Chapter 10: Becoming The Person Who Can Hold The Person I want to Be

learning how to sustain a life, bathroom makeouts and decision-making

January knocked the wind out of me. But major news: I’ve been working on becoming the person who can hold the person I want to be. I say this as if it’s a quick trip to Happier Grocery.

This transformation has included approximately twenty-five panic attacks. The kind where it feels like an exorcism moves through your body and leaves behind someone marginally calmer. Is this quantum leaping? Probably not.

I told my gynecologist this yesterday, as if she were Cynthia. When she asked the standard intake questions, how often do you drink, do you do drugs, I said, “I’ve been calming myself with weed gummies more than I’d like to admit this month.” She smiled, nodded, and told me I should really freeze my eggs if I want to have children. A conversation you and I will be getting into next week.

My January days broke into strange shifts: four hours where I’m fine, four hours where I spiral, four hours where I feel almost happy. I don’t know who scheduled it like that, but it’s been consistent, so I’ll give my brain that.

In exciting news, I finally went on a date.

As I publicly stated on Instagram, this was the first date I’ve been on in a year. I didn’t post that part because I think I’m embarrassed. Dating and relationships still feel like a rite of passage I somehow missed. At this point, I genuinely couldn’t tell you if someone even locked eyes with me last year.

This week, I think I finally came out of the tunnel of darkness, or at least into a dimly lit hallway that looks promising. Like the rest of the world, I’m very much preparing to shed the snake and become a horse on February 17th. I’m so excited about it I’ve considered throwing a party.

On Friday at Casa Cipriani, a man I was flirting with, with confidence and poise, said, “I want to make out with you in the bathroom.”

Somehow it worked.

I replied, “Do you want to have children?”

A fair question, considering he’s a divorcé with kids (something OG readers may remember my astrologer once predicted I would marry).

Very calmly, he asked, “Do you need to know that before you make out with someone?”

He had a point.

The last time energy like that stopped me in my tracks was mid-conversation with Michael B. Jordan. This man was no Michael B., though I did just watch Sinners, which, alongside The Academy, I would personally give sixteen nominations to.

Naturally, I left Casa Cipriani without the make-out. That night, I replayed the moment the way I replay most things: from every angle, with revised dialogue, as if one version might unlock a better ending. None of them did.

When I say I want to be having more experiences, what I mean is that I keep stopping myself right before they happen. I want to be vulnerable, but my subconscious intercepts it, like it’s doing its job, like it’s saying: this is how you get hurt. I don’t fully want vulnerability. If I did, I’d already have it. But I want to want it, which feels like its own kind of work.

Last week, I caught myself almost arguing with an ex-lover, if you can even call him that, over text. I stared at my phone and thought: would the person who has everything I want behave like this? Would she go back and forth like this over text? Would she refresh the thread like it was a stock ticker?

I hate to admit that a man brought this revelation about. But that’s when it clicked.

I need to become the person who can hold the person I want to be.
That’s the work.

So that’s the goal right now: becoming someone who can hold real love, business success, money, and difficult conversations.

I’ve made enough wrong decisions that my confidence isn’t built on intuition. It’s built on survival. I always land somewhere eventually. But that’s not the same as landing where I meant to go. And I want to be where I’m meant to go, even if it means being seen in a way my body is terrified of. I don’t want a life that’s technically fine but secretly full of abandoned versions of myself.

That shift really started with hosting the first How To Function event. Desiree Pais from Benshen.Co hosted at 113 Spring (thank you to In Search Of). We started with a prompt, what are the holding patterns of my life, and dissected where we get stuck and why. Watching people get something real out of the exercise felt genuinely profound, maybe the best I’ve felt in a long time.

It’s the direction I want to go in, and I’m grateful to you for reading this column, because it’s what got me here. I’ll be hosting another event in February and would love to invite you.

Most of the time, I don’t even know what I’m afraid of. Maybe that living will hurt too much. My mind tries to protect me and, in doing so, quietly shrinks my life. I feel things deeply, and I’ve spent a long time treating that like a flaw instead of embodying it.

I am, at my core, just a girl who loves to talk, write, discuss, and make things all about feelings. So I guess that’s where I should lean the fuck in.

Joan Didion said confidence is having the courage of your own mistakes. I don’t think I have confidence. And I’m not sure I ever will. But this is a start.

Somehow, Functioning,

Jilly