Why Can’t I Live All The Lives I Want?
Growing up in rural South Jersey, I was afraid of things like silence and wide open spaces. I hated being alone in the house, feeling constantly like something must be lurking just outside my field of vision. I hated driving down highways with endless, pitch-black cornfields and starry skies.
I never intended to stay in my hometown — unlike most people there, I wasn’t a 10th-generation resident — but as a little girl I unwittingly shaped my dreams by the local paradigm. I wouldn’t get married straight out of high school and stay put, no, but at the age of 10 I was having serious internal debates about whether I should marry between my undergrad and masters degrees or if I should wait until I got accepted to a PhD program.
I assumed I’d have to get married straight out of college to avoid ever being alone. It didn’t seem farfetched: My mother, while working her way through college and medical school, met and married my father in the scope of a single year and moved straight from the dorms to their first apartment.
There’s always something lurking behind you when you leave. My childhood fears have been reduced to their most basic form (bed in the corner of the room, leaving no space unseeable from the perch of my pillows, and no looking in mirrors alone at night, when they might reveal something unseen behind you), but the hometown still haunts.
Plenty of people from my socio-economic rung also went to college and left town, but I turned the whole notion on its head. I left early to start college at 16, mostly just to escape, and I failed to maintain my relationship with my hometown boyfriend, or to quickly replace him with a college sweetheart. I found myself settling into the city and making my life, lulled to sleep by the sound of one neighbor’s cough and another’s TV. I found that I didn’t have to be alone, not really, not ever.
But the not-aloneness of the city is harder than the not-aloneness of the country, especially now that I’m entering the life-stage of endless reminders of my feminine failures. I could ignore all of the engaged, married, reproducing women I once knew — unfriend them, even, the very idea — but I crave these glimpses at another kind of happiness.
Because they are happy (I think) and I do not pity them.
Sometimes I pity myself.
How lovely it must be to know that the things in which you hold most stock in life have been set. To have a job (medical receptionists abound), not a career, and never have to worry about whether a fucking tweet is going to make or break your success. To have a baby, something I want very much but know I “can’t have” until I’ve put in a more acceptable glut of years of thinking only of this professional scheme I’m weaving. To have a partner who wants to marry you young, because that’s the way it’s done and the way Mom and Dad did it, instead of having to navigate the ins and outs of “oh we’re seeing each other but I don’t know” for years and years until something gives.
And I know it isn’t actually an “easy” life. I know that not everyone who ends up there has really chosen it. I know that many of those lives aren’t actually set in stone, and that many of them aren’t actually happy. I know all of these things. But it’s hard not to romanticize the simpler things when you’re eating dinner for one and waiting for your roommate to get home so you can cry about how frustrating work was and oh god will they give me a raise because who can afford to live in this city and he hasn’t texted me back yet maybe he thought I was too fat and can we please drink a bottle of wine tonight and watch Netflix until we pass out —
These thoughts don’t occupy too much of my time. But the fear that I’ve somehow chosen wrong — picked a life of pushing and working and knowing how much I could achieve and still failing and crying and being alone — is always there.
When my first boyfriend got married, we were barely 21. I was in bed in my first apartment in the city when I found out, horrendously single and about to finish my masters degree.
The tears were not for losing him; I decided a long time ago that our relationship had been an even more damaging shitshow than your average high school affair. But I did cry. Because even though I didn’t want him anymore, part of me will always want the life I could have had with him, or someone like him. It’s a very small part of me.
And it scares me.
