2024 Inspo: That Late-Blooming Gen X Weirdo Energy
Write the warts-and-all vomit draft and other priceless advice from bestselling author Sari Botton.
There are a few rules I live by at this stage in life.
Go see your favorite musical artists in concert no matter how much the ticket costs.
Move your body daily.
Wear neon because none of us are getting out of here alive and fashion is supposed to be fun.
And if you see Sari Botton’s name on anything read the thing.
Because there’s a
Tackling shadow work and looking for your life partner? She’s got a New York Times Modern Love piece for that. (It’s a heck of a success story, too.)
Feeling like you’re—at best—stumbling through the peaks and valleys of the human experience? The collection of personal essays that make up her memoir, And You May Find Yourself…Confessions of a Late-Blooming Gen X Weirdo is required reading.
Staring down the barrel of aging? Her portfolio of Substacks includes one of my favorite newsletters on the entire platform, . Its content is devoted to “exploring what it means to travel through time in a human body at every phase of life” and will have you feeling thrilled about getting older. It will also better prepare you to manage the strange grief of leaving life stages behind.
I first discovered Sari Botton when I was leaving New York City after more than a decade for Nashville, TN.
One of my earliest mentors turned dear friend gifted me Goodbye to All That: Writers on Loving and Leaving New York, an anthology edited by Sari that also includes her essay “Real Estate,” a story that helped me sleep at night after giving up my rent-stabilized Greenpoint studio (!) as I went in search of a new life in Nashville.
With a new year before us, I wanted to pick Sari’s brain about her goals and resolutions as part of a 2024 hype series for
.Because a new year is thrilling! Inspiring! Hopeful!
That’s what I’ve been telling myself and others, so imagine my surprise when I realized a low-humming uneasiness about 2024 was threatening my usual lust for life.
Maybe it’s a midlife thing, but as I step into 2024 I find myself being happy with the choices I’ve made, longing for my former life in NYC, and wanting to escape to rural Tennessee where I can live in silence and rescue farm animals all at the same time.
So, super stable.
As luck would have it, Sari had just the thing for that, too. A conversation full of reflections, quips, and invaluable advice for 2024 and beyond.
Mixed Prints: How do you feel about New Year's resolutions? Are you someone who sets firm intentions?
Sari Botton: For many years during the day on Dec 31st, I attended a vision boarding arts and crafts party hosted by my artist friends Hope Windle and her husband Sean Nixon. They would host a potluck gathering and everyone would bring food, magazines, scissors, crayons, and paste and we would all spend time cutting things out of magazines and making these vision boards. The hosts call them “treasure maps.” At the end of the party, we would all share our boards and intentions with each other. For the first time since the pandemic, they just held it again.
MP: Wow, I LOVE this.
SB: It’s a really lovely practice. And it’s so zen to sit around with your friends and do arts and crafts. You’re just cutting and pasting and coloring…we all regress into childhood when we’re there. It’s a great opportunity to take inventory of your wishes and dreams and state your intentions to a bunch of friends because that solidifies the intentions. You’re making yourself accountable to yourself and your friends.
MP: What a cool way to get invested in the dreams of people you love and care about.
SB: It allows friends to become very invested in your dreams. There’s one artist friend of mine who will say to me now and again, “You just achieved this! That was on your vision board 3 years ago!”
MP: What kind of goals have made it onto your vision boards over the years?
SB: I put my memoir on there several years in a row. I’ve put time with friends and family, and personal goals like finding a house. I’ve realized almost every goal.
None of the luxury vacations have come through, but hope springs eternal.
I’ll tell you the funniest thing. For a couple of those years in addition to creating the vision board, I wrote a letter to Whoever Is In Charge of the Universe —aka WIICOTU (Pronunciation: Why-coe-too) — asking to help me achieve these dreams.
“None of the luxury vacations have come through, but hope springs eternal.”
MP: Ha! Do you feel like WIICOTU came through?
SB: I think when you set an intention in that way and bring consciousness to your intention, you bring your unconscious mind on board and it naturally leads you where you want to go.
I’ve achieved almost everything on my vision boards, but I don’t think it’s magic. I don’t think it's WIICOTU doing it for me! I think it’s me.
MP: What do you want to do more of for yourself this year?
SB: I want to learn to say “no” better and more often because by saying “no” to myself I’m also saying “yes” to myself. I'm too eager to jump onto every idea or intention and then I’m too busy for my own writing. What I really want is to have more space and time for my own creative work.
MP: Anything in particular?
SB: I want to finish my proposal for an Oldster anthology along the lines of Goodbye to All That, get a deal, and make the book happen. I want to publish some of my own essays on
I’d love to do another essay collection soon like And You May Find Yourself.
