I Miss You When I Blink: Essays(50)

We coexisted in that house for those weeks, all the me’s.

I had phone calls with my therapist once a week.

“Sometimes I drive around Nashville and don’t even go anywhere,” I told her once.

“What goes through your mind as you drive?” she asked.

“It’s so green,” I said. “They say the traffic’s bad here, but it’s nothing like Atlanta. It doesn’t feel like the city is screaming all the time.”

“What do you think about when you think of going home?”

“I think, ‘Maybe I can try to feel like this there.’?”

“Do you think you can?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

DAY 20: I am too smart to go back to being miserable.





Ungrateful Bitch


I know how fortunate I am to have my health and my family and my jobs and my roof and my car and my democracy. I do know. I promise. And I know that saying out loud, “I think I might want a different life,” when you already have a perfectly good life is sort of like holding a half-eaten chocolate chip cookie in your hand while saying, “I don’t want a chocolate chip cookie. I think I want some other kind of cookie.” I know some people have no cookies.

Unfortunately, having a fine life doesn’t exempt anyone from existential angst. Maybe it should. Maybe if we were all perfect people, we’d wake up in our nice warm beds, appreciate that we’re not waking up on concrete under an overpass, and cease fretting about our hopes and dreams, because if our basic biological needs are covered—food, shelter, water—what else could be so bad? Perhaps if I were homeless, I wouldn’t give a damn about things like professional satisfaction or personal fulfillment, because my greater concern would be not freezing to death. But I know damn well that once I had food in my belly and a roof over my head, I’d start thinking about those things again. The horizon of needs and wants never actually gets closer; it’s an illusion, a trick. We can always want more. We can always perceive some need.

Robert Browning wrote, “Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp, / Or what’s a heaven for?” and I feel him on that. But I also say, Okay Bob, what about a woman’s reach? You could fill a canyon with all that’s been written about women wanting “it all” and whether “it all” is fair to want and what the hell even is “it all” and how tired we all are of the backlash against backlash against backlash against that whole overplayed conversation. But I think the question people are arguing about when they fight about it isn’t What should women want? but Should women want? I mean, hey, America gave us the right to vote. We’ve got some high-powered lady-CEO role models now. There are breastfeeding lounges in airports. We have so much! Shouldn’t we stop all this unseemly wanting? Of course not. I know that’s bullshit, even as I know I still feel a little guilty whenever I want more or different than I have.

Knowing all this doesn’t change anything.

Remember that little mermaid? You might say she got what was coming to her for reaching too far, but I understand how she felt. She had a good life underwater, but she wanted a different one on land. Is that so terrible?



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I get the guilt thing. I imagine, sometimes, that when I stick up for what I need or insist on what I want, people are whispering behind my back, calling me an ungrateful bitch. They’re not. (At least I don’t think so.) That voice is coming from inside me. I have to talk myself out of it. I have to remind myself that wanting doesn’t make anyone an ungrateful bitch.

Or maybe it does.

Does it matter?

I mean, think about it—if you are an ungrateful bitch, then you’re an ungrateful bitch whether somebody else thinks you are or not. The ship of bitchy ingratitude has sailed, so why not climb on board and sail it somewhere interesting? Either I’m an ungrateful bitch or I’m not, but I’ve decided I don’t care which.

I made up a helpful exercise for whenever I’m worried about doing something that I believe, deep down, is important and necessary because I’m afraid someone might call me an ungrateful bitch. I’ll share it here in case anyone else needs to try it. It goes like this:



* * *



March over to the nearest mirror. Put your hands on your hips, look yourself right in the eye and say, “You ungrateful bitch.”

Walk outside to get the mail. When a car drives by, mouth the words UNGRATE-FUL BIIIITCH at the driver while hooking both thumbs at yourself, so they know.

Stop to look at an earthworm. Crouch low and look the little guy in the face—or the ass, it’s hard to tell on a worm—and say, “You know what I am, little fella? I’m an ungrateful bitch.”

Now, go to a coffee shop. When they ask what name to put on your cup, spell it out: U-N-G-R-A-T-E-F-U-L B-I-T-C-H.

Change your phone greeting to, “You have reached an ungrateful bitch, leave a message.”

Write the words down—ungrateful bitch—and stare at them until they’re just squiggles and shapes.

Say it out loud until the syllables are no more than the clatter of forks and knives in a drawer, the whir of an engine, the shushing slide of pages as you thumb a stack of blank paper. White noise.

Ungrateful bitch.

Ungrateful bitch?