On my last two business trips, I’ve had the following things happen:

1) I got my entire meal comped at a nice restaurant (though I attribute 50% credit to my charming colleague)

2) I got almost-free ice cream at the airport (the guy charged me for a kid-sized cone rather than my giant serving plus six add-ons)

The thing is, these occurrences aren’t that rare for me. I’m a friendly, genuinely interested     (notice I said that, and not interesting) person who engages with those around her. Most often, its not even in a flirtatious manner — just genuine banter.

So, what does this mean and why am I writing about it?

I recently connected with a guy who, on our first conversation, admitted that he had jealousy/possessive tendencies, particularly when it came to his girlfriend and her male friends. Instant red-flag: all of my friends are dudes…literally…except one person.

That is right – I only have a single, non-relative, female friend.

And my guy friends and I aren’t your typical bunch: what this means is that I’m not friends with a bunch of potential boyfriends, hoping to someday get into my pants (or vice versa) – but I am friends with human beings who I happen to connect with on a crazy amount of levels and well, they just happen to have penises.

Here’s the thing about my dudes:

• We go shopping together (sometimes for me, more often for them, most often for random costume necessities for our random costume events)
• We talk on the phone (when we can’t see each other)
• We share things (apartments, beds, drinks, food, clothes – them to me!)
• We are there for each other (my friend called me when he needed to end things with his gf, my other friend literally helped me move my stuff out of my ex-bf’s)
• We get drunk together (without anything inappropriate implied – we trust each other)
• We don’t ask for permission [from our significant others] to see each other
• We tell each other secrets, and we keep those
• We see each other on a regular basis

Dear Mom,

There is something that happened 11 years ago, plus or minus a few days because I can never actually remember the exact date, that changed everything.

You died.

I was fifteen.

I’ve always had questions for you — questions I’ve slowly started to give up on because I will never get the answers from you. In some cruel joke by the universe or Spiritual Being we were raised to believe in, in order to answer those questions, I have to look at the world through your lens; I have to grasp at the limited, biased, adulterated remnants of you to construct what you would have said or what you would have thought.

Why didn’t you write us letters?

I have few memories of you — practically none, actually. It’s a shame because I was told that you were a great mother. I was told you sacrificed everything for us, the three children you left behind. I was told you were smart, cold, resourceful, and moody. I remember you being a good dancer. I remember a yellow silk dress and a delicate gold necklace. The necklace is ugly. I remember your shoes. There are dismembered fragments of you that I try to piece together in my mind, but can’t.

What would you have thought of me today? Would we get along? Would you approve of my boyfriends, my clothes, my haircuts, my life decisions?

Your death wasn’t the ending of a painful chapter in my life. I think, by the way, that that’s why I don’t remember much. They’re defense mechanisms — our minds’ ability to repress and forget, just not successful enough to completely eradicate the past. But your death was just the beginning. To think that by now I have lived almost half my life without you, that I remember more of my life without you than with you — that is painful. We were not warned about the extent of the damage that the loss of you would cause.

When did you know you loved Dad? When did you know he was “the one?” How many boyfriends did you have before? What is more important in marriage — to be passionate or to be honest?

The loss of you lingers. Not in your particular absence — rather, in the absence of those in your wake who I will never get to love, who I will never let love me. This is the side effect of you dying: the unwillingness to attach, the debilitating deer-in-the-headlights autonomic anxiety that happens when I think I’m getting too close.

Did you believe in God? If so, why? If so, did you doubt your beliefs when you were dying? Do you think you deserved your illness? Do you think we did?

You were a scientist — a chemist, I think. I know you ended up a pharmacist. There are your old books in Dad’s library. I wonder, and now I’m too far away to look, if you wrote your name in the front cover as I do in all of my books. I haven’t lived at home in a long time. I wonder if my curiosity came from you.

What advice would you have given me? On my graduation. On my potential wedding day. On motherhood. Would you have consoled me when I was sad?

There is something no one told us about the repercussions of your death — that they would be a constant. We buried you, honored you, sat shiva for seven days, and mourned for a year but the pain is a constant. You see, for me it is less the actual loss of you, but what it did to my brothers and my father that I struggle with. You took away from them the proof of concept that they could be wholly, unconditionally loved by a woman and now they fill the void in their hearts with whoever will have them, undeserving or not.

What did you want from and for me? Would you have loved me even if I failed? Would I have failed if you hadn’t died? Have I failed?

I want to know all of these answers. And not just to these questions, to some rather simple ones too.

Would you have adapted to technology? Would you have a Facebook? What would you have thought of reality TV? Gay marriage. Barack Obama. Online dating.