“There’s so much more to do and be and have even after you think you’ve arrived.”
MP: Those essays deeply resonated with me. Probably because I haven’t quite found myself yet.
SB: But you’re young! I mean…compared to me.
Culture keeps telling us from the time we’re 29 that we’re too old for everything which is crazy. There’s so much more to do and be and have even after you think you’ve arrived. One of my favorite things to witness on
MP: I started learning ballet last year at 39. Maybe I’ll be doing my very first ballet recital at 40.
SB: OMG, you have to. You’re going to have to write about this.
MP: Big, lofty goals are always inspiring to hear, but I’m also curious about the day-to-day goals folks set for themselves in the new year. Do you have any?
SB: I want to go on a real vacation. I want to spend more time with people and learn to meditate. I love drawing with crayons and want to draw more. I drew the cherry blossoms on the cover of And You May Find Yourself and some of the illustrations inside.
And I want to sing more. I love singing, and I even hired a friend who plays at Sid Gold’s Request Room to come play karaoke piano at my house. I also want to write more songs and play them with my husband, Brian. I haven’t done that in years and I’m actually okay at it.
MP: We have a Sid Gold’s in Nashville!
SB: I have to visit Nashville! Brian and I loved that soapy TV show, Nashville. Maybe that’s where I go on vacation.
“When you’re caught up in the ‘shoulds’ and hard on yourself for not achieving those things, it’s really hard to find your way.”
MP: Back to And You May Find Yourself for a moment. Do you have any advice for folks— like me—who are still very much on the self-finding journey?
SB: The first thing is to find compassion for yourself. When you’re caught up in the “shoulds” and hard on yourself for not achieving those things, it’s really hard to find your way.
And forgive yourself. Forgive yourself for the choices you made when you didn’t have better information. I have these 30-minute yoga sessions I like to do, and at the end of the class, there’s a meditation exercise. I’ve started putting my hands on my heart and forgiving myself, extending compassion to myself, and extending compassion to the people who challenge me.
MP: As a millennial who grew up in hustle culture (ick), I appreciate that advice.
SB: The other thing is to let yourself write what you would never publish about this journey. Write whatever it is—even the ugliest thoughts. You need to let yourself write all the ugly versions of the stories you would never share so you can give yourself a chance to explore all the possibilities of how you feel about where you are, where you've been, and where you want to go without censoring yourself.
When you can get it out of your body and be able to look at it, it will give you courage and perspective.
“Write whatever it is—even the ugliest thoughts.”
MP: Was that part of your process in putting together And You May Find Yourself?
SB: Yes, but first I almost talked myself out of doing the book. I was so afraid of upsetting people. And then I said to myself, I’m going to write the version I would never publish and after that, I can make a decision.
Once I got that ugly version out of my head and put it away for a few weeks, I was able to see it differently.
From there I revised, and revised, and revised. I asked my editor for another year to revise further and blur people further. I knew I needed to make this not just about me and the particular people in my life, but more about phenomena that other people can relate to.
I had to tell myself the story in the warts-and-all vomit draft, which sounds disgusting, but that’s what I call it. Writing that first draft was so eye-opening. And it was very healing.
MP: In a way, this reminds me of how producer Rick Rubin says the audience should always be considered last in the creative process. You’ve got to listen to yourself and honor yourself in the work first or it won't be great.
SB: Absolutely. I was interviewing Shalom Auslander about Foreskin's Lament, his memoir about leaving the Hasidic community, and I asked him how he knows which stories are going to land with readers.
He said he trusts that if it catches his attention, there’s got to be somebody out there who will feel the same, and that’s how he knows he should write it.
And you can’t know that if you’re censoring yourself. You can censor yourself in later drafts and that’s a good idea. But in that early draft, you have to honor your curiosity and your intentions.
MP: Is there anything you learned in 2023 that you want to carry with you into 2024?
SB: I bought these shitty cardio machines from Sharper Image and put them in one of our guest rooms. Brian and I started getting up and doing a half hour of cardio first thing in the morning from 7:00 to 7:30 before coffee, and I’d like to carry that forward. It’s an easy way to get some exercise and boost the endorphins.
MP: What about something you want to let go of as we step into 2024?
SB: I want to let go of my knee-jerk “yes” reaction. I need to take 24 hours before I say yes to things because I have a real habit of overbooking myself with obligations. I’m eager to do a lot of things, but I’m also a little too eager to please. I want to let go of the people-pleasing so I can be sure I’m making choices from a grounded place.
Sari Botton’s Substacks include
, and . To keep up with her and to purchase her books, visit her website and follow her on Instagram.