I Miss You When I Blink: Essays(2)

I think this repeated need for recalibration happens partly because so many ways of being are pitched to us—particularly to women—as either-or choices: You can have a career or a family; be a domestic goddess who cans her own strawberry jam or a train wreck who flaunts the wine in her coffee mug; wear a blazer and tote a bullet journal or stick pencils in your messy bun and wipe paint on your jeans. Pious or profane. One thing or the other. Even whether or not you buy into those dichotomies seems to be an either-or proposition: You believe in “having it all” or you believe “having it all” is outdated bunk. Pick a way.

And it’s true that at any given second, a person is doing one thing or another. I can swallow a bite of toast right now or I can whistle the theme song from House of Cards. I can’t do both at the exact same moment or I’ll choke. But our lives aren’t one suspended moment, a single either-or choice; they’re a string of moments, a string of choices. Going from one moment to the next is not always a comfortable process. Sometimes it hurts, like when you realize your child no longer needs you to be his daily sidekick, and you have to adjust to a new role in his life. Sometimes it’s a comedy of errors, like when you decide you’re ready for a fresh start and you buy a whole wardrobe of pants and blouses that seem sleek and smart in the dressing room but in the light of day make you look like you’re about to give a PowerPoint presentation on a golf course. Sometimes you know one phase of life is ending—you’ve outgrown a relationship or reached the end of a long project—but you don’t know what the next step is supposed to be. You feel sure you can’t go forward and you can’t go back and you absolutely, positively cannot stand still one minute longer, all of which is insanely frustrating.

That’s what small identity shifts look like in everyday lives. Not the stereotypes.

The kind of crucial points in life I’m talking about are the ones that often go unseen, that most of us would feel embarrassed to call crises. They’re the ones a friend might talk about while sitting on your front steps in the dark at midnight after a dinner party, stalling because she doesn’t want to go home. Or because she hates her job. Or she’s scared something’s wrong with her kid or her spouse. Or she just saw one of her notebooks from college in a drawer, and she feels so detached from the person who wrote those brilliant notes about Virginia Woolf, and she’s worried that smart twenty-year-old has disappeared and she’ll never get her back, but she thinks she might want to try. She misses herself when she blinks.



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I miss you when I blink. I have felt it so many times in my life, at points where I didn’t really know who I was anymore, where I felt that when I closed my eyes, I could feel myself gone.



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I still have that scrap of paper my son wrote on all those years ago, before I had any clue that what he was writing would become my touchstone. I didn’t know then what a versatile refrain it would become.

I use it all the time. When I feel pressure to do the one exactly right thing—which I feel all the time because I am a human and a perfectionist—I remember all the selves I simultaneously have been, am, and will be. I miss you when I blink means I know all my selves are here with me, and I know we can do this. Saying it to myself is like a coach pushing a player out onto the field and saying, “You’ve got it. Just do what we practiced.” It’s like a parent placing a hand on the shoulder of an almost-grown child heading out the door to the prom, saying, “Remember who you are.”

Sometimes I think, Dammit, I will never be fifteen or twenty-five or thirty-five again. Those lives I’ve lived are over. And I get a little wistful, thinking I might like to get some of that time back. But then I remember my twenty-one-year-old self sitting in my cubicle at my first job out of college, feeling utterly confused and wishing she could disappear, and I think, Hey, young-me, it gets better. I swear. Worse sometimes, but also better.

And when I have anxiety attacks about the future—What if right now is the happiest I will ever be and I’m not appreciating it enough? Will I reach the end of my days having never lived in France or made enough people happy or learned everything there is to know about outer space or being able to do a split? Am I eating enough anti-oxidants? What will I be doing in ten years? In twenty?—I say I miss you when I blink to myself, and it means, Get a grip. Don’t panic. To figure out where to go next, look at where you came from. If you got here, you can get to the next thing.

Sometimes, in moments of memory or daydream, I feel the different iterations of myself pass by each other, as if right-now-me crosses paths with past-me or imaginary-me or even future-me in the hallways of my mind. “I miss you when I blink,” one says. “I’m right here,” says the other, and reaches out a hand.





Everything to Be Happy About


I was born without a sense of direction.

All babies are, I guess. But like wisdom teeth that never break through, my internal compass just didn’t come in.

Once, after a delayed flight home from one of my first business trips, I trudged out of the Atlanta airport terminal at 2 a.m. and couldn’t find my car in the parking lot. It wasn’t where I left it, I was sure. Had it been stolen? I wandered around under flickering yellow lights, dragging my bags along the asphalt, breaking down into self-pitying sobs as if I’d been left behind on Mars by my fellow astronauts.