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

by Glynnis MacNicol

Years of bumper stickers and Instagram accounts encouraging us to live in the now have not, it seems, prepared anyone to actually exist in a present where the future is so glaringly shifting like cursed quicksand in a fairy tale.

What no one prepares you for as a woman is for everything to go right.

That the intervening months have been swallowed into some sort of black hole during which no progress was made, no development, no transformation. And that any transformation I may have undergone has had very little to do with my own day-to-day experience and very much to do with witnessing so many other people experience isolation and uncertainty for the first time, and violently balk at the realities of it.

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.

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.

“We’re an attack on the value system of certain people.” As if my, or our, enjoyment undermines the hard work they have devoted to staying the path.

Actual maturity, I’ve come to suspect, is largely just succeeding at not letting the injuries of your childhood debilitate you, which is the great challenge of life.

I’m now able to enjoy the very obviously unflattering photos from two decades ago the way we all feel compassion and humor about something painful that is now so out of reach. 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.

That despite feeling satisfied and fulfilled, you can’t possibly be because you have opted out of the only satisfying and fulfilling things available to women (which no matter how much we profess to have progressed always seem to boil down to partners and parenting).

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.

I find that sometimes the easiest way to stick to your own experience of your life is, sadly, to stay quiet about it. Slide invisibly through the world doing exactly what you want. Don’t offer anything up for review.

“To know a city by bike is to know it intimately in a way not possible by foot or car…like being thrust into the bloodstream of a great beast, privy to its every pulse…you learn the beats and melody of the streets the way you learn any song.”

What right do I have to enjoy myself in this moment? I automatically ask myself. And then, immediately: What right do I have not to? What right do I have not to take the joy that is available to me?

For the most part pleasure is a mood, not a narrative. It exists in the memory as a feeling you want to return to. The sun. The sound of water. The afternoons in the park that are so similar they blend together.

I wake up every day grateful that I did not have the internet in my youth. I remember life without the internet, and the full horror of life with it feels apparent to me every day. I wouldn’t hand over my eighties childhood for a lifetime of smooth skin and perky breasts.

I pour myself a glass of wine and put on a Nina Simone playlist. The noise from the street gently filters in. This is the bone marrow of life. The swirl of the stars. The solitude of the rooms. The voice of Ms. Simone. The pleasure.

Time zones did not exist until 1883. Our entire modern understanding of time is, in fact, largely the result of the railroads. Towns needed to coordinate their timepieces so that they could coordinate arrivals and departures. Capitalism put us all on the same clock. The construct of time, as we collectively now experience it, is not yet two hundred years old.

Movement is only enjoyable when it’s a choice. Bookended by places of respite and permanence.

Panic needs an audience to be useful.

I’m also vaguely aware that I have become the very thing we are taught to fear. A woman unafraid of her own desires, freed from the expectation of asking permission to satisfy them, even briefly. There’s not a shred of shame.

What is it about riding through the country at night. Riding anywhere at night. The satisfaction. The knowledge of a life well lived.