I Miss You When I Blink: Essays(4)

So why did I feel like I couldn’t wake up from a classic anxiety dream in which I was stuck in traffic, watching the minutes tick by on a clock, knowing with certain dread that I was late, but not remembering where I was supposed to be going or how to get there?



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I made all the turns that led me to where I ended up, feeling broken and low despite all the luck and support that should have made me feel safe and happy and secure.

Most of those decisions were right in the moment when I made them. Well, some were terribly wrong. (See: the enormous SUV I purchased after my second child was born, then drove for a decade despite the fact that I couldn’t park it and regularly crashed it into obstacles and other cars.) But mostly I made what I really believed were good choices. Even if you deliberately choose to do a “wrong” thing, you’re choosing it, which means you’ve picked it as the right thing to do.

Still. You can stand by your past decisions even if they took you to a present where you don’t belong anymore.

You can find yourself at a time when, no matter how many things you’ve done right—really, truly right in the moment when you did them—you feel like something is wrong. No, everything is wrong. This feeling will defy logic, which will make you nuts because you love logic! You believe in cause and effect, hard work that pays off, wise choices that reap rewards. Early to bed, early to rise, rinse with cold water, choose brown rice, save your money, wear sunscreen, don’t lick water fountains, floss. These are not just things you believe; they’re things you do because that’s the deal: Do what’s right, and you’ll be glad in the end! If X, then Y.

But you’re not glad. X, but not Y. The to-do list was supposed to get smaller and smaller as you checked off everything you meant to do and approached the finish line of bona fide adulthood. Instead, you got to the end of the list and didn’t feel like you’d arrived anywhere. You felt more disoriented than ever.

I did, anyway.



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I knew what to do when I felt lost: Find help. So I started seeing a therapist.

One morning, she leaned forward from her chair to where I sat cross-legged on a sofa and asked, “Can you pinpoint when you stopped feeling happy?”

“I . . .” I looked down at my lap.

I felt embarrassed because here I was in a psychiatric session that cost real money, using up daylight hours, trying to find out if my brain was defective, parsing my own happiness history as if it was something that mattered in the world. I was a cliché: first-world problems. I felt ashamed.

But she had a point. Maybe if I could figure out what situations made me feel not like this, I could find a path out of this state, and I could find it before my misery caused anyone else unhappiness. I started thinking, I don’t belong here anymore. I have to get out. Now.

To find the path, I studied what other people did. I read books for guidance. How do other people get happy again? Run away was a common narrative. Leave it all behind. I read memoir after memoir by people who burned down one life and started another. Scorch the earth and be reborn as someone new. I could use that map if I wanted to. Maybe I should disappear into a crowded street on the other side of the world! Maybe I should change my name and climb a mountain! I researched tents. I put my hair in two braids and wrapped a bandana around my forehead: Does this look outdoorsy? And then I remembered, wait—I can’t lift my carry-on bag into the overhead bin on a plane, much less haul a pack on my back all day. I’m not that person. Nor am I the other people whose life stories I devoured: the young woman who escaped a kidnapper’s underground lair, the man who left a cult, or any of the many bold and exceptional individuals who chronicled their change of name, change of gender, change of everything in the search for who they really are.

I’m just a person.

It wouldn’t be fair for me to say, “I’m just an average person,” or “an ordinary” person, because I am also a lucky person. I was raised in a loving home and grew up to have another loving home, and I do not suffer from the dire physical, financial, or situational disadvantages that so many people struggle under.

But being fortunate doesn’t mean you won’t reach a certain point in life—many points, actually—and panic. It doesn’t mean you don’t periodically wonder how you got where you are and if there’s any way to get out.

I tried to imagine myself an action-movie hero, tossing a match over my shoulder and walking off in slow motion as an explosion bloomed behind me. The problem is that if you toss a match like that, you can’t control what it burns, and there was so much in my life I didn’t want to burn down.

Surely, that wasn’t the only alternative to the status quo. It couldn’t be just this one-or-the-other choice. But if these weren’t my only two options—stay miserable or blow it all up—then . . . what?

I was going to have to draw my own damned map.





The Perfect Murder Weapon


I have lost so much sleep trying to figure out where to hide bodies.

Killers on television are always tossing their victims into shallow woodland graves or dumping them into rivers where hikers and fishermen will come across them the next day. If the perps are a little smarter, they try to cover their tracks by throwing acid all over everything or setting a fire. But they always leave something behind—a hair, a clothing fiber, a footprint. If you want to make someone disappear, you’ve got to think things through. Murder is no occasion for shoddy preparation. It’s not like packing for a trip and then realizing, Whoops! Forgot my underwear! If you Whoops! Forgot my glove! back at the scene, you’re toast.