Glynnis Macnicol Quotes

This is why people have babies...because it's exhausting not to know what you're supposed to do next. A baby is basically a nonnegotiable map for the next two decades.

We're the first generation that can make enough of our own money to live the way we want. I feel like we have a responsibility to figure out what this means.

Every woman I knew seemed to think she was failing in some way, had been raised to believe she was lacking, and was certain someone else was doing it better. Had been told never to trust her own instincts. Taught to think of life as a solution when "done right", when in reality we existed in a kaleidoscope made of shades of gray, able to be very happy and very sad all at the same time.

When you are your own emergency contact, you learn how not to get into an emergency if at all possible.

What I wanted was for there to exist some way for me to say "I'm happy and sad and not jealous" all at the same time, and also "This is a loss and is still beautiful." Maybe that was the wedding toast. "We are really the ones giving you away. And it's hard. And I will miss our life. And I am still so happy for your happiness. And so proud of you.

Men, it occurred to me, perhaps for the first time in my life, did not need to be a goal.

And I knew the simple act of reading would give my mind a certain sort of peace nothing else could.

It was hard work to root yourself so deeply in life that you could still love people and rely on them, knowing at any point they could make decisions that would leave you scrambling to find solid ground again.

I had never wanted to leave my life entirely, I realized. I'd only wanted to know that I had the ability to step out of it and into something new. Now I knew. And I could do it again and again, whenever I wanted. The knowledge I possessed that freedom made me feel more powerful than I could remember feeling for a very long time.

I had grown up thinking of life as a series of linear decisions that if made properly would land me on some distant safe shore where I would finally enjoy the fruits of my labor. Now that I was getting a glimpse of that shore I was struck by the inanity of such an equation. My mother was never going to get another chance to do anything else. She did not have the capacity for regrets, nor was she even able to enjoy the comfort of nostalgia or fond memories--her mind had leaked away too imperceptibly to allow for the clarity to look back on her life and wish she had done things differently. As I continued to worry over what sort of future I was setting myself up for, she seemed a painful cautionary tale that life was not a savings plan, accrued now for enjoyment later. I was alive now. My responsibility was to live now as fully as possible.

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.

We're always drawn to the clearest articulation of what we think we lack.

We’re always drawn to the clearest articulation of what we think we lack.

I knew better than to allow myself to be thrown into a mental temper tantrum over Instagram. It just took effort. I had to lean on my knowledge of the real lives of the people in the photos, which were just as complicated and flawed as my own.

It was a truth universally acknowledged that by age forty I was supposed to have a certain kind of life, one that, whatever else it might involve, included a partner and babies. Having acquired neither of these, it was nearly impossible, no matter how smart, educated, or lucky I was, not to conclude that I had officially become the wrong answer to the question of what made a woman's life worth living. If this story wasn't going to end with a marriage or a child, what then? Could it even be called a story?

It was the singular blessing of an otherwise relentlessly cruel disease, but all I was able to think of as I watched the gleeful look on her face was what a waste of time all the good behavior had been. Her whole life stretched behind me now, and from this vantage point it seemed so short. And these concerns about other people’s opinions, which had dominated my mother’s thinking, seemed so fruitless and unworthy. I was overwhelmed with sadness for her.

Instead, sitting in the dark and quiet, something quite unexpected occurred. My life, precisely as it was—the product of good and bad decisions—began to come into focus for me. Sitting there, I could see it for the first time as something I’d chosen. Something I’d built intentionally, and not simply a makeshift thing I’d constructed as a for-the-time-being existence until something came along that would make me a whole person in the eyes of the world. Once I began to see it as such, it dawned on me that I had no wish to escape from it. On the contrary: I wanted it. I was choosing my life. I was willing to risk it.

I’ve realized that you can never be your best self without extra bandwidth to think clearly, give to others, and appreciate sunrises and sunsets.

there is plenty to be learned in the not knowing, and not knowing exactly where you are going does not denote a lack of ambition on your part to get there.

Fear of what other people will think is the single most paralyzing dynamic in business, and in life.

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.

There were times I worried my overdeveloped talent for self-sufficiency might be cutting me off from other equally valuable gifts, like the ability to tell others what I needed.

A wrong turn was never a wrong turn, it was simply a different route I had chosen.

The solution to all my problems remained the same: I just needed to keep moving.

I have never been more relieved than on the morning of my fortieth birthday...it felt like I'd been released.

I’ve noticed it’s almost always people who are living the exact opposite lives than you, and facing none of the risks, who are most encouraging.

Nora Ephron once wrote that she’d ceased being scared of flying when her husband pointed out it was narcissistic to think her plane was the one that was going to go down.

Not every encounter needed to be the first step in a permanent decision.

Being alone sometimes felt like being a solitary tree atop a very windy hill; there was nothing between the world and me to break its impact.

But it seemed to me that going through life making decisions on what I might possibly feel in a future that may or may not come about was a bad way to live.

Maybe this was normal; we spend our childhoods with full faith in our parents’ decision-making, and our adulthoods second-guessing their every move, certain we know better.

