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In the first weeks of March 2020 there was much puzzling over why we didn’t have more stories about the 1918 flu pandemic. But now it seems clear: people want to move on as quickly as possible.
Not having my physical presence responded to even in the smallest ways—no one has touched me or even smelled me for over a year—has inadvertently stripped away the lifelong habit of itemizing all the things that are wrong with me before I present myself to the world.
Certainly, one of the benefits of being in your forties must be the knowledge that depending on anything external to fundamentally transform you is a fool’s errand. As my friend Nina likes to say, wherever you go, that’s where you are.
the more you moved, the longer your life felt.
how does one mark time without movement or signposts? It remains flat, endless, and meaningless all at once.
What no one prepares you for as a woman is for everything to go right. When you are a woman alone, this is never even suggested as a possibility.
am untethered. Or if not exactly that, then my tethers have the capacity to unfurl at great lengths without ever breaking.
I packed all the versions of me. And now I am carting them all up many flights of stairs and they are very heavy.
When she says this, I am furious, but it doesn’t last. I can be angry about only so many things at the same time. And even then, I’m not very good at it.
What happens to us if, when we leave our own timeline, we slam into another version of ourselves? Does the universe implode? Is history irrevocably altered? But lately when I encounter past versions of myself, all I feel is sympathy and admiration. Good job, kid, I want to say. You did your best. Keep going.
When in fact, the uniqueness, if it can be called that, was simply in the telling, not the living.
Here all our conversations are underpinned with the understanding that things can be great and hard at the same time. At this table, we’ve all made the same choices; we’re all secure in them. As a starting line it is an extraordinary gift, and I have missed it.
What really irks this woman, I’ve come to realize, is that I appear to be enjoying myself. I have veered off the narrow path laid out for women to be successful in the world, and it turns out I’m fine. Sometimes better, sometimes worse, but mostly fine.
The older I get the less I find I stand on ceremony. My conversations with other women almost immediately just get to the point. I don’t think twice about talking about health, body issues, sex, insecurity. The pretense of…I suppose it’s shame, has evaporated.
We’re all mostly just sending the same messages back and forth to each other from puberty to death, the only difference as we go (hopefully) being that we do so with a better understanding of what we want, what we need, and the ability to ask for it directly and walk away from it more quickly when it doesn’t serve us.
It’s the other photos I’m reacting to, the ones that, by any measure, show me to be the woman I knew I had been trying so hard to be but never understood until now that I had been all along.
I’m a forty-six-year-old writer in Paris for a month. My hard work and mind and experience have brought me here against not a few odds. I’m
I have only myself to see me.
Parc Monceau
So far, aging often feels like an exercise in gaslighting. You might feel great. You might look great. And yet everyone and everything is telling you it’s terrible. It’s all terrible.
so much of enjoyment, and so much of bearing the hardest things, relies on the ability to do so with others. Misery loves company, but so does joy.
Before I can say exactly what I want and where I want to go, I need to get comfortable with the fact I can want. I need to believe it, believe there is joy to be had and it is mine for the taking.
The older I get, the better I know myself, the less distance I must travel to figure out whether to include someone in my life. The closer I am to me, the closer I am to other people (and conversely, the less time I need to figure out whether to keep them at arm’s length).
come to think of my forties as the age where the mortgage math takes over. What is the number that will make it possible to get the tests the doctor orders without having to worry about bankruptcy? What is the number that means you don’t approach every rent renewal wondering if the $10,000 you’ve finally scrounged together for savings will be spent on a broker’s fee and down payment looking for a new apartment? What is the number that will make it okay that there is no one to ask for help?
We talk of cities these days the way we used to talk about partners. How do we get them to commit? How do we convince them to let us stay permanently? Satisfy us emotionally and financially. To want us. To give us a safe haven. Of course, there is no guarantee a partner will give you this either. They could suck you dry too.
once out with my friends I find it difficult to pull myself away to an experience that, while appealing, is not guaranteed. My skin might be starving, but no more than my brain or, I suppose, my soul is for communion. I find myself out in the evenings, in the midst of conversation, hands sliding across the table for this meat or that cheese, or the hard end of the baguette, or to dole out the last of the carafe of rosé—une autre s’il vous plaît—and lean back into the conversation as though into a wave that carries me along, gently and securely. But also with direction and determination. To be
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But the wine is flowing, and the conversation is flowing, and I don’t want out of this.
I’ve stopped worrying about the dates I am canceling and just let myself go where I please, assuming it will just be a matter of time before I answer the call.
None of the selves I’d spent more than a year envisioning had yet to find a place here. Currently Paris is requiring me to be only one person, and that person is currently wearing tight-fitting cheap cotton.
I am fully and completely in my own body in a way I have not been in such a long time, I wonder right now if there was ever really a time that I was.
I’m clumsy and awkward, barely managing to walk a straight line on the sidewalk.
am fully inside myself and only looking out. I don’t care how I appear, only how I feel, and I feel fucking fantastic right now.
but I understand what she really means is: I’m scared to do the thing you just did, and you doing it made me have to think about that.
This, I think, is what maturity actually means most of the time. It has little to do with growing away from the things that bring us pleasure or joy or just silly fun. It most often just means kindness. Knowing how to give it, to ourselves and others, and also receive
Far from cataloging the state of your breasts, or your hips, or your tummy, men are mostly just thrilled you’ve taken off your clothes at all. Women’s bodies are beautiful. Truly. All of them. The amount of energy that has gone into convincing us otherwise is extraordinary and telling.
What right do I have not to? What right do I have not to take the joy that is available to me?
Age becomes a useless metric. I move “I’m mostly here to enjoy myself” into my bio. Lead with your needs.
Language bounced off me. Other people’s conversation flowed around me but could not carry me away.
That intensity leapt off and infused everything I encountered. The city vibrated with remote strangeness. That degree of newness and intensity slows time. It feels similar to the experience of trying to walk through deep water. There were days I didn’t think I could bear it. Like the pressure of it would succeed in pulverizing me.
Maybe Paris feels so unknowable because it does not ask one to have a destination at all times. It’s fine just to be. To wander.
West with the Night, Beryl Markham’s
Something is about to happen. You can count the minutes in your life when something happens. Strokes of light sweep the ground, shining red and green; it’s a gala evening, a late-night party—my party…. There. It’s happened. I’m flying to New York. It’s true…. I’m leaving my life behind. I don’t know if it will be through anger or hope, but something is going to be revealed—a world so full, so rich, and so unexpected that I’ll have the extraordinary adventure of becoming a different me.
Do all women do this? Insert themselves in real estate as though trying on an outfit.
How the world must have expanded for her at a time and age in the exact ways we are told it will be collapsing.
The assumption must be that they are there, have been all along. We need better maps. I shouldn’t have to look this hard. No one should. That’s where the anger comes from. I shouldn’t have to look this hard to know I am not alone. Not the first. Not original. I shouldn’t be dependent on the random placement of plaques or a casting director’s decision to cast a forty-year-old woman to see some element of my life, or its potential, in one that existed before me,
There is always youth emerging—triumphant, powerful, unquestioned, full of potential.
For the most part pleasure is a mood, not a narrative. It exists in the memory as a feeling you want to return to.
lose track of which name belongs to which girl. Which I shouldn’t. They are not interchangeable. But they seem to me to be in some way flattened by their youth, the way the elderly are flattened by their age.
internet has robbed her of discovery. Of being allowed to not know, to have to find out on your own.
Instead, she has been raised in a funhouse, with every version of what life could look like reflected back to her.
