A compendium of things I’ve learned (so far)

A field guide for the almost-forty and entirely tender-hearted

Dearest,

1.
Thirty-nine arrived quietly in the last week—steady, insistent, impossible to ignore. It found me mid-sentence, mid-dream, mid-reinvention.

At thirty-nine, I still haven’t figured out how to make a decent soft-boiled egg, how to say no without feeling like I’m breaking the heart of someone’s grandmother, and how to sit with discomfort without immediately trying to redesign my entire life.

Still a work-in-progress, I know. Like a Johnlock fanfic. But here we are.

It seems I have reached the age where gravity has become a real character in my life story, naps are recreational drugs, and my curmudgeonly inner self haunts me with very ambitious ideas at two in the morning and questionable fashion choices on a Saturday. (I just bought my first pair of grey Crocs. Unironically.)

Believe it or not, I’m singing along to Tubthumping at the top of my lungs while I write this. I GET KNOCKED DOWN. BUT I GET UP AGAIN.

In the past few days, I’ve done an interrogation of myself—sat down at the edge of another year and asked: What do I actually know?

Painting by Amy Judd

2.
Here’s what I’ve gathered so far—through trial, error, heartache, books, and a frankly immoderate amount of carbs.

All I really need to know I learned (and am learning) from the tender wreckage of being human¹

Ladies and gentlemen of the class² of The Great Perhaps—³

Believe in the power of baking soda. If I could offer you only one tip for the future, it’s this: baking soda is magic. It unclogs sinks. It deodorises shoes. It saves white laundry and restores fridges to polite society. Whereas the rest of my learning nuggets have no basis more reliable than my own discursive, mentally gadabout self, here’s what I know without any agenda:

Speak from the scar, not the wound. Trust me—I have been there. I was that person crying in the rice aisle, constructing elaborate arguments about abandonment while deciding between basmati and jasmine. I used to believe that feeling everything right now and saying everything right now meant I was being brave. But the truth is, I could be unbelievably cruel in the heat of the moment—and yet still ask for forgiveness, far more than I deserved. What I am saying is: take a second. The scar doesn’t mean it didn’t hurt. It means you can live with the story.

If it saves time, spend the money. If it creates a memory, spend the money.⁴ I have wasted many an evening researching the cheapest shipping option to save PHP 147, only to end up paying more in emotional deterioration and snacks consumed out of frustration. Buy the lacy panties that make your ass look good. Take the rideshare and by god take the Skyway and pay the toll (especially in this Manila traffic). Moisturise with lavender oil. Get the good croissant. There are worse things to be.

Bad experiences can sometimes happen when I break my own rules. Like eating a month-old pizza in the fridge when I’m trying my best to enforce FIFO. Or saying yes to a project that gave me a stomachache the moment the email arrived. Or trying to wing it when I know I am not a winging-it kind of girl. Every time I override my own internal alarm system, the universe laughs. Sometimes we suffer because life is unfair. Sometimes we suffer because we’re stubborn.

Don’t fall in love with your ideas. Idea debt is real.⁵ Dreaming about a project is intoxicating. Planning it down to the smallest detail is seductive. But the work is unsexy. Unglamorous. Uncinematic. The work happens in the doing. The project doesn’t have to be epic. There’s no future TED Talk. Just make it exist.

Tip well. Don’t be an asshole. Tip like you believe in karma and decimal points.

People you love will die. Suddenly. Slowly. Before you’re ready. You need to keep going anyway. The laundry will still need folding. There will be mornings. You grow around the grief and sometimes you won’t know how to go on. But you need to keep going anyway.

Don’t sabotage your joy. My dearest friend Mandana once told me this over the phone. I was turning happiness over in my hands like a bomb, waiting for it to explode. And she just said it. Calm. Clear. Not up for debate. Yes Ma’am.

(via Synexdoche)

Make decisions from your talent, not your desperation.⁶ You know—I’m still learning this, actually. It’s hard to create from a place of panic. Hard to say yes for the right reasons when rent is due, your inbox is on fire, and your self-worth is doing cartwheels in a dark alley. I have accepted projects that made me wilt. I’ve snacked on crumbs and called it strategy. I’ve said thank you through gritted teeth while slowly hollowing out. Desperation makes terrible choices. It says take it now or lose everything. It says you should be grateful for this opportunity. It says this is your only shot. I’m teaching myself to have my own back and trust that I won’t let myself down. Talent, not terror, should be steering the ship. Give me a red lipstick and I’m there.

Quantity leads to quality. Yes, you need discipline. Yes, you need patience. But mostly, you need to make a lot of bad things before you arrive at something decent. Like, a lot a lot. The kind of things you hope no one ever sees. The half-drafts. The abandoned file titled “FINAL2_real_REALfinal.docx.” Make it bad. Make it worse. As with life—do it anyway.

Text people when you get home. It takes less than a minute.

Vulnerability is a feature, not a bug.⁷ The part of me that feels too much, says too much, cries at reels of strangers hugging their dads in airports—that’s not a glitch. That’s part of my wiring. That’s what it says in my instruction manual. If you have a problem with that, take it up with my manager.

Keep up with medical and dental appointments. Not me saying this when I am notoriously terrible at it! But yes. Amidst all my late-night Googling of “weird feeling in rib” and “scratch on skin red??” I know I must book the appointment. Get the bloodwork. Let them poke around my molars and tsk-tsk about flossing. This is how I take care of future me. This is how I remind my body: I still want to be here.

You can take some chances. Get the yellow dress. Try wasabi ice cream. Send the poem. Apply for the thing. Listen: here’s your permission slip.

