Wine Wisdom

Recently around a table filled with friends each reaching for their cups of a deep red wine, charcuterie, and my favorite crunchy walnuts, I had a sudden realization. When I have kids (one day) there are a few essential truths at the age of 26 that I don’t want to forget to tell them.

So here are my rules to life.

1. 90% of Life is Showing Up

Prioritize your people. And to me that is my family. Growing up I was lucky enough to be stitched together by love. My parents, grandparents, my aunts and uncles, my cousins, my younger sister. The best thing about me is probably my family. And the older I get the more I realize that kind of closeness is not accidental. Family is a choice people keep making over and over again.

Because maintaining a family actually takes effort once everyone grows up. It takes calling people back. Showing up to things. Traveling when you are tired. Checking in when life gets busy. It takes choosing each other repeatedly even after time, distance, arguments, marriages, children, grief, and completely different lives begin pulling everyone apart.

But do it anyways because 90% of life is showing up for the people we care about. Some of the moments that brought me closest to my family happened during things that technically were not even “happy.” I have gone to funerals for relatives I barley knew and somehow left feeling more connected to my younger cousins than before. I have gone to graduations and white coat ceremonies and random family gatherings where suddenly you look around and realize these people are becoming adults alongside you. People you played with as children become people you deeply admire. Even old childhood dynamics start healing with time. Cousins you fought with become best friends. Relationships soften. Everybody grows up a little. And honestly I think one of the greatest responsibilities we have in life is continuing to mend the bridge back to one another. Just keep trying.

Growing up my grandma created the most magical cousin camp every summer. We would stay at her house for a week wearing matching camp t-shirts while earning “cousin camp money” by doing chores around the house that we could later spend at the final auction. The auction items were random Costco things which somehow made it even more exciting. I specifically remember people aggressively bidding fake money on giant tubs of candy and water guns like our lives depended on it.

Once a summer, we would all sleep outside in a giant tent while my grandma told stories in the dark. There were campfires and s’mores and movies in the basement with popcorn and lemonade. Everything felt special. Everything detail felt intentional. Those are still some of my favorite memories of my entire life. And the older I get the more I realize none of that magic happened accidentally. My grandmother made the choice to create it for us. She chose to go above and beyond. She chose to make ordinary things feel meaningful.

I think adults forget that we can do that too. You can choose to make people feel loved. You can choose to host dinners and celebrate birthdays and create traditions and make things beautiful and thoughtful and memorable. You can choose to turn ordinary moments into stories people carry forever. That kind of magic is a choice. It starts by showing up for each other and then choosing to live life with them.

2. You can break any rule if you accept the consequence

   
   

Around the table the topic of train ticket prices came up and I admitted that I am a huge advocate of hypothetically sneaking onto trains and never buying tickets because worst case scenario you just pay the fine and best case scenario it was free. To me this is just math. Meanwhile my friends were horrified by this approach, taking rules very seriously for the betterment of society while I have always operated under the philosophy that the only rules I consistently follow are the ones that keep me out of jail. I do not necessarily think either side is wrong though. I just think people pretend too often that they are not making choices. Every action in life comes with consequences attached to it. Breaking rules is a choice. Following rules is a choice. Staying in relationships is a choice. Leaving them is a choice too. You can do almost whatever you want with your life if you are willing to accept what comes after it.

3. There is only 2 people in every relationship, and only you get to decide how you deserve to be treated

   
   

This is a big one because at the age of 26, I have been in relationships, seen relationships, urged friends to leave relationships, given unsolicited advice about relationships, and even lost friendships over decisions I could not respect. But honestly, now here I am retracting almost all relationship advice going forward because I have come to the understanding that there are really only two people inside a relationship. Just you and another person living through thousands of tiny daily moments together that nobody else sees. Not your friends, not your parents, not strangers online, not the girl in the bathroom at the bar telling you he is toxic while fixing her lipstick. Just you two. And more importantly, only you get to decide what you deserve.

The relationship you dream about in your head, the one that imitates “the one,” the fairytale, the soft safe kind of love people spend their entire lives looking for, it is your responsibility to protect the possibility of that for yourself. It is my job in this life to make sure I am respected, cared for, and deeply loved. It sounds obvious when written down but I actually think people forget this all the time. You have to protect the person living inside of you. You decide what is okay to live with. You decide what feels wrong. You decide how much pain is too much pain. Be as picky as you want. Seriously. Build a life that feels good to you because if you settle for less than what you know you need, nobody else carries that responsibility but you. No one owns you. No one controls you. You give yourself permission for the life you live, so live as honestly as you can.