I’d learned in the last year that being single past a certain age meant that many of the most difficult things in my life were the direct result of overflow from other people’s lives.

So often in the last years it had felt as if things were ending, but change wasn't the end; life came back around, and back around again if you let it. People leave, but they also come back.

Every woman I knew seemed to think she was failing in some way, had been raised to believe she was lacking, and was certain someone else was doing it better. Had been told never to trust her own instincts. Taught to think of life as a solution when “done right,” when in reality we existed in a kaleidoscope made of shades of gray, able to be very happy and very sad all at the same time.

I made myself say it out love: I might always be alone. It sounded less overwhelming against the noise of the breaking waves. I laughed. Fuck off, I thought, I am done feeling bad. And then aloud: I can do whatever I want. Just then I remembered seeing Patti Smith, two summers before, reading an old poem at the Brooklyn Bridge Park, the city aflame behind her in the setting summer sun. I am gonna get out of here, she said, as if she were once again that young girl who'd written those lines decades ago. She was going to get on that train and go to New York City. She was never going to return, no never. She was going to travel light. How I loved that. Oh, watch me now, she'd said. As if she was about to perform the world's greatest magic trip. Oh, watch me now, I thought.

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.

It was hard work to root yourself so deeply in life that you could still love people and rely on them, knowing at any point they could make decisions that would leave you scrambling to find solid ground again. This was the better or worse of friendship, undeclared.

So often in the last year there had been no way to take any pictures of the life I was leading -- the divide between the messy, painful reality and the screen had been so huge I'd felt unable to bridge it. I was never certain whether we were all trying to sell our lives to others or use others to sell our lives back to us.

The problem was the encroaching sense that I had somehow stepped outside of ritual and was always going to be a guest star, forever celebrating the milestones of others without ever starring in my own. What cultural markers were there for women other than weddings and babies? How else do women mark the progression of their lives?

That was really the question. Would I be okay without a child? Each night I sat with [my infant nephew] Connor and forced myself to go down the path of imaginary motherhood, suspicious of myself that this would be something that I would be willing to reject. Every night I expected to have a change of heart and come up with a different, more recognizable answer. But it never happened. Instead, sitting in the dark and quiet, something quite unexpected occurred. My life, precisely as it was--the product of good and bad decisions--began to come into focus for me. Sitting there, I could see it for the first time as something I'd chosen. Something I'd built intentionally, and not simply a makeshift thing I'd constructed as a for-the-time-being existence until something came along that would make me a whole person in the eyes of the world. Once I began to see it as such, it dawned on me that I had no wish to escape from it. On the contrary: I wanted it. I was choosing my life. I was willing to risk it.

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.

I remembered the hotel drinks with the married man, when he'd eagerly asked me if I wanted children. And now here was this man, neurotically lying about his age. I'd spent a lot of my life being cautioned to avoid being a certain kind of woman: needy, desperate, hungry for commitment and babies, terrified of my age. Only now was it starting to occur to me that these female clichés had all been created by men, and perhaps, like many writers, they'd simply been describing themselves and projecting their worst characteristics.

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.

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.

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.

This is the magic they were hoping for. I ask, “Would it be OK with you if this were easy?

Every woman I knew seemed to think she was failing in some way, had been raised to believe she was lacking, and was certain someone else was doing it better. Had been told never to trust her own instincts. Taught to think of life as a solution when "done right," when in reality we existed in a kaleidoscope made of shades of gray, able to be very happy and very sad all at the same time.

I had never wanted to leave my life entirely, I realized. I’d only wanted to know that I had the ability to step out of it and into something new. Now I knew. And I could do it again and again, whenever I wanted. The knowledge I possessed that freedom made me feel more powerful than I could remember feeling for a very long time.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

But inside I am aflame with gratitude that I have only myself to carry around, however heavy all these me’s might currently be.

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.

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.

Please, no. But I am saying we can do ourselves and our society a great service—and be more effective and heard—by authentically, empathetically connecting with one another.

Courage is not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it.”—Nelson Mandela

What no one prepares you for as a woman is for everything to go right. When you are a woman alone, this is never even suggested as a possibility. I will know fellow women who travel solo by their rapt attention when I recount what follows with a level of detail that would exhaust a person accustomed to, for better or worse, traveling with a companion. It’s the solo lady version of parents telling one another they’ve successfully sleep-trained their child or managed to introduce a vegetable into their diet. Similarly, I will watch these women’s faces light up in a combination of recognition, voyeurism, and relief at seeing an ideal version of their life out in the world.

In The White Album, Joan Didion famously wrote down her packing list, radical at the time—Tampax!—and revealing in its intimacy and simplicity. As a storytelling device, it was admirable in what it told the reader about the writer, about her life, and about what it meant to be a woman in the world, without seeming to say much. Didion wrote the list in 1979, but it has gained new life in the last ten years, surpassing, at times, the popularity of her “Goodbye to All That” essay about leaving New York, which has seemingly been redone by every writer leaving the city ever since. Less mentioned is the fact she returned twenty-five years later and made it her permanent home. (Does any other city require a defense of departure? Did people feel the need to declare why they were leaving Paris? Was it that New York was an identity and other cities were just places to live, or does New York simply attract a higher concentration of narcissists?)