I am without a blueprint. The loss of you —without question — is what led to my infinite curiosity with how we react and act to those around us. The loss of you, thankfully, is what strengthened me because I understood the limitless bounds of my resilience. The loss of you, sadly, is what left me with a tiny, easily exploitable crack.

How would you have mourned the death of your mother? How would you have wanted to be remembered?

There’s no perfect formula to mourning, despite psychologists’ attempts to figure it out. I have friends who also no longer have mothers, and we talk about the dead mom’s club. We have drunk brunches on Mother’s Day at places with bottomless mimosas and waffles that are too big. We don’t let our boyfriend’s mothers hug us. We never talk about the disappointment we feel that our children will not have their maternal grandmothers. We acknowledge your absence, and in doing so make the presence of your loss palpable.

Would I be different if you had lived? Would I have left home at the same young age? Would I be dread going back as much as I do?

I always joke that I was raised by wolves. We were all — my two brothers, father, and I — brought back to our primal instincts when you died. We didn’t want to excel in your absence, we simply needed to survive. We were all wolves.

Have you found peace? What was your last thought?

Your daughter.

I’ve noticed a trend of “Top 10″ lists of people sharing their life lessons and have been working on mine for a little while. Here’s what I came up with; I like that its the first thing posted on this blog. Consider this more “lifestyle development” than dating advice.

1. Don’t concern yourself with being liked by everyone but remember to stay grateful for the people you love and who love you. I’ve never understood those who mistreat their closest people but still make an effort to be nice to complete strangers and acquaintances for fear of “offending them.” To me, that seems like a poor allocation of your mental resources.
2. Keep your promises, even when you won’t be held accountable for them. Don’t become someone who needs their integrity to be micromanaged. Two years ago, my neighbor bought me a bike to help me get around the city and asked that I ride 1 mile for every dollar he paid (done) and not sell it for at least four years. We fell out of touch last year and although I haven’t been biking as much, I lent the bike to one of my best friends so she could get around the city. And, you bet I won’t be selling it for a while (if ever!)
3. Don’t “plan” for the potential emotional consequences of a decision and use that as an excuse to stalemate. You don’t know how you’re going to feel until you feel it. Make your choice and then take the appropriate steps to recenter.
4. Education may be expensive but learning is not. There is no excuse, especially today, to claim that you can’t afford (the money or the time) to learn. Check out Khan Academy, Wikipedia, other blogs, or barter your knowledge away. When I needed to write a business plan, I used this book, Google, and traded French-speaking lessons with an alum from one of the best B-Schools in the country for help on the financial projections. Don’t confuse expensive education with being smarter or better.
5. Never stop learning. Even if that consists of examining yourself, stay hungry for information, knowledge, and data. If you don’t know how to do something, figure it out. One of my favourite sayings is that “there is always something left to learn.” Learning is not the same thing as being well-educated. (See above)
6. Quit drinking, even if its just for a little while. It will give you better skin, mental clarity, and most importantly, help build up your tolerance for making decisions that are outside the social norms. I stopped in January until about mid-July (going from 5-6 drinks a week to 1 cheat day a month) and the hardest thing wasn’t the “not drinking” part, it was the part where most people were telling me how weird I was for doing so. At times, especially at first, I’d feel very uncomfortable when someone made a snarky comment (imagine the first dates!) but today, I wouldn’t bat an eye. That resilience will extend to other decisions, too.
7. Discipline your mind. I was always a two-marshmallow kind of girl, until I wasn’t and both my physical and mental health suffered for it. Like the little social experiment above about not drinking in a drinking culture, play little games with yourself and train your mind. Learn to say “no”, “later”, and “only if…” to yourself and stick to it. Set goals and keep yourself honest. There are tools to help with that if you don’t want to enlist another person’s help.
8.  As you get older, you may not get more fearful but you will certainly have more excuses to choose from for not doing something and you will likely use them. This is the time to make all of your seemingly risky bad decisions. In retrospect, they will probably not be as bad as you think they are now and you will certainly be richer for the experience.
9. Take more pictures, especially of moments when you feel very happy. Digital photos mean that your whole life can be held in a hard drive that you can take anywhere you go. Your memory will often fail you (no matter how old you are) and cognitive biases mean you’ll remember something differently than it actually was, or not at all. But, let the pictures bring you back and also push you forward. Most of us already carry around a camera anyway.
10. Believe in “fairies”. On the negative side, the Tinkerbell Effect is why things that shouldn’t matter to people really matter to people but on the flip-side, if you don’t believe something incredible can happen, it probably won’t. So prime your brain for extraordinary. Another example: social psychologist Richard Wiseman did an experiment where he saw the correlation between a subject’s positive attitude and whether or not they noticed a $5 bill conspicuously placed on the ground in front of them. (There was.)