# Marsh, *How To Be You*, 2022 > [!cite] > Marsh, Jeffrey. *How To Be You: Stop Trying to Be Someone Else and Start Living Your Life*. Souvenir Press, 2022. --- ‘Don’t dismiss. Don’t conflate. Don’t belittle and don’t rush any young person you’re talking to. Take the care you would give to a close friend and give that to a student.’ [[Marsh, How To Be You, 2022|(Marsh 2022, 179–180)]] ^6383dc ‘Assuming what someone means without actually asking for clarification is a big fat CDE: communication dead end. If you want a student to open up, then you need to do the work of showing them that it’s safe to do so.’ [[Marsh, How To Be You, 2022|(Marsh 2022, 180)]] ^fe492d ‘So much torture, so much worry, is brought into our lives by our inability to just sit still by ourselves.’ [[Marsh, How To Be You, 2022|(Marsh 2022, 170)]] ^0d826c ‘A popular theory goes that if you do something “wrong”, you will feel bad about it, and you are then persuaded not to do that wrong thing again. That’s actually a crazy theory. Why in the world do you need the middle step of feeling bad? Can’t you just live your life and see when something doesn’t work, then do your best not to do that thing again?’ [[Marsh, How To Be You, 2022|(Marsh 2022, 145)]] ^f2a0d1 ‘I suspect we keep feeling bad even when it doesn’t work for a couple of reasons: (1) we keep thinking it will get us somewhere and, worst of all, (2) it’s simply familiar.’ [[Marsh, How To Be You, 2022|(Marsh 2022, 156)]] ^68ee13 According to Marsh, the only way to *stop* feeling bad about things all the time is… to choose not to feel that way. Obviously, it takes a lot of time and work to do something so ‘simple.’ [[Marsh, How To Be You, 2022|(Marsh 2022, 156)]] ^877186 ‘\[…] remember to celebrate your work after you’re done.’ [[Marsh, How To Be You, 2022|(Marsh 2022, 152)]] ^d80bc4 ‘I have gotten comfortable with the uncomfortable feeling of not knowing.’ [[Marsh, How To Be You, 2022|(Marsh 2022, 139)]] ^a8cdc1 ‘People don’t ever wake up one day, having found themselves, and declare the quest over. This “finding” isn’t a single event like finding a lost shoe. It is a becoming, an ongoing process of discovery.’ [[Marsh, How To Be You, 2022|(Marsh 2022, 135)]] ^f0ebae ‘You get into trouble when you think you know who you’re supposed to be because once you “know”, you stop exploring, you stop examining. You check out… *from your life.*’ [[Marsh, How To Be You, 2022|(Marsh 2022, 130)]] ^b68656 ‘Many of us were trained to need a good excuse for everything. Having an excuse is like knowing the future. If you aren’t careful, you can live under a constant pressure that what you’re doing needs to make sense somehow, or be leading to a “better” or “right” life.’ [[Marsh, How To Be You, 2022|(Marsh 2022, 131)]] ^3e11b9 ‘Your parents’ reactions to what you *loved* gave you a context for what is appropriate or inappropriate for you to *be* and what is the right thing for you to want to do.’ [[Marsh, How To Be You, 2022|(Marsh 2022, 131)]] ^ee6286 ‘You have so little control over your life circumstances and you are not alone in that.’ [[Marsh, How To Be You, 2022|(Marsh 2022, 110)]] ^d724f7 ‘\[…] control isn’t even possible in almost every situation, and yet most people believe it’s the thing they must have.’ [[Marsh, How To Be You, 2022|(Marsh 2022, 108)]] ^c4f70d ‘The only solution, it seems, is to try to control harder. No! Don’t do it! When trying to control your life doesn’t work, you try harder to control, and when that doesn’t work, you try even harder to control, and on and on, assuming the whole time that there is something wrong with you if you can’t control what happens to you.’ [[Marsh, How To Be You, 2022|(Marsh 2022, 109)]] ^657aa3 ‘So how exactly do we let go of control and punishment once and for all? \[…] You will need to slow down. You need to sidestep or ignore a lot of what you’ve been taught to believe. You will need to take deep breaths and find ways to pause and look deeply. \[…] Get off the control train. Refuse to participate. Let it go. Also, you will need to be willing not to feel like you. I know it sounds crazy, but you know who you are based on what you believe, and if you’re going to change your beliefs, it will feel like you are changing yourself.’ [[Marsh, How To Be You, 2022|(Marsh 2022, 110)]] ^587c83 ‘Letting go of thinking about things in terms of punishment and reward will help you see more possibilities about what you actually do “deserve”. And hopefully, you will even see that life is not about deserving.’ [[Marsh, How To Be You, 2022|(Marsh 2022, 102)]] ^fd4755 ‘Dividing the people and things up into good and bad and punishment and reward arbitrarily and according to our whims is a way we try to box up life. It’s a way we try to control life.’ [[Marsh, How To Be You, 2022|(Marsh 2022, 101)]] ^a292e0 ‘Just because you don’t like something doesn’t mean it’s a punishment. And liking something doesn’t make it a reward. [[Marsh, How To Be You, 2022|(Marsh 2022, 101)]] ^afb6e3 ‘Reducing the vast, beautiful, mysterious happenings of the universe all the way down to being about what you want or don’t want is incredibly selfish. It is an utterly self-centered act. Beyond there being other people on this planet who might think differently about the same events, there are trees and squirrels and comets flying by that, as we might all guess, have just as much of a right to be here as you do. You can’t make it all about your desire to be validated by rewards or made penitent by punishments. You can’t make it all about you, because it so clearly isn’t.’ [[Marsh, How To Be You, 2022|(Marsh 2022, 101)]] ^59a4dc ‘Withholding affection from yourself or punishing yourself isn’t a very effective way to change your own behavior. People who feel left out, like they are being singled out, like they are being abused by life, aren’t too enthusiastic about changing.’ [[Marsh, How To Be You, 2022|(Marsh 2022, 96)]] ^743ac4