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.

This feeling of triumph recedes as thoughts of the people not on this plane roll in—the people I am leaving behind, so many of whom remain tethered, by money, by family, by job, by children. I am untethered. Or if not exactly that, then my tethers have the capacity to unfurl at great lengths without ever breaking. I can be simultaneously connected and disconnected.

There is also the matter of my own increasingly unreliable body. From age fourteen to forty it operated with military punctuality; you could have set a watch by the time my uterus kept. No longer. My body has detached itself from its own timeline. On more than a few occasions in the last year I’ve been compelled to ask the question: Virus or perimenopause? (In the winter months this shifts to: Virus, perimenopause, or my century-old radiator?) My doctor, while wonderful, has no answers. “You’re getting to that age” has become the most frequently repeated sentence in my appointments with her. When I press and ask, “Is this normal?” she says, “No one is sure,” because “no one” has ever done the research into the universal experience of half the population. But this might soon change, she assures me after she asks if I’ve scheduled my appointment for the newly released vaccine, which took only a year to create. “Your generation is accustomed to having information,” she tells me. “You’re all furious there is none.” When she says this, I am furious, but it doesn’t last. I can be angry about only so many things at the same time. And even then, I’m not very good at it.

Nora Ephron’s essay “On Maintenance,” from the collection I Feel Bad About My Neck. In it, Ephron writes at length about upkeep: “There’s a reason why forty, fifty, and sixty don’t look the way they used to, and it’s not because of feminism, or better living through exercise. It’s because of hair dye.

Plans seem to belong not just to another lifetime, but to another timeline. Years of bumper stickers and Instagram accounts encouraging us to live in the now have not, it seems, prepared anyone to actually exist in a present where the future is so glaringly shifting like cursed quicksand in a fairy tale.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

I didn’t ask for help. There are muscles that don’t get exercised when you live alone, and this was one.

Don’t forsake those duties which keep you out of the nuthouse,” Katharine Hepburn once wrote.

it was a truth universally acknowledged that by age forty I was supposed to have a certain kind of life, one that, whatever else it might involve, included a partner and babies. Having acquired neither of these, it was nearly impossible, no matter how smart, educated, or lucky I was, not to conclude that I had officially become the wrong answer to the question of what made a woman’s life worth living. If this story wasn’t going to end with a marriage or a child, what then? Could it even be called a story? I

I knew that. There were an endless number of things about my life I might end up regretting. Some I already did. But it seemed to me that going through life making decisions on what I might possibly feel in a future that may or may not come about was a bad way to live.

The truth was, no one knows what they're missing in the end. You can only live your own life, and do your best with the outcome when you roll the dice.

You'll never be younger than you are today

As I continued to worry over what sort of future I was setting myself up for, she seemed a painful cautionary tale that life was not a savings plan, accrued now for enjoyment later. I was alive now. My responsibility was to live now as fully as possible.

Time is measured in experience as much as anything, and children, I thought, must both slow it down and speed it up. But I also didn't want to spend time trying to stay young. I wanted to live unafraid and fully in my life.

If there had been a soundtrack to my life in recent years it was the buzz of my phone.

The device itself was not entirely the problem, so much as the fact that it held incontrovertible evidence of the series of bad relationship decisions I’d made over the past few years.

The device itself was not entirely the problem, so much as the fact that it held incontrovertible evidence of the series of bad relationship decisions I’d made over the past few years. It was like carrying around a court transcript of my personal crimes and misdemeanors, proof of a person I didn’t want to be but had been . . . repeatedly.

I desperately wanted to be a person who enjoyed flying.

For months, I’d been trapped in a feedback loop trying to figure out how to set up the help she needed; it felt like a video game I was trying to master:

I always took turbulence personally, as if I were being punished for something I had or hadn’t done.

I felt as if I’d been dropped into another life. Or the poster for another life. My own, with all its responsibilities and anxiety, was weirdly distant.

The truth was, no one knows what they’re missing in the end. You can only live your own life, and do your best with the outcome when you roll the dice.

I didn’t want to make myself feel better by making others feel as if they were lacking.

I was never certain whether we were all trying to sell our lives to others or use others to sell our lives back to us.

Technicolor had been replaced by filters.

I waited, temporarily holding off the news of whatever was coming, as if I had the power to put my life on pause, even for just a few minutes.

It was like living in a fun house; I never knew if what I was seeing was reliable.

I was determined to separate myself from the fray,

When you are your own emergency contact, you learn how not to get into an emergency if at all possible

One thought flashed through my head: Sometimes things did work out. Sometimes timing was everything, and sometimes it was perfect.

She did not have the capacity for regrets, nor was she even able to enjoy the comfort of nostalgia or fond memories—her mind had leaked away too imperceptibly to allow her the clarity to look back on her life and wish she had done things differently.