Laura (L.A.) Mariani

Your self-image acts like a thermostat. Raise it and your life adjusts upward. Lower it and opportunities disappear. You can read about it in my new book, a practical philosophy of identity, behaviour, and personal transformation ➡️ buff.ly/I6HJNCB

I wonder how many people are living lives that look perfectly respectable from the outside but don't quite fit them anymore. The job, the relationship, the routine, the familiar role. Everything may look fine, and yet the question keeps coming back: Is this still my life?

Be sensible. Be useful. Be nice. Don't make a fuss. Don't be too ambitious. Don't change your mind. Some of these rules arrive so early that we stop recognising them as rules. We call them personality, common sense or just the way things are. Who decided?

There are people who remember versions of us that no longer exist: the child, the student, the new graduate, the young parent, the person we were before a particular loss. I wonder how much of our identity depends on who is around to remember us that way.

Grief can change your relationship with yourself not just with the person who is gone. You may miss the person you were when they were alive or the life you thought you'd have together. Sometimes loss changes the story you tell about who you are. That part deserves room, too.

We inherit more than possessions and family stories. We inherit ways of behaving, ideas about work, assumptions about relationships and rules about what a respectable life should look like. Some help us. Others deserve a closer look. We don't have to keep every inheritance.

Some people leave this world but conversations don't quite stop. You still know what they'd have said about a particular situation. You hear their expressions in your speech. You make a decision and wonder what they'd have thought. We carry people in ways we don't always notice.

The first days of November have a particular weight in the Catholic calendar: All Saints' Day and All Souls' Day. They invite us to remember people who came before us, the lives they lived and the things they left with us. Memory is part of how we understand ourselves, too.

I like the idea of a body of work more than I like the idea of a personal brand. A brand tells people what you are. A body of work lets them decide what they think.

Perhaps the real privilege of writing is getting to spend your life following your own curiosity. Not every curiosity becomes a book and not every thought needs to become anything. But you get to keep following.

I used to think publishing a book was the end of something. Now I think it is more like leaving a breadcrumb trail. Someone finds the book. Then another piece of writing. Then another. Eventually you realise you have made a body of work without quite noticing.

Writing is one of the few things I know where the finished version is almost never the version you started with. The interesting part is everything that happens in between.

There is a particular pleasure in discovering that an idea you had years ago wasn't wrong; you just weren't ready to finish thinking about it.

I have hundreds of old pieces of writing sitting around. Some are good. Some are frankly embarrassing. Some contain one sentence I still like and some are waiting patiently to become something entirely different. I'm rather enjoying finding out which is which.

The older I get, the more interested I am in the difference between having an experience and actually noticing it. Most of us have interesting lives. Perhaps the writer's job is simply to keep looking.

I don't think writers necessarily have more to say than other people. We may simply have developed the slightly unfortunate habit of writing things down. And publish it 😉

A book is such a strange object. Years of thinking, writing, doubting, editing and obsessing eventually become something that can sit quietly on a shelf while you get on with making dinner. There is something wonderfully absurd about that.

One of the strange things about having written for a long time is that your old work becomes evidence of people you used to be. Sometimes you read something and think: "Yes. Absolutely." And sometimes: "Who on earth wrote this?"

There are days when the most interesting thing that happens is that someone says something ridiculous over coffee. I write those things down. Beware.

I don't think ambition disappears with age; I think it gets more specific. At twenty-five, you might want everything. Later on, you may finally know which things you don't want at all. That can be considerably more useful.

One of the underrated pleasures of getting older is being able to leave a room without needing everyone in it to like you. Not every room, obviously, but quite a few.