Hi! Good to be back on a sunny Sunday. How’s your weekend going? I’m rounding out my last week in Amsterdam, where I’ve spent my days reading and writing and cycling around town. I only left here ten months ago, not so long in the grand scheme of things, but it’s definitely an object lesson in how a little bit of distance can make you appreciate the bond that you have. I don’t know that I’ll ever not feel the desire to live in two places at once, or to be able to reconcile being drawn equally to throbbing, gritty, chaotic metropolises and to more calm, human-scale cities that have the closeness of a village.
Being in one place will always leave me homesick for the other. But instead of fighting it, I’m learning to just accept that the tension makes me who I am. More on that below.
Enjoy your afternoon, especially all the fathers and father-figures out there.
Love,
Heather
After spending my days mining the depths of my teenage years in search of insights into my current midlife ones, I've been plopping down in the evenings for an hour or two of Netflix and melt. It's not exactly the opposite of chill, but a version wherein I allow my brain to go all loose and flabby, settling into oozy pools of psychic nacho cheez. Mmmm nachos. My latest junk food binge has been watching The Bold Type, an Emily in Paris-esque (haters gonna hate) series about three sassy millennial women faking it and making it in yet another highly mythological version of the New York mediaverse. No one really believes that jobs in publishing, especially entry-level ones, are as glamorous and enviable as they're almost universally portrayed but that doesn't in the least deter us–and by us I mean me–being hopelessly drawn to the escapist fantasy of casually borrowing some Saint Laurent from the styling closet or commuting in heels (LOL).
There's no use trying to hide the reason why I find this particular trope so compelling: it's because I see my own parallel unlived life story in it.
At sixteen, I was steadfast in pursuit of my sole ambition to become a magazine journalist. I was accepted to every school I applied to (humblebrag?), but only one really mattered: NYU. I had subscriptions to the most important glossies of the day, all based in Manhattan: Sassy, Spin, Rolling Stone. I worshipped their writers as canon, I studied their pages as closely as my textbooks–before I hacked them to bits for my own zine-making, of course. I knew that New York was the only place to be if I was going to take this career path seriously, that if I could make there, well, you know how the song goes. The day that the tellingly thick envelope arrived, full of promise, I felt like my fate was sealed.
Of course, you already know how this works out. I did not go to NYU. On one hand, they did not offer enough financial aid; on another, my parents were not keen to let their daughter loose on the mean streets of Gotham. Instead, I went to Boston University–a great school, mind you, even if it was my third choice after Emerson. My blindered focus on studying journalism became my ultimate undoing. I neglected anything that I felt wasn't advancing the plot of my becoming a staffer at Spin. My grades were either As or Fs or–the absolute worst–incompletes. For three and a half years I floundered and flailed, dropping out my senior year. Yet, within a few months I was already on a new path, climbing up an entirely new ladder towards a career in digital design. And the rest, as they say, is history.
What can our unlived lives teach us about our real lived one? In his essay, "What If You Could Do It All Over?," New Yorker ideas editor Joshua Rothman writes:
"Even as we regret who we haven't become, we value who we are. We seem to find meaning in what's never happened. Our self portraits use a lot of negative space."
As a designer, it happens that I know something about negative space, about its essential relationship to the composition as a whole. The negative space frames the focus. All of the things that aren't there say something about the things that are.
We're living in unprecedented times for our potentialities. Rothman points out that capitalism has expanded our array of paths far beyond the scope of what was available to our parents, and certainly our parent's parents. Frost had his two roads diverging in a yellow wood; we have a superhighway. Coincidentally, Rothman's own "Sliding Doors" story is a flipped version of my own: he started out as a tech founder in the late nineties whose emerging career was upended by the dotcom bubble bursting. He ended up getting an English degree and becoming a writer.
For all the lives I've lived, there's a ragged trail of ones I've left behind, providing, at least, endless fodder for my own ruminations. "Too much change in the reflecting pool," goes a line from one of my favorite Evan Dando songs. What if I had remained in Paris instead of returning to the States back in 2001? What if I'd stayed married to the guy with the good heart but bad temper? What if kept working in restaurants? What if I'd never left Boston? What if I went to NYU? Some of these unlived lives haunt me like ghosts–not always the friendly kind–and I conjure them occasionally, in the yellowed, fragile pages of old diaries; in songs or scents that whoosh me right back into a moment; in a false déjà vù feeling of something experienced only in a dream.
Last summer, when I was mining the depths of another part of my life for a story I was working on (it's a favorite pastime), I came across a book called Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life, by British psychoanalyst-slash-philosopher Adam Phillips. Though this was probably the worst beach read imaginable, Phillips' premise, that the myth of our own potential is the shadow at our heels, perfectly aligned with how I'd been reckoning with choices both past and present in my own life. The shadow of unlived lives is the near-permanent condition of being an expat, for example. We live with a fragmented sense of self, a part of our identity fixed in all these different places, each one of them a home, each one offering the possibility of another life that you'll be longing for and missing out on in perpetuity.
When my dear friend shared Rothman's essay with me, knowing how strongly I'd resonate with it, I wasn't at all surprised to find that he, too, had referenced Phillips' work, noting that “the story of our lives becomes the story of the lives we were prevented from living.” While that take might come off as maudlin, if not a bit tragic, that's not Phillips' intention. Rather, he writes in praise of the unlived life, believing that it's not about feeling a sense of failure, or a falling short of what or who we might have been–I coulda been a contenda!–but instead, it’s a driving force of who we might become:
"...our possibilities for satisfaction depend upon our capacity for frustration; if we can’t let ourselves feel our frustration – and, surprisingly, this is a surprisingly difficult thing to do – we can’t get a sense of what it is we might be wanting, and missing, of what might really give us pleasure."
It's the longing that keeps me going, the fuel to my relentless ambitions, the restless energy that propels me ever forward. What is happiness, Don Draper says, but the moment before you need more happiness. Our pursuit of passion and fulfillment in our work, our relationships, our lives is born out of our frustrations.
No, I never made it to NYU, but I did eventually make it to New York. I found my way back to Paris. And it only took twenty-five years, but I finally published my first byline in a magazine. We become, Phillips says, present to ourselves in the absence of what we need. The negative space is full of possibility.
I love this story! I sensed it but never thought much about how much we are defined by what we have knowingly not done as well as what we have actually done. I also still live in the Amsterdam of my mind. Sometimes if I lay down to take an afternoon nap I will imagine myself at my apartment on the Nieuwe Herengracht, go outside, unlock my bike and take off for a bike ride, usually heading up the Amstel to the skinny bridge and then take off from there! In fact, I’m going to do that right now!