I'm Mostly Here to Enjoy Myself Quotes

“Eventually, I did some calculations and concluded that there is, on 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.”
― Glynnis MacNicol, I'm Mostly Here to Enjoy Myself: One Woman's Pursuit of Pleasure in Paris

“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.”
― Glynnis MacNicol, I'm Mostly Here to Enjoy Myself: One Woman's Pursuit of Pleasure in Paris

“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.”
― Glynnis MacNicol, I'm Mostly Here to Enjoy Myself: One Woman's Pursuit of Pleasure in Paris

“inside I am aflame with gratitude that I have only myself to carry around, however heavy all these me’s might currently be.”
― Glynnis MacNicol, I'm Mostly Here to Enjoy Myself: One Woman's Pursuit of Pleasure in Paris

“I’ve sometimes found it difficult to mark the passage of time in my own life. Being untethered, thrilling though it often is, also means being unstuck in time for much of the time. I’m disconnected from nearly every ritual commonly used to mark progress and worthiness: engagement parties, weddings, baby showers, children’s birthdays, children’s school years, marriage anniversaries, Mother’s Day.”
― Glynnis MacNicol, I'm Mostly Here to Enjoy Myself: One Woman's Pursuit of Pleasure in Paris

“It’s in the face of this expression that I remember something I’ve always known. Not learned. Known. 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. The fact I am currently being reminded of this by a thirty-year-old man with bulging arms and a washboard stomach—that I need to be reminded of this by a man—feels like a somewhat problematic catch-22 that I imagine has been explored in a number of highly respected feminist books I have not read.”
― Glynnis MacNicol, I'm Mostly Here to Enjoy Myself: One Woman's Pursuit of Pleasure in Paris

“Women in myths are forever condemning the world to chaos in their search for knowledge - the apple bitten, the box opened. But I know plenty. I am not here to learn. I am here to feel.”
― Glynnis MacNicol, I'm Mostly Here to Enjoy Myself: One Woman's Pursuit of Pleasure in Paris

“But inside I am aflame with gratitude that I have only myself to carry around, however heavy all these me’s might currently be.”
― Glynnis MacNicol, I'm Mostly Here to Enjoy Myself: One Woman's Pursuit of Pleasure in Paris

“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.”
― Glynnis MacNicol, I'm Mostly Here to Enjoy Myself: One Woman's Pursuit of Pleasure in Paris

“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 it. In this instance, this is not a challenge since I’m so high on the sensation of my entire body being alive I cannot feel anything but good. Beyond good, I feel great. I’m surprised by how powerful I feel. I got what I wanted, or allowed what I wanted to get me.”
― Glynnis MacNicol, I'm Mostly Here to Enjoy Myself: One Woman's Pursuit of Pleasure in Paris

“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. If people don’t know what you’re doing, they can’t tell you why it doesn’t matter. Clearly this is not the route I have chosen, though I can see its appeal.”
― Glynnis MacNicol, I'm Mostly Here to Enjoy Myself: One Woman's Pursuit of Pleasure in Paris

“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. Eventually every day becomes an endless decision to choose reality over consensus. I am feeling this, so it must be true versus everyone says this is true, so I will feel it too. The disconnect is so extreme at times, I find the result is I’ve come to distrust literally every story we’ve ever been told to expect as women, even when some of them have turned out to be true. To choose to enjoy things simply because they are enjoyable, even if no one quite believes you. To understand things are hard, even when you are constantly being told they are not as hard. This is true loneliness, I sometimes want to say. Because 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. And not the company of one other person. So many women in my life are told daily by their partner that they are beautiful, and yet move through the world feeling ugly. We need the company of a narrative.”
― Glynnis MacNicol, I'm Mostly Here to Enjoy Myself: One Woman's Pursuit of Pleasure in Paris

“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. Which inevitably throws a question mark at the end of her decisions. I mentioned this to Nina once, and she understood immediately: “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. And worse, calls into question the rewards that path offers. If I don’t feel bad about my life, how can they feel good? I used to feel the need to launch a rousing defense of myself in the face of this, but that’s gone away. It feels like enough that my life is no longer a question mark to me. Here at this table, I don’t need to answer for myself.”
― Glynnis MacNicol, I'm Mostly Here to Enjoy Myself: One Woman's Pursuit of Pleasure in Paris

“And yet, the perceived risk of jetting away, only slightly ahead of a new virus wave, is, in my mind, only incrementally greater than any other decision I make. My life as a single forty-six-year-old writer—outside of marriage, outside of motherhood, outside of payroll, outside of ritual, outside of, for the past year anyway, real-life human contact—is a life lived largely without a safety net. I am my own fallback. I play all the roles. I’m the person who thinks five steps ahead down all the paths, envisions the various outcomes, and then role-plays all the people I will have to be to solve it. Whether it is risky to get on a plane pales in comparison to what could potentially be more of this…not just isolation, but stagnancy. Total invisibility. Paralysis. Leaving feels less like a risk than a necessity.”
― Glynnis MacNicol, I'm Mostly Here to Enjoy Myself: One Woman's Pursuit of Pleasure in Paris

“My body and brain are still very much tied together, but the former is currently running the show. And my body is not here for validation. My body is here for pleasure.”
― Glynnis MacNicol, I'm Mostly Here to Enjoy Myself: One Woman's Pursuit of Pleasure in Paris

