On unsolicited advice and what to do with it

Selma Miriam stands at less than five feet tall. She is thin and you can see the bones of her sternum as they protrude from under her thin and veiny skin. She is wearing a blue and green short sleeve button down tucked in to green shorts that are held up with a green belt that is tied so tightly it nearly wraps around her twice. She is probably in her eighties, although her frailty, a product of her sheer size, makes her look older. What I would come to learn of Selma, in our brief conversation over lunch at her restaurant, Bloodroot, in Bridgeport, Connecticut, is that she doesn't take shit from anyone.

When I asked Selma how she had landed on this particularly quiet corner of the world—in the worn shingled house with the blue door and the hydrangea garden which sat on the bank of the harbor—she said that she had come here "on a feeling". This notion of traveling through life on a feeling had the same enchantment as if she had said she had traveled by magic carpet or in the palm of some giant. Courses guided by feeling are often easily derailed but Selma's life in Bridgeport was exactly as she had imagined it. She weaved and cooked and spoke to the guests that she welcomed into the home-turned-restaurant which she had bought in the '70s with a group of women who shared a similar feminist conviction.

If walls could talk, the walls of the one story building would tell of all the ways Selma and her feminist counterparts had stuck to their conviction. Books lined shelves about intersectional environmentalism, whose publication dates well predate the movement's modern manifestation. Socialist bumper stickers adhere to various corners of once-white walls. Images from feminist marches that the Selma and her co-owner Noel have attended over the years are pinned to one or another bulletin board.

"Everyone had an opinion," Selma explained as she took us on a tour of the space, pointing out things on the walls as she went, as if we were playing a game of I-spy. "They told us no one will come, to pick a house on the main road, to offer more than vegetarian fare, to advertise more, to be less political." What Selma and Noel did instead was whatever they so chose, mostly whatever was dictated by that feeling that had brought them to the coast of Bridgeport, Connecticut to begin with.

The New York Times described Bloodroot once as "A Salon for Activists," and the photos from the marches and the feminist books and the plant-based menu speak to the sort of activism that we all know to be impactful. But the other, more latent activism upon which Bloodroot was founded, the kind that forms from following a feeling, the refusal to be swayed by unsolicited advice, is a type of activism to which I aspire.

Unsolicited advice is always unprompted, never asked for, and tends to be inherently self-important. As one writer puts it, “holding a small shard of my story in your hands, how do you feel qualified to instruct me on the whole?” I have—like I'm sure you have, too—found myself often on the receiving end of unsolicited advice over the years and I have always wondered what to do with it and where to put it. Selma's frame was so small, I suspect she learned years ago that she would crumble under its weight, were she to carry the words of unsolicited advice on her narrow shoulders. To swat away at unsolicited advice as it lingers between "giver" and receiver, like shooing away a fly, seems rash and melodramatic. But to turn it over in one's mind, or worse, to let it seep into one's veins and take root in one's gut, gives it a power from under which it is hard to come out.

What I have found is that becoming resilient in the face of unsolicited advice, to handle it with grace and courage, to follow that illusive feeling of so-called “intuition”, comes not with age, but with practice. In a recent semester, I received an email from a professor with notes on my final essay. He explained that my writing, while good, still needed a lot of work. This came as no surprise and was, if not welcomed feedback, realistic feedback. But the advice which followed was a bit more jarring, harder to digest, and its feeling lingered on my tongue like drinking tea that's too hot. "Often writing like yours arises from a sense of insecurity: I have to sound smart. I have to be as high-flown as I can be. You're plenty smart enough for your purposes," he offered. (What those purposes are, I am still unsure, although I had the feeling mediocrity was among them.)

To write with less insecurity in a moment when I was feeling most insecure, felt like a nonstarter, a dark and deeply ironic catch-22. But I did proceed, carrying his comments about me and my writing in my gut as I went. I stopped writing for a while after that. I took down everything I had shared on this blog and shuddered at the idea that I had ever felt the conviction to share words marred by my own insecurity and insufficiency. And for a long time after that, I kept that advice in my back pocket. Quite literally, it was written in an email and stored on my phone and I would sometimes, often privately, before I sat down to begin writing, look at this professor’s words and I would stop.

What I have come to learn, some nine months later, is that I am entitled to my own, private activism that begins with shedding the weight of all the extraneous advice I have ever received. We have control over so few things in life, including the advice we receive from others, that we can only control where we put such advice and how we proceed in the face of its awkward and cumbersome presence. I have returned to writing (obviously), and although I haven’t (yet) figured out what feeling it is that I am trying to chase, I am at least a little lighter as I move in its general direction.