* * *
I made all the turns that led me to where I ended up, feeling broken and low despite all the luck and support that should have made me feel safe and happy and secure.
Most of those decisions were right in the moment when I made them. Well, some were terribly wrong. (See: the enormous SUV I purchased after my second child was born, then drove for a decade despite the fact that I couldn’t park it and regularly crashed it into obstacles and other cars.) But mostly I made what I really believed were good choices. Even if you deliberately choose to do a “wrong” thing, you’re choosing it, which means you’ve picked it as the right thing to do.
Still. You can stand by your past decisions even if they took you to a present where you don’t belong anymore.
You can find yourself at a time when, no matter how many things you’ve done right—really, truly right in the moment when you did them—you feel like something is wrong. No, everything is wrong. This feeling will defy logic, which will make you nuts because you love logic! You believe in cause and effect, hard work that pays off, wise choices that reap rewards. Early to bed, early to rise, rinse with cold water, choose brown rice, save your money, wear sunscreen, don’t lick water fountains, floss. These are not just things you believe; they’re things you do because that’s the deal: Do what’s right, and you’ll be glad in the end! If X, then Y.
But you’re not glad. X, but not Y. The to-do list was supposed to get smaller and smaller as you checked off everything you meant to do and approached the finish line of bona fide adulthood. Instead, you got to the end of the list and didn’t feel like you’d arrived anywhere. You felt more disoriented than ever.
I did, anyway.
* * *
I knew what to do when I felt lost: Find help. So I started seeing a therapist.
One morning, she leaned forward from her chair to where I sat cross-legged on a sofa and asked, “Can you pinpoint when you stopped feeling happy?”
“I . . .” I looked down at my lap.
I felt embarrassed because here I was in a psychiatric session that cost real money, using up daylight hours, trying to find out if my brain was defective, parsing my own happiness history as if it was something that mattered in the world. I was a cliché: first-world problems. I felt ashamed.
But she had a point. Maybe if I could figure out what situations made me feel not like this, I could find a path out of this state, and I could find it before my misery caused anyone else unhappiness. I started thinking, I don’t belong here anymore. I have to get out. Now.
To find the path, I studied what other people did. I read books for guidance. How do other people get happy again? Run away was a common narrative. Leave it all behind. I read memoir after memoir by people who burned down one life and started another. Scorch the earth and be reborn as someone new. I could use that map if I wanted to. Maybe I should disappear into a crowded street on the other side of the world! Maybe I should change my name and climb a mountain! I researched tents. I put my hair in two braids and wrapped a bandana around my forehead: Does this look outdoorsy? And then I remembered, wait—I can’t lift my carry-on bag into the overhead bin on a plane, much less haul a pack on my back all day. I’m not that person. Nor am I the other people whose life stories I devoured: the young woman who escaped a kidnapper’s underground lair, the man who left a cult, or any of the many bold and exceptional individuals who chronicled their change of name, change of gender, change of everything in the search for who they really are.
I’m just a person.
It wouldn’t be fair for me to say, “I’m just an average person,” or “an ordinary” person, because I am also a lucky person. I was raised in a loving home and grew up to have another loving home, and I do not suffer from the dire physical, financial, or situational disadvantages that so many people struggle under.
But being fortunate doesn’t mean you won’t reach a certain point in life—many points, actually—and panic. It doesn’t mean you don’t periodically wonder how you got where you are and if there’s any way to get out.
I tried to imagine myself an action-movie hero, tossing a match over my shoulder and walking off in slow motion as an explosion bloomed behind me. The problem is that if you toss a match like that, you can’t control what it burns, and there was so much in my life I didn’t want to burn down.
Surely, that wasn’t the only alternative to the status quo. It couldn’t be just this one-or-the-other choice. But if these weren’t my only two options—stay miserable or blow it all up—then . . . what?
I was going to have to draw my own damned map.
The Perfect Murder Weapon
I have lost so much sleep trying to figure out where to hide bodies.
Killers on television are always tossing their victims into shallow woodland graves or dumping them into rivers where hikers and fishermen will come across them the next day. If the perps are a little smarter, they try to cover their tracks by throwing acid all over everything or setting a fire. But they always leave something behind—a hair, a clothing fiber, a footprint. If you want to make someone disappear, you’ve got to think things through. Murder is no occasion for shoddy preparation. It’s not like packing for a trip and then realizing, Whoops! Forgot my underwear! If you Whoops! Forgot my glove! back at the scene, you’re toast.
Bad guys on TV also like to choose weapons that can be traced: a bullet from a specific gun, a knife with a telltale blade pattern, poison that leaves a chemical residue. Are they trying to get arrested? Do they not even want to do a good job? You’d think this would be a situation where somebody would take the time to check their work.
* * *
This line of thinking is why I’ve decided to quit watching crime shows and police procedurals before bedtime.
Every time I do, I stay awake for hours walking through the crime, planning how I’d have done it better, what weapon I’d have chosen. Not because I have plans to kill anyone—no, no, I’m the kind of person who rescues earthworms from sidewalks when the sun comes out after a rainstorm—but because I can’t see a problem without trying to solve it. Even problems I don’t have, problems that couldn’t possibly have less to do with me, like how to pull off a well-organized, shipshape, evidence-free murder.
