in particular was SO HELPFUL! I just needed to hear it.

MT: Nobody takes advice! I mean, it’s nice to hear what other people would do, but at the end of the day you have your own nature and you’re going to figure it out on your own, and people have to learn things their own way. That might mean you do it the hard way, and that’s your way. That was my way, the hard way.

NG: I feel like I have to learn everything like a caveman.

MT: Totally. Totally. I do, too. Usually everything’s going to be OK no matter what. There’s only a few instances where if you don’t take the right advice your life is going to go down the toilet. And those tend to be around addiction or gambling-things that can really sabotage your life or put you in danger. Most other things, like shitty roommates or “Should I go back to school?”-you know you’re going to be happy no matter what. You just need to have joy in your life, even if you didn’t take the best job or date the best person.

NG: I guess a lot of people aren’t happy or don’t know how to make themselves happy.

MT: They probably need meds. If you’ve done everything and you’re still not happy, go on meds. That’s what I did. We live in a world where you have access to a pill that makes you not a freaking stress case everyday. It’s so wonderful. It’s such a nicer way to live.

1. If you think you’re an alcoholic, get sober.

NG: How much do you have to think it?

MT: It’s hard to quantify, but if you’re haunted by this feeling you might be an alcoholic, do it. Go to a 12 step program. Don’t just be like, “I’m going to read Pema Chrodron and go to the gym.” I promise you will drink again. If you go to a 12 step, you’ll probably drink again, to be realistic, because the odds of an alcoholic drinking again are high. But the best odds are through a 12-step program, so why not go where the odds are the best?

2. If you are haunted by the thought that your relationship sucks, break up with the person.

NG: When I read your book, I was in a moment where I was really loving and needing the breakup advice. I needed to break up with somebody, but I was waffling. They asked me if I genuinely wanted to be with them, and I thought, “I don’t know-they’re such a nice person, but they’re not the right person for me.” From your book I re-discovered that if you feel wish-washy, you should let the person go, because someone else will be stoked to date them, and they won’t say “Maybe” when asked if they want to be there.

MT: You don’t want to be wishy washy with romance. Romance is one of the best reasons to be alive on the planet.

NG: I think of it in terms if you want to put your dog to sleep. If you’re even having that thought, then something’s wrong. You wouldn’t debate whether or not to put a healthy puppy to sleep. The thought generally pops into your mind when your dog is very sick.

MT: I don’t sit around thinking if I should break up with (my wife) Dashiel. I’ve literally never ever thought about breaking up with Dashiel. But I have been in crappy relationships where I was haunted with the feeling of, “Oh, we should break up.” If you’re a person who learns everything the hard way, one good tip is if you’re crying more than you’re not crying, it’s probably a bad situation for you. You probably need to break up and get on meds.

3. Go to Paris.

MT: Preferably alone, as a single person.

4. Don’t be afraid to let go of the subcultural uniform of your youth.

MT: You’re not betraying anyone. You’re not betraying your younger self because your younger self doesn’t actually exist. People have allegiance to the person they were in their past as if that’s a real person. But that person is you. It’s a long time ago. It’s OK to not want to wear that flag you were flying. It’s OK to actually just want to wear clothes because they’re beautiful or they’re fashionable and not because they’re signaling to the world that you are part of a black block or something.

5. You are powerless.

NG: Was there something that was the hardest for you to let go of?

MT: I think alcohol was the hardest to let go of. Really, that was the struggle. But learning how to let go of that gave me a template for learning how to let go of other things. It was the hardest, but it showed me a particular formula that was really adaptable and you can substitute all sorts of problems for alcohol-people and money and all kinds of stuff.

The premise of it is you’re powerless. You’re powerless over alcohol if you’re an alcoholic. As a person, we’re powerless over everything. We get ourselves into a lot of trouble thinking we have more control than we do.

NG: How do you apply that to a person?

MT: A problematic person? You are powerless over that person, you can’t make them suddenly not be problematic. You can let go of trying to fix that problem, and walk away from that problem, or fix your part of the problem-like, why are you so obsessed with that problematic person? You’re powerless over other people you can’t make them be the way you want them to be.