Call bullshit on being palatable. It’s wild how hard this actually is. I’m way too aware how my hips take up a lot of space when I move through lines, crowds. I don’t laugh demurely, I cackle. And I’m too earnest for my own good sometimes. But the whole trick to being alive is to be yourself as thoroughly as possible.⁸

If it says “do not microwave,” do not microwave. Or suffer the consequences.

Don’t mistake your capability for your capacity. Just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should. Or that you must. Or that you won’t be sprawled on the floor, overwhelmed, wondering why you never learn. Being good at something doesn’t obligate you to give it your life. You’re allowed to protect your energy.

Give voice to your own astonishment. Say look at that when the sky is pink. Say this is beautiful even if no one else agrees. Say I made this with satisfaction. We spend so much time shrinking wonder down, making it manageable, making sure no one thinks we’re too sentimental, too dramatic, too in love with the world. Fuck that. Let yourself gasp. Let yourself praise.

I can be loved despite my impossibilities. Even when I spiral. Even when I am just…hard to hold. There are people who choose me. Not because I’m easy. But because I’m real. It’s taken me years to believe this—and honestly, I’m still working on it. But here’s what I know now: I have to give people the chance to love me. Even the messy parts. Especially the messy parts.

Trust in the timing of your life. There are things I wanted at twenty-five that fell through. Things I begged for at thirty that didn’t arrive. Things I only learned how to carry after I lost what I thought I couldn’t live without. Dodged a bullet here and there and only realised that much later. It’s a challenge trusting the invisible clock of life sometimes. But still—some of the best things didn’t come when I wanted them to. They arrived when the universe says, Bitch, you’re ready. Come get it.

(via)

3.
There’s no neat bow to tie around thirty-nine.

I still forget to drink water. I still overthink texts.

But I’m learning to stay. To soften at the edges. To witness my own life as it unfolds.

Some of these lessons I’ll forget. Some I’ll have to relearn the hard way.

But I want to live by them anyway.

I want to try. I am saying: I’m getting better at living in the world without apologising for how I move through it.

4.
Finally, a poem:

Instructions for the Journey
Pat Schneider

The self you leave behind
is only a skin you have outgrown.
Don’t grieve for it.
Look to the wet, raw, unfinished
self, the one you are becoming.
The world, too, sheds its skin:
politicians, cataclysms, ordinary days.
It’s easy to lose this tenderly
unfolding moment. Look for it
as if it were the first green blade
after a long winter. Listen for it
as if it were the first clear tone
in a place where dawn is heralded by bells.

And if all that fails,

wash your own dishes.
Rinse them.
Stand in your kitchen at your sink.
Let cold water run between your fingers.
Feel it.

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Celebrating & Amplifying

Sharing some works from friends lately that you should check out—poets, artists, thinkers, and makers whose work deserves more eyes, more ears, more hearts. If you’re looking for something new to read, listen to, or witness, start here:

• Tran Tran, dear friend and a poet I admire so much, writes about multilinguality on Seventh Wave: “To write in English as a multilingual, non-native English speaker is to face this perpetual pressure of wrongness.” Check out her latest poem in Pangyrus.

• Yomalis Rosario
  has two poems up at The Marbled Sigh.

• Check out this interview of

  hiwot adilow
  in Literary Liberation.

• Listen to

  Gabriela Bittencourt
  read “Labor Pains” from Shō Poetry Journal No. 4 (Winter 2023/24).

• The lovely

  Shivani Gupta
  is featured in The Loyola Phoenix: “What are we if not fragments of each other bonded by a body?”

• Don’t miss signing up for the April session of

  Shira Erlichman
  ’s In Surreal Life. Visiting artists are Hala Alyan, Diana Khoi Nguyen, and Nate Marshall.

• Sara Matson has a new poem in Discount Guillotine.

• The ever so lovely Gbenga Adesina is leading an in-person poetry writing workshop on creating portraits of family, based on Yaa Gyasi’s “HomeGoing.”

• I loved reading Jenny Molberg’s poem up at The American Poetry Review.

• Come hang out with Ashna Ali at AWP and join the

  PAIN BABY
  Book Club!

• I’m blessed to have read Kami Enzie’s poems, out now in Oxford Poetry.

• Kristin Lueke
  has some bangers (and I mean great poems) in Heavy Feather Review.

• Mandana Chaffa is in conversation with Eve L. Ewing on her newest project, Original Sins: The (Mis)Education of Black and Native Children and the Construction of American Racism at Chicago Review of Books.

• William Ward Butler has a new poem in Hunger Mountain.

• Talicha Johnson is offering a collaborative Solidarity Study Circle for Palestine, Sudan, the Congo, and the many others facing genocide emergencies.

• There’s an upcoming Zine Lunch on April by Miriam Calleja called “Poetry as Prayer,” offered by Sarabande Books.

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Yours,
T.

— Poet’s Field Notes, Log #008, recorded on 22 March 2025, from Manila.

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Thank you for being here. I am deeply grateful for your continued readership. If you find value in my work and would like to support it, you can make a one-time donation or gift a monthly subscription via Ko-Fi. The Substack subscription model (using Stripe) isn’t available in my country, and so your support on Ko-Fi would mean the world to me. This allows me to spend more hours on what I love most: poems, and more poems.

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1. With apologies to Robert Fulghum

2. With apologies to Baz Luhrmann

3. Borrowed affection from John Green, who borrowed it from Rabelais

4. Treyton DeVore’s rules on money

5. Jessica Abel, by way of Kazu Kibuishi, who has definitely seen people overthink themselves into creative hypothermia

6. Lesley Jones keeping it real, who learned it from Katt Williams

7. Paraphrased from Steven de Souza, who gave us John McClane bleeding, broken, barefoot—and somehow still the hero. Yippee-ki-yay.

8. Andrew Sean Greer casually dropping the meaning of life