* * *
My name is Mary Laura, and I am addicted to getting things right.
* * *
All of us have some prevalent personality trait, no matter what other qualities we possess. There’s always one ingredient that flavors everything else about us. The cilantro, if you will.
For me, it’s my type A nature. I became aware of this label as a preteen, when a sixth-grade science teacher walked past my tidy desk and remarked offhandedly, “You’re a little type A, aren’t you?” I took note of her comment, keen to think she meant I was an A student. Over time, as I heard it more and more, I came to realize that being “type A” doesn’t mean you’re a grade A human being—it means you have a certain set of high-strung tendencies.
Back in the 1950s, a couple of cardiologists named Meyer Friedman and Ray Rosenman coined the term to describe people who were extraordinarily driven by work, more ambitious, competitive, and time-focused than most other people. They theorized that type A people, unlike their more naturally relaxed type B counterparts, had a higher risk of heart disease. (As it turned out, they were partially right. Research eventually proved a link between heart attacks and high levels of unreleased stress, and as all of us type A people can tell you, unreleased stress is what we have pulsing through our veins.) Nowadays the term is thrown around casually to mean anyone who’s a stickler for timeliness, someone who fixates on perfection. In search of that perfection, some type A folks see other people as competitors in everything they do. Others (like me) compete constantly with themselves, always trying to beat their own personal best. Type A people also crave information, so that we can always be ready with the right answer in any scenario.
Thus my need to know how to plan the perfect m
urder.
* * *
When you know your own tendencies, you can come up with workarounds to navigate daily life with fewer pitfalls. For example, I love reading magazines, but I’ve learned to save them for when I’m traveling. If I’m already stuck in an airport, it’s not as much of a time loss when I blow an hour poring over pieces like “Nine Tips for a Stronger Golf Swing” and “Three Signs Your Cat May Be Depressed,” which I shouldn’t be reading anyway, because I don’t golf or have a cat. Do I suspect someone’s going to walk into a crowd and yell, “Help! My drives aren’t making it down the fairway, and it’s making my cat sad. What should I do?” and I’ll be the one with the knowledge to save the day? I don’t know. But that folly is best left for time that’s already wasted.
* * *
I scrutinize minutiae as if I’m preparing for a test, and to me, everything in life is a test. Fill in the blank: The right job is _____. The right way to be a friend is _____. The right parenting style is _____. The right way to handle anxiety over whether or not I’m right about everything is _____.
This need to succeed comes out in silly ways—like when I take part in little private contests throughout the day, just so I can pat myself on the back: When I turn the page in a book, I give myself a split second to guess the first word on the next page. I also pretend there’s an app in my bathroom mirror that’s scoring me on how symmetrically I apply eyeliner to both eyes. I’ve done this stuff for as long as I can remember. As a kid, I ate my way around a plate as if someone might stop the clock any second and judge me based on how evenly I’d consumed the different food groups in my meal. (Three bites of egg, three bites of bagel, three bites of strawberry.) Teenage-me imagined I was being filmed in my closet, giving an interview about my organizational skills; I won imaginary prizes for keeping my shoes so neat. Dial back to any point on my timeline, and there I am, a contestant in a game show no one else can see.
I’m making it sound like being this way is fun, like it’s a hilarious quirk, but to be clear: It’s also miserable. I hate that I can’t relax. I wish I didn’t have a to-do list in my peripheral vision at all times.
It’s an exhausting way to live, but try as I might, I can’t turn it off. My brain seeks tasks to check off, i’s to dot and t’s to cross (not to mention x’s to slash, e’s to loop, and z’s to zag), the way a sort-of-but-not-really reformed smoker sucks in a deep lungful of nicotine when walking past a crowd of smokers outside a bar. Like any high-functioning addict, I have learned to sneak a hit wherever I can. When the pediatrician gives me my kids’ growth charts, I look for the percentages first. When the water meter guy handed me a report with our latest meter reading, I scanned it for a score and asked, “Is this good?” I can sustain a buzz for hours after anyone tells me that something I’ve done was “the best”—even if it’s just a colleague at the bookstore where I work saying, “Hey, Mary Laura, you’re the best at changing the toilet paper roll in the employee bathroom.” Bam. Better than a shot of tequila.
Vacations are difficult to settle into when you’re like this. A good day for me ends with completing something, looking at that thing all nice and finished, and letting a sense of accomplishment flood my nervous system. Ahhhhh, that’s better. It soothes my mind and brings me peace—and peace is what vacation is supposed to be all about, right? But whip out a laptop at the pool, and people go nuts. Workaholic, they call you. OCD. Control freak. On my fortieth-birthday beach trip, I hid in a cabana bathroom to finish edits on an article I was working on. There was no way I could enjoy a margarita until the assignment was complete.
