Dear Tanaïs: Knowing When You’ve Had Enough

Darlings,

During Ramadan, I’m on a hiatus from the beauty hustle to focus on new writing and art, including this advice column Dear Tanaïs, which I’ve started writing from a Brooklyn courthouse whilst awaiting jury service! (Update: I was dismissed!) If you’re seeking advice, please write to hello@studiotanais.com — and know that your name or personal information will never, ever be revealed. As with most things I do, I’ll post when I feel the energy and inspiration to do so, esp. if I want to answer something I believe I can offer helpful and real insight into. I’ll try my best to write once a month.

The two questions I’m answering in this first installment came in through an Ask Me Anything on Instagram. Here goes…

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Dear Tanaïs:

If you feel unvalued, but deeply value the relationship or work, how do you reconcile this disconnect?

Let me say first — eventually, one day, in the glorious future that awaits you, you will know when it’s enough, when you can’t take it anymore, when you have to walk away from the love or the work to love and work on yourself. That day will come, I promise, you only have to keep on the path you’ve set out for yourself to get there. It happens when you’re ready, and not before.

Knowing that, I hope, is a small solace while you’re en route to freedom. But life isn’t about preemptively cutting off profound and difficult experiences to spare ourselves from being hurt. Thinking of how my body fell apart to write In Sensorium, I would not do it any other way if it meant my book would be a diluted version of what I ended up reaching. Living so much of our lives digitally has made us wrapped up in collective delusion, collective states of coveting ease, leisure, luxury and happiness—but the truth is, we were made to fight for our survival.

The nature of being in a body means that you’ll be moving through life trying to protect this precious body that contains your being. You are meant to protect your heart and mind from harm. But growth hurts. This is your vessel. This vessel you’ve taught over and over: you have the capacity to heal, and the capacity to break. Often this is happening simultaneously, and little by little, day by day, you’ve deepened your wisdom.

Since your question is open-ended, my answer, I hope, is applicable to any relationship, whether romantic or platonic love or work, and usually, when one sphere of our life feels uncertain, every sphere is affected. When we undertake any labor of love that does not honor our effort, it’s but a matter of time before it’s just not going to work anymore. We’ve had enough. The situationship or the 9-5 or the lack of spiritual evolution is not enough.

When it starts to make you question whether or not you are enough—it’s time to go. Time to quit. Take the lessons and shift your focus to self-preservation.

Here’s where my advice may not best serve peaceful relations — but I think all truths should be laid out on the table. If you have serious hurts to address, it’s necessary to say it aloud.

For present you, for Future you.

And for the next Black or Indigenous or brown-skinned woman or femme or queer or trans person who comes after you.

I’ve burnt bridges along the way and that’s included bridges with people I’ve loved, femmes I never thought I’d say bye too. Lovers I could no longer see eye to eye with; publishers who never saw me as viable, sellable or marketable. I have no regrets when I’ve spoken up, but I do regret my silences. Choosing silence or fearing conflict has meant I’ve let discord build and build until I erupted and then disappeared. Ghosting might feel ideal if your natural state is eager to please and avoid discomfort, but the pain will come for you, eventually. Might as well meet it with grace and honesty first. It’s advice I try to give myself when I feel conflict brewing these days.

If the relationship is imbalanced, or harmful — it’s good to set up a one-on-one conversation, face to face, flesh to flesh and say, “I’m not feeling appreciated for my work, for my love, for my commitment. Can you work with me to make this better? I’m not sure I can make it work unless things change.

Remember your inviolable and innate strength, worth and power, your immense beauty you walk in this world with, and remember the lineage of all those who came before you, who survived for you to have this precious life. Never waste a single minute being silent in the face of discord or disrespect.

Never waste a single breath being untrue to you.

Love,

Tanaïs

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Dear Tanaïs:

What does it mean to be figuring it out in your 20s? Some Dos and Don’ts?

Now that I’m 40, I can honestly say that I love and appreciate every hot second of my 20s. I bow down to that babe who got me here. There is a wildness and freedom I knew in the 2000s, freedom to switch life up at a moment’s notice, traveling, fucking, studying, partying and healing and falling apart to my heart’s content that felt chaotic often but also right what I needed to be doing at the time. You know that nothing lasts forever and that includes this age you are now. You have a powerful inner world that’s been yearning to be free since childhood — a decade or so away from trauma or feeling like a baby is not a terribly long time ago—so I want you to remember this is the age to assert your independence. To revel in the gorgeous, immortal sense of forever you can’t help but feel, even when we know loss and death are a part of life, you’re living in that dreamy part of our arc on Earth, if you’re lucky to be safe from harm, war, hunger, then this is the period of your life you’re meant to sow the seeds of the future, learning to love and accept not only yourself, but to extend that love and compassion to all beings, no matter what they can offer you.

This period of your life is a gift and it only happens once. Live it fully, baby.

Do

Play. Whether it’s making art with your friends or for your own pleasure, or in a community space, remember that we are closest to our innate truth when we play.

