No One Tells Everything

Which is largely what I did. I sensed an abandon all hope, ye who enter here message woven into the colorful birthday cards that arrived in the mail for her. As if simply by turning forty, my mother had somehow failed at something.

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And now here I was so many years later, about to turn forty myself, gripped by those identical fears despite all my determination to be otherwise. Eight-year-old me would have been revolted. My desk faced north. Through the wall of windows that made up half of the corner office I was in, I had a panoramic view of the island. Below me Manhattan stretched out like a toy city, all sharp angles, silver rectangles, and the unbroken lines of the avenues running north. Even from this height the city exuded purpose, like an engine exhaust.

Right then it was shimmering in the late afternoon, early September sun. The light cast a golden hue on everything. It was the sort of light that caused even the most hell-bent New Yorker to look up with renewed awe. I pulled out my phone, automatically angled my head in a well-practiced tilt, and took a selfie. I was aware that to the outside world I could not have appeared less like a woman who should be worried about her age, less like someone who was now spending the last hours be fore her birthday seized by the belief she was being marched to her demise.

In all likelihood, even my friends would have been surprised to hear it. I was not known as a person who tended to cower; I was a person who kept going, who took care of things, who always had the answer, who rarely asked for help. I had been on my own since I was eighteen years old. I had taken myself from waitress to well-paid writer to business owner and now back to writer without stopping to consider whether any of these things were plausible to anyone but me.

Currently my mind felt split, as though there were two voices in my head debating the importance of my birthday, and like the pendulum on a grandfather clock I was swinging from one to the other. The rational voice kept pointing out that it was not only shameful, but also a waste of time, to cower before age. Lucky was too weak a word. Did I really need reminding that by nearly every metric available, there had never been a better time in history to be a woman?

Sometimes this voice merely noted how universally horrific it had been to be a woman up until very recently. Who cares, said the other voice. Sure, fine, technically it might be true I was lucky. Could it even be called a story? I very much wanted to muster a good fuck you to these voices.

No One Tells Everything

I reminded myself what the manager of the Greenwich Village tavern where I worked in my twenties as a waitress had once said to me after listening to me lament my upcoming twenty-fifth birthday, no less: Bring on the blade, I thought. I was so tired of my own mind it would be a relief. My phone vibrated beside me and my heart leapt from long habit, like a dog that believes every noise of a package being opened holds the promise of food.

But it was just my friend and now business partner, Rachel.

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Her fortieth birthday party, two years prior, had taken place in a vast loft with a liquor sponsor. No Party, I wrote back. People had asked and offered. There were a half dozen friends I could text right now, who would meet me at any place I chose. Whatever else it was, my birthday was not the story of a lonely woman.

But I did not want a party. A party felt like a delay tactic. This little spark of defiance had brought me comfort in recent days, but now I could barely strike it before it faded away. Not even the view could save me this time, it seemed. Right now, all it revealed was who I had been.

'No One Tells You This': The Triumph Of Choosing A Single, Childfree Life At 40

I needed only to glance out the window to see my own history laid out before me. Live in the same place long enough and it eventually becomes a map to all your past lives: And there had been plenty of versions of New York City me. Sitting here now thinking of those years, it occurred to me this birthday panic might not actually be such a recent development. Instead of words the first bubble would have contained an equation representing the sad reality that nearly everything in my life had become a shifting math problem with an immutable result: The calculation went something like this: I had x amount of activities in a week.

Babies are never mathematical certainties, obviously, but that is one of those truths that is never true for you until it is true for you. As thirty-seven became thirty-eight became thirty-nine the calculations became even more pressing and less feasible.

Married next week, and pregnant the next morning? Eventually there was no way to make the numbers add up. The second bubble would simply have been a picture of me getting on a plane on short notice and leaving. By the time I turned thirty-seven, I was almost as consumed with the idea of getting away as I was with the conviction I was running out of time. Not traveling per se, just leaving.

I was a media reporter in New York then, and I started my long work days from home. To the outside observer my job was glamorous: The reality was that it required me to chase website traffic like a shady lawyer going after an ambulance—clicks, no matter how ill-gotten, were the coin of the realm. All I could think as I gazed at it was: There is no internet on that garbage truck. Hunched over my desk, my BlackBerry buzzing like a trapped fly against a window, chat windows exploding on my screen with the urgency of dispatches being sent from a war zone, I spent months nearly paralyzed by my desire to be anywhere else.

That these two visions of my life were in direct contradiction with each other never once occurred to me. Not even a little bit. If anything, I was doing the opposite.

I had simply taken it as a given, like financial security and regular exercise, obvious outcomes sane people generally aimed their lives toward. On paper at least, I was, by the time I turned thirty-seven, precisely where I had always wanted to be. I was a New Yorker; I was a full-time writer.

No One Tells You This

It was a position I had achieved less than five years after waiting my last table. I had worked for it, relentlessly. Which worked out admirably well, until I also went up in smoke. Or so it felt like to me. There are no speed bumps in the digital world. It was as though my career was a car racing across an endless plain, on a road with no speed limits, pedal to the floor: And that was exactly what happened.

The fiery ambition that had once driven me to work eighteen hours a day, seven days a week, for years, consumed me until I burned up. Another weak phrase—as if borrowed from a subway advertisement for bubble bath or resort vacations—to describe something that felt so shattering. It had started slowly and the early warning signs were easy to ignore.

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When I started thinking of writing as punishment instead of fortune, for instance, people said it was just the subject matter, I should switch beats. When I started approaching my workday with dread instead of eagerness, people told me I just needed a vacation.

But it turned out this was like telling someone whose house has been destroyed in a natural disaster that they simply needed a fresh coat of paint. I simply went through my day on autopilot, resentful but too worn out to make any changes. Instead, I cleared my desk out and walked home over the Brooklyn Bridge feeling giddy with my new freedom.

No One Tells Everything - Rae Meadows

This sensation lasted for a few weeks, buoyed along by plenty of good for yous! Eventually the rush wore off and reality began to set in, and yet I found myself unable to stop doing nothing. During those months of doing nothing, I watched the numbers in my savings account disappear, as though observing a weather report from a far-off land. Presumably the necessity of a paycheck to keep someone else alive might have eclipsed the manner in which I earned it.

Other days I wondered what it would be like not to be in this alone, to know there was someone else to pick up the financial slack. Will I ever get married?

See a Problem?

Do I want to have children? Are these even the most important questions to be asking of myself in the first place? In , nearly 60 percent of Americans between the ages of 18 and 29 were married. By , that percentage had fallen to just American women are marrying and having kids later, or not at all.

Our narratives should be a force as well. The rest of the book largely focuses on the following year. These anecdotes provide a framework through which MacNicol can reflect on the thrills and hardships of living a life for which modern women have few models. MacNicol acknowledges the negatives that can come along with a solo not solitary, but solo life in a society that assumes those circumstances make you fundamentally unhappy. She communicates the exhaustion of doing physical and emotional caretaking for her mother and her friends without a designated person to lean on for support.

She realizes the moments that might be simpler if she had a partner to lean on, and also honors the genuine wistfulness some of her friends with partners have when they talk about her life. Part of being human is to imagine the freedoms and luxuries of lives that are not your own. Ten years behind MacNicol in age, I see echoes of my life in her own. She moved to New York City when she was She has a tight-knit group of friends whom she depends on and who depend on her.

Of course, MacNicol is a white, straight woman living in a metropolitan city with enough money to live comfortably.