I hear people talk about how fun it is to “do nothing” when they’re off work, and I think, I want to do nothing, too. “Nothing” sounds wonderful. So I study how to be unstudied. I watch how laid-back people act and try to mimic it. I toss my purse on the floor and fling my arm breezily over the side of a chair, like I’m so relaxed I don’t even care where my limbs or belongings land. Sometimes I can almost convince myself I feel it.
Luckily, one of my responsibilities at the bookstore is reading manuscripts of forthcoming books. That means that on vacation I can imitate relaxing while I’m actually working. All I have to do is lean back in my beach lounger and point to my stack of books and say, “Behold this leisurely reading I’m doing while casually wearing a sarong, free of all cares and work-related thoughts,” when in fact I’m thinking, Four books in three days. Yessss.
If success came in snortable form, I’d sniff it up each nostril and rub the residue on my gums.
* * *
People like me—people who don’t just enjoy being right, but need to be right—are often described as ballbusters, as if all we want in the world is to make everyone’s lives harder. As if we take some pleasure in grinding our gears over every little problem in the world. Let me speak for my people and say, no, it’s not that. I don’t want to make anyone’s life more difficult.
And I don’t mean to come across as impatient, but I do like to be on time. I sense the ticking of an invisible stopwatch in everything I do, because life’s to-do list never seems to get shorter, which means the only hope for feeling some sense of progress is to get through it without delay. My senior yearbook quote was, “Dost thou love life? Then do not squander time, for that is the stuff life is made of,” by Benjamin Franklin. (So, so cool next to everyone else’s Prince lyrics.)
It’s Mr. Franklin’s philosophy I always have in mind whenever people I have plans with are running late. I used to text them:
Are you coming?
Need me to pick you up?
Reservation in five mins.
Should I call and change it?
I sent a string of texts like this to a friend once. Then I noticed that after her leaving soon response to my first message, she had stopped answering. She pulled into my driveway to pick me up (for another friend’s birthday dinner, for which we were now half an hour late), and when I opened the passenger door, she snapped, “I know.”
She backed out of my driveway, looking in the rearview mirror, refusing to make eye contact with me. We sat silently side by side for the ride, and when we arrived at the restaurant, she leapt from the car as if being freed from a broken elevator, hustling over to where our other friends stood leisurely chatting near the door. No one had told the hostess our party was late. No one had checked to see if the table was still available. Why was she so happy to see these irresponsible friends who didn’t even care about making sure our dinner plan didn’t fall apart? I was the one who’d tried to help her be on time. I was the one who’d tried to make everything right. And now she was mad at me!
I’d been freaking out because our plans had gone off the rails and I wanted to fix them. And yes, also because lateness makes me insane. But I realized as my friend gave an exasperated sigh and handed me a drink from the bar—an act I recognized in that moment as one of forgiveness—that she’d been more irritated by my prodding than she was frustrated by our scrambled plans or sorry about being late. I had made her feel rushed and belittled. When we were finally seated, another half hour later, the glow of our tabletop candlelight camouflaged how red my face had flushed with embarrassment.
I resolved, silently, to be less terrible next time.
Shortly thereafter, I started training myself not to text every hurry-up-where-are-you that popped into my head, thereby making me seem more relaxed. It’s a front, but it preserves friendships.
I don’t want people to feel I’m judging them. I don’t want to be perceived as hostile, although I know that I sometimes am. But I’m not hostile like a crazy person punching strangers on a subway platform. I’m just hostile like a crazy person who wants to gouge her eyes out when she sees grammatical errors on billboards. LOWEST PRICE’S—I can hardly stand it.
My mind seeks the tidiness of a question answered. An agenda complete. A box checked. That’s what harmony feels like in my brain. Wasted time and wrong answers disrupt that harmony like an off-key instrument making a disso
nant clang in a musician’s ears.
I’m not a monster. I just want everything to be perfect. Is that so much to ask?
* * *
(It’s an icicle, by the way. The perfect murder weapon. It melts—no fingerprints!)
Wonder Woman
People blame their parents for their flaws and eccentricities all the time. In interviews, in therapy, in memoirs, they enumerate the many ways their mothers fucked them up. It seems we can’t discuss the way we are without assigning some responsibility to the generation before. Anyone can do it.
* * *
Chapel Hill, North Carolina. I was in first grade. My mother picked me up from school in our family Buick, as always. My dad, still in the early years of his medical career, was off working at the hospital most of the time, so the role of daily caretaker fell to her, as it did with most mothers then. She had been a schoolteacher before we were born—me, then my brother—and once she had us, she stayed home and we became her tiny class of two. When we were little, she was the one human being we saw most. She was our guide to how the world worked, not to mention our food source, our referee, our correctional officer, our chief entertainer—the de facto center of our universe.
That afternoon, I unloaded my Wonder Woman book bag onto the vinyl bench seat of our car and showed my mother the stack of papers we’d all been sent home with, a list of words printed on each page. Easy ones like love, candy, bike, and harder ones like breath, power, and understand. That week there was to be a spelling contest, winnowing the class down to the best spellers, ultimately crowning a champion.
I Miss You When I Blink Page 2