Hi friends. This week’s musing is an extension of last week’s (thanks for all the love on that post, btw). I might continue with this format a while longer, as I’m finding it to be a useful exercise. Sometimes figuring out what we don’t want can help us identify what we do. I’ve found this to be true in my life, at least. Maybe give it a try yourself? If you do, let me know how it goes. And hit that little ❤️ if you feel so inclined. It makes my day every time. Thanks for being here. Thanks for reading. Thanks for all of it.
I don’t want to be cool. I want to be brave. I want to love with ferocity. I want to cuddle with my cat and remain unapologetically obsessed with her. I want to rotate through the same three work outfits and not worry if people notice how infrequently I update my wardrobe. I want to read as many books as possible and let some of them be deep but a lot of them be light. I want to read intellectually stimulating, philosophically thoughtful, socially critical, historically important books, but also thrillers and beach reads and memoirs. In equal measure, at least. And without embarrassment. I want to post selfies on the internet and let people think I’m vain. I want to cry easily and laugh easily. And often. I want to lift heavy things and grow bigger muscles and eat my protein and get as strong as possible and walk around with a 40lb backpack for fun and not care if strangers think I’m too weird or too masculine or a jock (I am, actually!) or a meathead or whatever other assumptions they might make about me based upon these behaviors. I don’t want to hustle for affection, I want to allow it to flow freely. And to offer it freely in return. I want to let it be okay if I’m the one who cares more. I want to let my hair go gray and let my face get wrinkly and not feel compelled to subvert these naturally-occurring changes. I want to fall in love with my aging self. I want to refuse to disappear even though society tells women that to get old is to become invisible. I want to stop apologizing for having needs and for setting healthy boundaries. I want to have the courage to be disliked or misunderstood, to be the villain in someone else’s story. I want to aggressively support my friends and text them to tell them I love them. I want to grieve (my mom, my uterus, lost time, what never was, what will never be, broken friendships, the world) out loud and in public, without shame or self-consciousness. I want to be unabashedly who I am, no pretense or performing. And I want my acceptance of self to set others at ease; may they feel more like themselves in my company.
In her book The Top Five Regrets of the Dying: A Life Transformed by the Dearly Departing, Bronnie Ware writes about the regrets people have in their last days, compiled during her many years in palliative care, assisting folks in the final weeks and moments of their lives. The most common regret her patients expressed?
“I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.”
I’ve thought about this a lot since I first heard it several years ago, but I’m not sure the truth of it actually set in until my mom’s death in 2023. She died too young (61), too fast (11 weeks after her cancer diagnosis), too soon (seven months before her planned retirement). She died having just barely learned how to love herself. She did so much to buck the system(s) within which she had been raised, shook off so much pernicious (cultural, religious, familial) conditioning, rejected many of the expectations the world placed upon her, but she had SO MUCH left to do. I watched her get more and more free as she approached her 60th birthday, shed more of what wasn’t hers to hold or to become, step more fully into who she actually was, and then — in a cruel act of providence (or randomness, perhaps) — I watched it all get stolen away.
As I’ve written before, I hold no specific beliefs about the afterlife, and I’m still not at all convinced there is one. BUT I also don’t think my mom is just gone. (Please don’t ask me how I square this contradiction in my brain.) I like to think she’s more free than she ever got to be in her lifetime. I like to think she’s completely at ease. What I DO know is wherever or whatever or however she is, she’d want me to pick up where she left off, loving myself for exactly who I am, abandoning any effort to be cool or play cool or to conform to what anyone else believes I should be. She’d want me to feel unashamed in my earnestness and to fully embrace my cringe. So that’s what I’m committed to doing. Every day, in small ways, I’m trying to make her proud.
I’m pretty sure she already is.
Here’s to being less cool and more uncontrollable.
Here’s to becoming immune to embarrassment.
Here’s to getting older and weirder and more of who we are.
xoxo
❍ Finally read Demon Copperhead and it definitely lives up to the hype
❍ Barbara Kingsolver used the profits from Demon Copperhead to build a recovery center for women called Higher Ground in Lee County, VA — which is just another example of why more women having more money is good for all of us. Because when they have more than they need, women give SIGNIFICANTLY more of it away than their male counterparts
❍ Highly recommend watching the movie Flow if you haven’t yet — best 90 minutes I’ve spent in a while
❍ my life is boring — highly relatable read
❍ How Much Do I Really Need to Know — on consuming the news in a sustainable fashion
❍ Tariffs Impact Consumers — But Women Bear the Brunt — the pink tax is real
❍ Is Science in Danger? — an enlightening conversation on the Unexplainable podcast
❍ Shout out to my mom for being my mom. Always and forever
To not apologize for having needs… That one got me 💕
💜