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December 9 - December 12, 2024
“Why don’t you write anymore?” I would be asked. “Why don’t you start a blog again?” Because I have no right. No authority. Nothing interesting. No opinions. No stories.
I was in too many pieces to process such thoughts, or to attend wholly to them. Wholly!—an impossible idea. The cup of tea was not whole, the alphabet puzzle was not whole, the pelvic floor was not whole, the night was not whole, and I most of all, I was not whole.
When the haze of hormones, chronic sleeplessness, and alcohol-free nights lifted, I finally knew what had hit me. I looked around for pieces of myself I recognized, and tried to put the component parts back together, but nothing fit the same way anymore. The original form was quite gone. The new composition I made in its place was rough-hewn, with exposed cracks and gaps.
The thing about fantasy is it can’t be observed in reality. This makes it fun but also the symptom of a mental health disorder.
when we think of our best, authentic self, we see someone who’s self-disciplined, practicing impulse control.
Who am I? is not the right question to ask yourself in high school. The right question is How do I fit in?
On Wednesdays, the end of my working week, they would say, “Enjoy your days off!” And then because they’re considerate people who know that it’s hard to be a working mother, they’d correct themselves to say, “No, your days at work are your real days off, aren’t they!” But it’s not a question of which days to refer to, it’s a matter of there never being an “off.” Unlike a bicycle trailer, it turns out you can’t conveniently unhitch motherhood from who you are.
A one-track mind is usually seen as a bad thing, a deficiency, but a narrow outlet can generate enormous power, all that built-up energy funneled toward one point.
When Emma was twelve, she and a friend wrote stories about Star Trek—she remembers their loopy, girlish handwriting on the yellow legal pads they passed back and forth—and she says she feels like she has more in common, now, with that twelve-year-old girl than with the professor she has seemed to become. Those stories were fanfiction too, of course; she just didn’t know it.
In an excellent essay for Catapult magazine about fanfiction (which is really an excellent essay about love), the writer Emilia Copeland Titus notes, “Indifference is easy, but love—the kind of love that runs so deep and so clear that it threatens to burst the dam of your heart—is difficult.”
Something makes me happy, or brings me pleasure, and I ask, how does this make me look? Nice? Thin? Modest? Domestic? Caring? Invested in my relationship? Sexually faithful? Like a good wife? I put everything through a pressure test, to see if it will hold up under public scrutiny, to see if it’s okay. And if the pleasure doesn’t consider the needs of other people, and if it doesn’t attend to what other people require of me—if it’s just for me—then it will fail.
A question about how motherhood nearly ruined me, which no one ever asks. A question about how I disappeared from myself, and from Nathan, and from the couch, going to bed at the same time as the children to get a head start on the night, which now ended, impossibly, at two a.m. A question about how we no longer seemed similar at all, but completely different, biologically opposed, two people on different schedules, having different experiences, who no longer saw the same TV shows, nor the world the same way.
The young people today who think they’re wearing retro, nineties-style clothes, couldn’t possibly conceive of how many sizes up they’d need to go to replicate how we actually looked at the time.
Women mature out of their pleasures. Men, on the other hand, get to hang on to theirs, turning them into lifelong passions, or even better, a career. Then they get to make cute jokes about how they never grew up.
there was a time I also did not get it, and now look at me. The “truth about getting older is that there are fewer and fewer things to make fun of until finally there is nothing you are sure you will never be.” That’s a line from Jenny Offill’s novel Dept. of Speculation
