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 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.

Some relationships survive because two people still love each other and some survive because they have become very good at being together. Those aren't necessarily the same thing.

Women are often taught to make themselves useful. Be helpful. Be accommodating. Blah. Remember everyone's birthday. Blah blah. Notice what needs doing. Anticipate the problem. Blah blah blah. There is a point at which useful becomes invisible. I think that's worth noticing.

I find it interesting how differently people talk about money depending on whether they have enough of it. When you don't have enough, money is practical but when you have enough, people often start pretending it isn't important. I'm not convinced.

There is a point in many careers when the question changes from: "What can I achieve?" to: "Do I actually want the life that comes with achieving it?" They are not the same question.

Hannah Arendt spent much of her life thinking about what it means to think for yourself. THAT seems like a rather good subject for a woman to leave behind. Today, on her birthday, I'm thinking about that and about how easily we can mistake conformity for certainty.

There is a particular kind of freedom in discovering that something you thought was "just who you are" was actually something you learned. You can learn things, which means that, inconveniently or conveniently, you can unlearn them too.

I've become suspicious of the phrase "that's just how I am." It sounds definitive. Often it's just a very efficient way of ending the conversation.

I think we underestimate how much energy goes into maintaining an old version of ourselves. Sometimes the life change isn't the exhausting bit. The exhausting bit is trying to convince yourself that nothing has changed.