6. Try to see what your part in all these crappy relationships are.

MT: Not to be hard on yourself, but that’s the only way you’ll be able to see what your bad patterns are. And once you figure that out, you can change them and start making better patterns for yourself. And you won’t be in a situation where you have to break up with a bunch of schmoes because you won’t be dating schmoes in the first place.

7. Don’t hate money.

MT: Don’t hate the player, hate the game. Don’t hate money.

I know a lot of people who, because they grew up broke and money’s always been an issue, they demonize money and try not to deal with it. I understand. I spent a lot of time doing that, but at the end of the day you end up screwing yourself over and having to unlearn that and learn how to have a healthy relationship with money. The first step in not having an unhealthy relationship with money is not seeing money as the enemy or as evil.

NG: I dog eared the money spell in the book.

MT: I love doing it. I might be delusional, but I feel like I’m doing something good for myself when I say the money chant.

I am sniffing my baby’s head right now and it smells so good.

NG: What does it smell like?

MT: It smells like warm baby head. It smells like head, but a different kind. It’s like, a sweaty head of someone who sweats liquid gold or something. The sweat of a completely pure being who’s never eating a Dorito or smoked a cigarette.

NG: That’s what my head smells like.

MT: Cigarettes and Doritos?

NG: No, like I’ve never had a cigarette or a Dorito!

8. Jobs are for quitting.

MT: This advice is for people who are artists of some sort. It takes a while to build your art career into something that sustains you. It can take a long while. It took decades for me. I guess a decade.

NG: Me too.

MT: It takes a really long time, and in the meantime you have to work these little jobs. I think you should work jobs you don’t care that much about so that it’s not taking time and energy and focus away from your real purpose in life, which is your art. In a perfect world, you’d be getting paid to make your art, but you take on these little jobs, and when they come between you and your art, you quit them.

If you get a great opportunity, you quit that job and take the opportunity. Through my 20s I was always quitting jobs., so I could go to a poetry festival in New Mexico, or go on tour, or even do a reading. If I had a reading at night and the job said, “You’ve wanted one too many night off for this,” I’d be like, “OK, I have to leave.”

I’m really glad that I did. Because nobody is going to fight for your artistic career. NOBODY. There’s nobody who’s going to fight for you to be an artist. You have to do it. You have to put it first. Sometimes that means you have to make some scary-seeming decisions. I’m really glad that I’ve made all of the decisions I’ve made.

NG: I think this information is particularly valuable coming for you because it’s not like you’re saying this with the benefit of a trust fund.

MT: I think it’s also really good if you’re an artist to have your overhead as low as possible. I’ve gotten trapped in that. This merged with my scarcity issues because I was afraid of taking on a new expense to make my life better. When I was younger, having cheap rent. I didn’t have any debt because I didn’t go to college.

NG: Living with no debt is huge!

MT: No debt is so huge, oh my God. If you have debt, then you’re tethered to a job. If you have debt, you do have to take it more seriously so you don’t get fired, and you have to find a job that pays really well, and then you have a career, and maybe you didn’t want a career-you wanted to be an artist!

You need to make all the choices you need to make when you’re younger so you can stave off having a mid-life crisis. You don’t want to suddenly be in mid-life and say, “Oh no, I wanted to be an artist all this time!” and then sabotage your life at that point. While you’re young, make decisions that sabotage life. It’s easier to bounce back from them when you’re younger.

9. You can choose towards happiness.

NG: Is happiness a choice?

MT: I mean kind of. In a way. You can choose towards happiness. You can decide that you’re not going to fetishize suffering and gloom. You can decide to, like, take radical action towards making yourself happier like going on meds or quitting drinking or getting out of a shitty relationship. You can take some chances and make those choices.

10. You can choose to be a dik-dik.

NG: One more question: If I had to distill us down to animals, what animal would you be?

MT: (immediately and with no hesitation), I’d like to be a dik dik.

Michelle Tea’s memoir, How to Grow Up, is available now. Nicole Georges is a cartoonist and author of Calling Dr. Laura.

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