Live Your Life Like Nobody Cares

What I want my granddaughter to know before I forget to tell her

A week ago, I became a grandmother for the first time.

I knew I was excited. We all were. We waited with the kind of anxious anticipation that makes time move strangely, too fast and too slow at the same time. But I was not fully prepared, and really, how could I be, for the tsunami of it. Relief that everyone was healthy. Joy at this new beginning for all of us. And love for this tiny, perfect girl who arrived and immediately rearranged every priority in the room without making a sound.

A few days later, a friend said to me, “You should write it all down. The feelings. The wisdom. Everything you want her to know. Write it down before you forget it all.” She chuckled when she said that last part. She knows how our brains work at this age. Too much to hold onto. Too much already slipping.

So I woke up at dawn, the way I always do when I need to write, and I sat down with my coffee. And the first thing that surfaced wasn’t practical. It wasn’t about money or career advice or choosing the right partner.

It was this: live your life like nobody cares.

The Empty Theater

That sounds harsh when you first hear it. It’s not. Or at least, it wasn’t for me.

I spent a good portion of my life performing. Not on a stage, but in rooms, in relationships, in work, in the quiet daily act of editing myself to fit whatever I thought was expected of me. Conforming in a world that says it’s progressive but still rewards sameness. Managing perceptions. Curating the version of me that would get the least resistance.

It took me a long time to realize that the audience I was performing for was mostly not watching. They were too busy running their own show, rehearsing their own lines, managing their own version of the same thing. The judgment I spent years organizing my life around was largely imaginary. Not entirely, but mostly.

And when that finally lands, the feeling isn’t sadness. It’s relief. And then it’s almost funny, honestly. All those years, all that energy, and the theater was mostly empty seats.

Maybe that’s why I ended up where I did. I eventually landed in New Orleans, where the freak flag isn’t something you fly on special occasions. It’s the uniform. I’m a gay woman who loves design and Paris and writing about both, and I live in a city full of artists, musicians, writers, and deeply conservative southerners, sometimes all in the same room, sometimes all in the same person. My whole life is kind of funny when I look at it from the right angle. Thank God.

The Surprise on the Other Side

The part I didn’t expect? When you stop editing yourself for other people, you don’t become selfish. You become more generous.

That sounds backward, I know.

Oftentimes, “choosing yourself” gets framed as a withdrawal from other people. Pick yourself. Put yourself first. Set your boundaries. And all of that matters. But when I stopped spending so much energy on the appearance of caring, I started actually caring. More deeply, more freely, and with fewer strings attached. I became a better partner, a better parent, a better friend, and a better designer. Not because I cared less about people, but because I stopped filtering everything through what it looked like from the outside.

These days, I notice generosity differently than I used to. Real generosity, the kind that has no agenda, is something you barely realize you’re doing when it’s genuine. There’s no calculation, no expectation of return. It just happens, almost quietly, because you have more to give when you’re not managing how everything looks.

And the healing that comes from that kind of openness is mostly behind the scenes. It’s invisible, but it’s more powerful than any of the obvious self-improvement work I’ve ever done.

The catch, and I don’t think anyone talks about this enough, is that truly seeing people and really connecting with them takes time. And time is finite. You can’t show up deeply for everyone, which means being honest about who you actually have room for. Not in a closed-off way. More in an intentional one. The door stays open, but the table only seats so many.

Choosing yourself at the expense of others is a different thing entirely. That’s not freedom. That’s just ego with better branding. The real thing is quieter than that, and it looks like showing up fully and letting other people do the same.

Still Listening

It would be nice to report that once you stop curating yourself for other people, the work is done. It isn’t. Not even close.

The inner work gets all the credit. The self-awareness, the therapy, the reflection. And all of that is real.

But the harder work, the one I’m still doing every day, is being truly aware of others. Not the appearance of awareness, but the real thing. Actually listening.

I catch myself in conversations, mid-sentence sometimes, and realize I haven’t heard a word the other person said because I’m already composing my response, already formulating my point, already waiting for my turn. And I have to pull myself back. Sometimes I catch it in time. Sometimes I don’t.

I think it comes from years of not feeling heard. We all carry some version of that. When you spend a long time feeling invisible or talked over, the hunger to be heard gets so loud that it drowns out your ability to hear anyone else. It becomes a habit, and then it becomes invisible to you.

Breaking that cycle takes more daily effort than any of the internal self-discovery work ever did. It’s the advanced class, and I’m still very much enrolled.

But the daily practice extends to everything, not just listening.

I changed careers in the second half of my life, which sounds brave but was really just the logical result of finally listening to myself. My old career lives inside the new one, alongside writing and new technology and projects that are still finding their legs. Not everything is working yet, and some of it is beautifully imperfect. But I love the challenges these days in a way I didn’t used to, and I think that’s because I have more room for them now that I’m not spending all my energy worrying about what everyone thinks.

This is one reason I love writing, Substack specifically. It gives me the space that real-time conversation doesn’t. I can form a thought without racing. When someone responds, I can sit with what they actually said and absorb it before I react. That’s not a limitation. It’s self-knowledge. And building your life around how you actually function instead of how you think you should might be the most practical form of “live like nobody cares” there is.

Courage, and the People Behind It

I keep coming back to the same question, and I don’t think I have a clean answer for it: what is everyone so afraid of?

If you look closely enough, every single person walking around has something that sits outside the norm. Something unique, something a little different, something they’ve learned to tuck away. Even the most traditional, buttoned-up person you know has something they only do when nobody’s watching, tucked neatly in a drawer they don’t open at dinner parties.

These aren’t new questions. People have been asking them forever. But maybe the value isn’t in the answer. Maybe it’s in keeping the question visible, reminding each other to wonder, because the moment we stop asking is the moment we stop noticing that we’re afraid at all.

And living like nobody cares, in the face of that fear, takes courage. Especially these days, and especially when you’re young.

It is one thing for me, at my age, with my experience and my hard-won sense of self, to say “be exactly who you are.” It is another thing entirely for a young person to do it in a world where people who pretend to care too much, and about the wrong things in my humble opinion, can make it feel genuinely dangerous to be yourself.

Being brave at a young age means you need brave and loving people behind you. Parents, grandparents, friends, chosen family, people who don’t just say “be yourself” and then leave you alone with the consequences. People who show up and stand behind the courage, not just applaud it from a distance.

Her parents are those people. Mabel and I are those people. And so are her other grandparents. She has six of us, by the way, and she is the first grandchild for every single one. Six grown adults who have navigated careers and heartbreaks and second acts of their own, all completely undone by one tiny girl who doesn’t even know our names yet.

She will not lack for backup. Or opinions. Or people willing to show up.

I’ll try to be thoughtful as I hand out my unsolicited wisdom, because I know the difference between giving advice and giving backup.

She’ll get both.

Before I Forget

My friend said to write it down before I forget. So here it is. Not all of it, not even most of it, but the thing that came first, before the coffee got cold, before the sun was all the way up.

Live your life like nobody cares.

Not because nobody does, but because the people who actually care about you, the real ones, are never the ones asking you to be smaller or quieter or more like everyone else.

And the rest of them? They’re not watching anyway. They never really were.

She’ll figure out the rest. I did, eventually, imperfectly, at dawn, still catching myself, still pulling back, still practicing. Still working on the diplomacy part, if I’m being honest. Still figuring it out.

But lighter than I used to be. And paying better attention than I used to.

Which might be the whole point.

Oh, and sweetheart? Eat your vegetables. Get outside and into nature every chance you get. Read everything you can get your hands on. Wear your sunscreen.

And always, always listen to your abuelas.

We know things.