4. Dig Yourself

The university class I credit the most to my personal growth was African dance, which is funny because I spent thousands of dollars on a business degree only for the life changing wisdom to come from my dance class. But my professor was genuinely one of the wisest people I have ever met. He only really spoke in stories. He danced because he had something to say and when he entered a room you felt it immediately. He carried himself like somebody who knew exactly who he was.

One day he walked up to the tallest girl in our class and said, completely seriously, “You’re short.”

And she laughed and said, “No I’m not.”

“Yes you are.”

Again she laughed. “I wish I was short. Men don’t like tall girls.”

Then for the next hour this man continued insisting she was short until eventually she started cracking a little. “Maybe I’m not as tall as I thought.” And suddenly he screamed, “DIG YOURSELF.”

The whole room went silent. As one would expect if the professor starts screaming. He marched to the front of class puffing his chest out with the cockiest smile on his face repeating it over and over again. Dig yourself. Dig deep enough into your roots that nobody else gets to tell you who you are. Because people will try. They will tell you you’re too emotional, too loud, too difficult, too ambitious, too much, too intimidating, too soft. And if you do not know yourself deeply enough eventually you will start believing them.

I think about that class all the time because honestly I think half of adulthood is just figuring out who you actually are underneath everybody else’s opinions of you. Dig yourself. Love yourself. Love what your body can do. Make yourself into someone that feels aligned with your soul instead of trying to become somebody easier for the world to digest.

5. Do not prove your worth to anyone

The worst boss I ever had almost convinced me I was stupid. I was a fresh associate staffed on a large integration project and honestly in the beginning I loved the work. I loved the movement of deals, the chaos of it, the workplans, the integration meetings, figuring out how giant corporations somehow stitched themselves together behind the scenes. I still miss that feeling sometimes. But slowly, little by little, my boss started shrinking me. Piano piano as the Italians say.

At first I did not talk enough. Then I talked too much. I did not ask enough questions. Then my questions were bad. Everything I did was somehow wrong. How did I even get hired? Why did I think I was good enough to be on their team? Every version of me was incorrect. And because I was young and they were senior and I respected authority, I believed them.

Over the course of six months I watched myself become smaller. I cried before meetings. I replayed every sentence I said all day long in my head. I obsessed over every mistake. I genuinely started believing I did not deserve to be there. One Sunday night my partner put a 7am Monday meeting on my calendar while I was asleep and I woke up at 7:30 in full panic realizing I missed it. They formally wrote me up for that. Looking back now it actually makes me laugh a little because at the time I thought my life was ending over a random corporate calendar invite.

But what makes me angry now is how hard I worked trying to prove my worth to people who had already decided not to see it. That experience taught me something I will carry forever which is that there is a massive difference between being challenged and being diminished. Hard work is fine. Pressure is fine. Criticism is fine. But do not let people convince you that your value disappears because they personally cannot see it. Stick up for yourself. Seriously. Who cares about the power difference. Nobody gets to decide your worth for you unless you hand them permission.

6. Who your friends are is who you become

Finally, my last rule to who ever reads this. The older I get the more important friendship becomes to me. Real friendship. Not just history or convenience or people you keep around because you have known them forever. I mean genuine friendship. The kind where somebody celebrates your wins without secretly competing with you. The kind where you leave dinner feeling bigger instead of smaller.

Because honestly who you surround yourself with eventually becomes your life.

Your friends shape your standards, your confidence, your habits, your worldview, even the way you talk to yourself. And I think friendship standards are not discussed enough because there are a lot of people who call themselves your friend while quietly tearing you down to make themselves feel better. Jealousy inside friendships is one of the saddest things to witness because friendship is supposed to feel like partnership. Like we are all trying to survive this life together side by side.

Two years ago I took a long hard look at my life and realized a lot of the people around me were not people I wanted to become. So I cut almost all of them off. Honestly it was horrible at first. I was lonely for almost a year. I kept wondering if I was expecting too much from people or if I had made some huge mistake. But eventually that empty space started filling correctly and the right people moved in.

Women who inspire me. Women who motivate me. Women who genuinely want good things for me and who I want good things for in return. Women I admire deeply. And now when I look at my friends I feel proud. Proud of who they are, proud of who they are becoming, proud to stand beside them while they build beautiful lives for themselves. I think friendship is one of the most underrated parts of being human. We are not supposed to do life alone. So choose your people carefully because eventually your life starts resembling the rooms you spend the most time in.