“…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. If people don’t know what you’re doing they can’t tell you why it doesn’t matter. Clearly this is not the route I’ve chosen, though I can see its appeal.”
― Glynnis MacNicol, I'm Mostly Here to Enjoy Myself: One Woman's Pursuit of Pleasure in Paris

“I look at this young woman, twenty-three years old, and how all her selves have been split up too. Not by isolation, but by too much connection. Too much knowledge. The way that the internet has robbed her of discovery. Of being allowed to not know, to have to find out on your own. The understanding of self being the result of the work of acquiring that knowledge. Instead, she has been raised in a funhouse, with every version of what life could look like reflected back to her.”
― Glynnis MacNicol, I'm Mostly Here to Enjoy Myself: One Woman's Pursuit of Pleasure in Paris

“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.”
― Glynnis MacNicol, I'm Mostly Here to Enjoy Myself: One Woman's Pursuit of Pleasure in Paris

“But I was left with the impression that the only female problems we understood women to have, and subsequently know how to solve, were love and children.”
― Glynnis MacNicol, I'm Mostly Here to Enjoy Myself: One Woman's Pursuit of Pleasure in Paris

“I’ve sometimes found it difficult to mark the passage of time in my own life. Being untethered, thrilling though it often is, also means being unstuck in time for much of the time.”
― Glynnis MacNicol, I'm Mostly Here to Enjoy Myself: One Woman's Pursuit of Pleasure in Paris

“But I don’t look back. Instead, I lean back in my seat and reappear to myself as a person in motion. I like what I see.”
― Glynnis MacNicol, I'm Mostly Here to Enjoy Myself: One Woman's Pursuit of Pleasure in Paris

“If it is not true that I am made invisible by my age, what else might not be true? Perhaps none of it is true.”
― Glynnis MacNicol, I'm Mostly Here to Enjoy Myself: One Woman's Pursuit of Pleasure in Paris

“No matter whose individual direct gaze we find ourselves under—how that individual might identify, how you might—we are all existing under the Male Gaze. Even when we work to live outside of it. Even to define your life as being outside of it is, itself, a recognition of what and who is inside. Who is offered the sanctuary. This Male Gaze has so many names. Patriarchy. Women’s clothing sizes. Beauty products. Pay rates. Health care. It’s endless. To step outside of it even for a moment is to risk casting yourself into a void. Because what else is out there? It’s nearly impossible to know. And then perhaps you do anyway. Because you have to. Or maybe, as in my case, just because I can. And very briefly you find, for instance, yourself in the literal gaze of an extremely attractive young man no one has ever suggested you’d be in the gaze of again. And you are reminded, even just briefly, that it’s all a lie. For them as much as for you.”
― Glynnis MacNicol, I'm Mostly Here to Enjoy Myself: One Woman's Pursuit of Pleasure in Paris

“I look up to see him staring at me and I catch that look on his face, the look we are relentlessly told is reserved only for the rarified who have followed the proper regime. Applied the toners and moisturizers and serums in the correct order. Lifted the right amount of weights. Done cardio for the correct amount of time. Excluded the right amount of sugar or fats or meats. Followed each set of new rules as they appear. Restricted themselves. Contorted themselves. Done the work. Remained young. It is the look of a man gazing upon a naked female body they have been invited to partake in. A mix of lust, excitement, gratitude, and relief. He steps back for a moment, dropping my bra onto the couch and removing his shirt. He takes another long look at me. Ah the enjoyment of being enjoyed. “Amazing,” he says with a grin before coming closer. And I think, Yes. Yes. You are fortunate my clothes are off. It is amazing. Is there a name for the Male Gaze being subverted by actual male gazes?”
― Glynnis MacNicol, I'm Mostly Here to Enjoy Myself: One Woman's Pursuit of Pleasure in Paris

“But something about building quality friendships later in life seems to fascinate. Which has always puzzled me. 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).”
― Glynnis MacNicol, I'm Mostly Here to Enjoy Myself: One Woman's Pursuit of Pleasure in Paris

“Of our five senses—sight, smell, taste, sound, and touch—I was informed by Google that touch is the only one essential to human life.”
― Glynnis MacNicol, I'm Mostly Here to Enjoy Myself: One Woman's Pursuit of Pleasure in Paris

“Independence is costly and risky, drudgery of a different sort. One solution people were toying with, if only in conversation (but isn’t that always the first step), was to try on the idea, out of fashion long enough to feel radical, of letting the men pay. For everything.”
― Glynnis MacNicol, I'm Mostly Here to Enjoy Myself: One Woman's Pursuit of Pleasure in Paris

“The assumption that we ever move on from giddy insecurity in the face of attraction to some more stoic and balanced response seems to me either an illusion created from a vacuum of storytelling, or the triumph of cynicism. 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. As Larkin says, “An only life can take so long to climb / clear of its wrong beginnings, and may never.” 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.”
― Glynnis MacNicol, I'm Mostly Here to Enjoy Myself: One Woman's Pursuit of Pleasure in Paris

“One of the unexpected realizations to come out of my forties is that being human is often largely ridiculous. This, and that how we experience romance at age fifteen is more or less the same as romance at eighty-five.”
― Glynnis MacNicol, I'm Mostly Here to Enjoy Myself: One Woman's Pursuit of Pleasure in Paris

“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. The directness of expressing how I exist in the world becomes a life force. Encountering people who are not put off by this, who do the same, is immediately comforting and intensely enjoyable.”
― Glynnis MacNicol, I'm Mostly Here to Enjoy Myself: One Woman's Pursuit of Pleasure in Paris