I'm Mostly Here to Enjoy Myself: One Woman's Pursuit of Pleasure in Paris

by Glynnis MacNicol

I once went to a museum exhibit about Einstein, and the only idea I took away from it was that movement stretches time. I don’t recall the science behind this, something to do with curvature I think. What I was left with was the understanding that the more you moved, the longer your life felt.

I am stunned by all of this. I feel as if the world has taken me by the hand. Thrown open a door. Raised a glass and toasted my good decision-making.

I have been perversely grateful every day since March 2020 that she died before the pandemic and we didn’t have to spend this time worried about her well-being in a locked-down nursing home.

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.

In The White Album, Joan Didion famously wrote down her packing list, radical at the time—Tampax!—and revealing in its intimacy and simplicity. As a storytelling device, it was admirable in what it told the reader about the writer, about her life, and about what it meant to be a woman in the world, without seeming to say much.

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.

I pulled out all the photos I had that showed me at parties with friends. I looked amazing in all of them. I couldn’t believe it. I dazzled. And yet, I’m aware that in each instance I’d been horrified by the photos the first time I’d seen them. The disconnect is staggering to me now.

average, a five-year gap between current me being able to enjoy the me in the photos. Five years before I can clearly see myself for what I am: powerful and alive and beautiful. Ever since, when I see a photo of myself, as much as I may be put off by it (and there is plenty to be put off by, as this recent tour through my phone has evidenced) I remind myself that in five years I will love it. But I don’t want to wait five years. I want enjoyment now.

Older woman. In my own head I am still young. I do not yet feel the diminishment of my so-called powers in the way I have been warned will happen. Far from invisible, I do not feel even remotely faded. I wonder sometimes if this is because I live by myself and do not have the experience of living alongside people whom I have loved enough to commit my life to, have birthed, have raised through the years of total dependence, who have defined my place in the world, and who suddenly, or slowly and then quickly, need me less. See me less. I have only myself to see me.

On Instagram from time to time, much like Didion’s packing list, floats by Garbo’s response to a dinner invitation: “Thank you for thinking of me, and I am sorry, but for the moment, I can speak to no one.”

And voilà. Here we are. A postcard for the good life. Five beauties in a window. Lipstick, hair, light. A classic of the genre.

I watch it again and again and stare at my own beauty, which leaps off the screen at me, delayed ten years. My jawline. My eyes. My hair. I find myself coveting myself. And then I remind myself, I will covet this self too. This trip. This freedom. This joy. This movement and this skin I have now, even if parts are less vibrant than they were, they are more so now than they will be. I know, too, that what the person in that video did not have was a sense of self. A belief in herself. A seriousness in life. Do I have it now? Do we ever fully have it?