Heal. Honestly, if I hadn’t committed to therapy from 27-31 and then again from 36-38 (and now I’ve started again!) I don’t know if I would’ve been on the same survivor path as I am now. I needed to outgrow toxic ways of moving through life and having a therapy session each week gave me the language and the space. At least for a while — I believe these moments last and fade out naturally but in our 20s it helps us work towards healing core wounds and patterns.

Travel. I miss the hostel travel life, sharing bunk bedded rooms with strangers in Mexico or France, traveling in India solo on trains, I found ways to travel whenever I saved up money or got a random gig selling shawls or a fellowship to work in a nonprofit. Travel as a young person is often done so more humbly, on a budget and with friends you meet on the road. It’s done when you’ve saved up enough or on a credit card that takes years to pay off. I’m not say travel your money away, but set aside the time and resources to see this glorious planet when you have the capacity to do so. Honestly, I can’t do the hardcore traveling in the same way at this age, my body can’t take it! There will never be anything as sweet as the simplicity of living on sandwich and coffee each day as I wrote my first book at a bar in the South of France.

Apply! To all the things. Grants or grad school or an even a damn Instagram giveaway of goods you want but can’t afford — these little risks sort of work a muscle of larger risk-taking that yields an interesting life. If you’re wanting to deepen your knowledge, I will say that choosing my Fiction MFA, as hard and as white as it was, really proved to me that I was meant to be a writer.

Love is everything. Nothing matters more than love. Build with your friends, create weird, gorgeous and fun experiences and art together. Make love to people that touch some place deep in your heart, share collective meals and dance! Love is an expansive state, never regret loving people, even when they are too vested in their own suffering to love you back. Love everyone, even those who’ve hurt you (loving them from afar, psychically counts), love strangers. Give money to liberation work you believe in, give time to young people you want to see thriving. Love is a legacy to live by.

Meditate. I wish I had done this every day of my life, but I just started in 2022, and NOTHING re-centers your mind and heart than sitting in stillness in meditation. If we think of our brains as constantly in motion, imagine this 10-30 minute period of time for your brain to attempt stillness and rest. We need rest and a reset. We need the illumination inherent in us.

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Don’t

Make everything about business and getting your coin to get ahead — I promise you, the trajectory there might give you financial stability, but the cost is steep — those types exude a lack of confidence, feel fake and often feel & look way older than their actual age.

Ignore your trauma and responses to trauma. Find space for healing, therapy, psychedelics, joy — you deserve to know life outside of pain or the past. It only gets harder to deal with if it’s unresolved in your 30s onward.

Follow the wishes of your family, elders or parents when it comes to your major life decisions, if they’re against your own wishes. You’ve been born during this time on this planet to live this life. No one gets to determine your dreams. Your parents may have sacrificed everything, survived wars, fed, clothed and paid for you—this is parenthood, this is a choice they long ago made. So is letting go of their beloved spawn!

Document everything for the Internet. Some of the stupid shit we do in our 20s would be best left off the Record! I feel grateful I lived at a time when analog, in real life experiences ruled. There’s something liberatory about being incognito. Don’t fret if you didn’t record the moment, your body and memory were made for that.

Be afraid of risks, reinvention and upheaval. Life will get unruly, intense and rejections are a part of that process. We don’t get everything we want, and we aren’t always given opportunities we deserve. People will flat out say no. Every no is a new path, a new portal for us to walk through. Let yourself be open to change. There is no one version of you. For several years, you may be on a certain trajectory, but then life happens and it’s time to swerve. I worked as a community organizer and youth educator in nonprofits for years, until I knew I wanted to devote myself fully to art, writing and perfume. And now, here I am.

Would we have found each other had I not decided to choose personal revolution?

Every version of you is a powerful foundation for you to become everything you’re meant to be.

Love,

Tanaïs

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Thank you for reading! I hope any of the above feels like insight you want to incorporate into your life.

As you may know, I’m taking a social media break. The constant barrage of white supremacist capitalist narcissist energy of the space—which brings up all of our pain and feelings of worthlessness—can’t be how I spend my real life. Feels like being penned inside white men’s digital cages, as they get richer and manipulate elections and markets — and I hope we can all leave for our collective mental and spiritual health.)

I won’t lie, it’s hard not to share cool shit that happens on social. Yesterday, my perfume and insight on oil-based perfumes, ATTARS, was featured in Vogue US, thanks to the incredible writer and former beauty director of Vogue India, Parizaad Khan Sethi. You can read more about attars and some exciting perfume brands here.

As ever, this writing space is free—not that I can’t use the pledge money — but to be honest, I want some part of what I do to be for public & community well-being. Totally free. Untangled with money. Spiritually satisfying. I want to write my truth. But if you’d like to further support my work, and my livelihood as a writer, independent perfumer and artist, please consider a purchase of my creations on www.studiotanais.com

Until APRIL 5, 11:59 PM EST USE THE CODE LIBRAFULLMOON40 FOR 40% OFF

& BUY MY BOOK, IN SENSORIUM: NOTES FOR MY PEOPLE. There are 5K copies of this Limited Edition, First Edition book, and after that, it’s out of print. I’ve learned to let the bitterness of that go, little by little, each day. X