In her bold new book Proof of Life: Let Go, Let Love, and Stop Looking for Permission to Live Your Life, writer and speaker Jennifer Pastiloff invites us into the messy, magical truth of transformation. Best known for her bestselling memoir On Being Human and her unfiltered dispatches on Substack, Pastiloff writes the way she lives — with radical vulnerability, sharp wit, and an unshakeable belief in the power of starting over. This excerpt is part rallying cry, part love letter to anyone who’s ever felt stuck or unworthy — and a vivid reminder that sometimes the life we think is falling apart is actually the one we’ve been waiting for.
There’s an expression that’s mistakenly attributed to John Lennon: “Life is what happens when you’re busy making other plans.” Life happened while I was busy trying to write this book.
Except, it didn’t just happen. It didn’t even blow up. “My whole life blew up,” I’d say, like it was some passive thing that I had no choice in.
I blew it up, and despite what I initially believed (and what some other people told me) I neither wrecked nor destroyed my life. I expanded it. I’ve got to tell you, it can feel like the same thing. “You get to have this” is a thing I now say pretty regularly. I believe it, too. But for most of my life, I did not believe I deserved anything.
I did deserve some things, of course. Guilt, feeling bad, punishment, things being taken away from me, et cetera. But as far as love, joy, ease, contentment, or any kind of feeling good? Nope. Ever since I was eight years old, I’d held tight to the fact that I was a bad person. A monster, as it were.
For reference, here’s how my monster got made: The last thing that my favorite person, my entire universe — my father — said to me was “You’re being bad and making me not feel good.” Then he dropped dead.
I took on that badness as a permanent uniform. Starting that July, between the second and third grades, I imagined horns and fangs and scales when I looked in the mirror. I knew I had to pay for what I did, for the rest of my life.
I eventually did take off that uniform of badness and accept all I’d denied myself, even when it felt like I was wearing someone else’s life without my old uniform on. I wasn’t.
What I’m saying is that if I could do what I believed to be impossible, you can, too.
Oh, and it isn’t impossible.
I unexpectedly bought a house, then left my husband. After I bought the house. Neither planned; both complicated. Equally as complicated and unplanned was my falling madly and unexpectedly in love with someone else, then becoming engaged to that person while still disentangling myself from my long and very precarious marriage, which included custody of our small child and, perhaps most damning—at least for a person in California who wants to exit a long marriage—my being the breadwinner.
I started writing poetry again, then teaching poetry workshops to hundreds of people. I switched antidepressants, after years of taking Prozac, and became a prolific painter, despite not even being able to draw a stick figure. Then there was the incredible blow that was my mother’s new diagnosis: Alzheimer’s.
It all happened while I was supposed to be working on this book. Some other awful words of note in addition to supposed: should, shame, stupid, sorry.
So many seemingly impossible things were happening around me, yet I was trying to repudiate them as if they were not happening — the same way I saw others deny what was possible in their own lives, even as what they were denying was very obviously occurring. I became aware that I was doing the exact thing I’d witnessed folks do in my workshops. I was trying to negate what was right in front of me, just like I’d coached people to stop doing. (Hi, Pot. It’s me, Kettle.)
I had no choice but to write about it if I wanted to work through it. I wrote to remind myself — as well as anyone who needed it — how easy it is to cling to old, familiar stories or live in denial, and certainly not because we need reminding how easy it is to fall back into old patterns. But because we do need reminders to use kid gloves on ourselves because of how easy it can be.
May you be willing to let go of the belief that life is something to be tolerated and that choosing and being yourself is not permissible. No matter what you have been told, no matter what you think — you can’t believe everything you think anyway — you are deserving and worthy of the life you want. You are deserving and worthy. That’s the whole sentence. No qualifiers or exceptions come after. That’s it.
Maybe you’ve spent God knows how many years climbing the corporate ladder, just to realize that not only have you not climbed anywhere besides out of your overflowing inbox filled with Zoom invites, but also that you don’t want to spend another second climbing a hallucinatory ladder. Maybe you’ve stayed at a soul‑sucking job but are too afraid to leave for all the reasons we are ever too afraid to leave. Maybe you’ve painstakingly admitted you are a writer at last and have begun your book. Maybe you’ve gone back to school at fifty or seventy or twenty‑two. Maybe your beloved passed away, and the thought of even opening the cupboard and seeing their coffee mug brings you to your knees. Maybe you’re tired of being single and ready to break out the dating apps or sign up for a hip‑hop class to meet people, even though dating apps scare you and you have two left feet. Maybe you’ve had your heart broken. Maybe you did the breaking, to save your own heart for once. Maybe you’ve just entered recovery and are navigating the world as a sober person, or maybe you’ve relapsed and are beginning again. Maybe you’re recovering from a heart attack or adjusting to life after a double mastectomy or some kind of cancer that kicked your ass. Maybe your best friend broke up with you for a reason you’ll never understand, even though you have tried very hard to. Maybe you ended a friendship because you finally get what boundaries mean despite growing up with nary a one. Maybe you are in the process of transitioning and using your beautiful new name out in the world. Maybe you lost a child, gave birth, became a solo parent, or took in your brother’s kids who were left orphans. Maybe your kids are out of the house and empty nester is your new moniker, which alternately makes you weep with missing them and has you jumping on the bed like a toddler, flinging yourself in the air with glee at the thought of your new freedom.
There are endless maybes of what may be going on in your life, but one thing is certain. This next phase is: The Era of You, and may this book be your companion as you enter it.
You absolutely and wholeheartedly get to choose yourself, even if others don’t approve. Even if others don’t choose you. Especially then, you must choose you.
So many think they don’t get to rest, or feel guilty for it. They feel they need to constantly be producing, and that they must be able to show for what they produced.
When my son, Charlie, was little, he asked me if the trees stay awake at night or if they sleep. My friend overheard his sweet and profound question.
She answered him. “Charlie, dear, why they sleep, of course. Holding up the sky is very tiring.”
This Is The Era of You
You get to must become your own permission slip.
Will you write something down real quick?
I am partial to sticky notes; they’re like my ride or dies. They’re all over my house, I use them in workshops and retreats, I put them in my son’s lunchbox as love notes, and they are my version of PowerPoint when I give keynotes. They’re cute and colorful, sure, but the best thing about them is that you can stick them anywhere. You can move them, stick them where the sun doesn’t shine, crumple them, or throw them away. They can serve as little reminders that nothing is permanent. Especially not stuckness.
Like sticky notes, we, too, are malleable. We get to change and unstick ourselves from old stories and beliefs. (Obviously, we also get to be cute and colorful.)
What I’m saying is: May we be more like sticky notes.
Now, go grab a sticky note. (Or anything else will suffice if you don’t have any.) Write in big, bold letters. Put the note where you’ll see it frequently.
Feel free to replace the we with an I. Whatever works.
Our collective sticky note:
We do note have to prove that we deserve to be wildly alive ever again.
We do not need to crush what lights us up ever again.
We do not have to try to talk ourselves out of feeling good ever again.
Wait. One more:
We are our own proof of life.
From Proof of Life: Let Go, Let Love, and Stop Looking for Permission to Live Your Life by Jennifer Pastiloff with permission from Dutton, an imprint of the Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Copyright © 2025 by Jennifer Pastiloff
Jennifer Pastiloff trots the globe as a public speaker. She is the author of the national bestseller On Being Human, founder of the Substack Proof of Life, and teaches writing and creativity classes workshops when she isn’t painting. She is deaf, reads lips, and mishears almost everything, but what she hears is usually funnier (at least she thinks so).
