Taking the Long Way Home
Younger me was impatient to fast-forward to the next "Good Part".
It’s a Monday until it isn’t. It could be love until it’s no longer. It’s the swift burn of a matchstick that leaves us wanting more. It’s the sea on the horizon where the world ends tonight, and everyone is telling us to grow up when all we want to do is dream.
All we’ve ever wanted to do is dream.
I’m in a group chat with five versatile, articulate, mostly single women in our late 20s to 30s. We run nationwide nonprofits, we started our own companies, we volunteer with animals, we speak on panels and advise on boards, and we do it with grace and poise and warmth—maybe because we’re taught to, maybe because we’re penalized when we don’t, I don’t know.
Most of all, we make time to check in with each other.
My friend Cindy brought us together for International Women’s Day, and it’s evolved into one of the more supportive groups of women I’ve found since moving back to the city in 2022. We cheer each other on through job changes, startup stress, first date horror stories, more dating woes, plant motherhood, egg freezing, and all sorts of mundanities that make being a woman in this world complicated and wonderful.
We’re collectively probably still too open-hearted, still prone to over-thinking, and still sometimes stumble into metaphorical gutters. We’re figuring out what it means to be ambitious and feminine and likable and fierce at the same time. Once in a while, we fall for the wrong men. Once in a while, we let boys nuzzle I love you's into our necks and once in a while, we drink the wine of believing those boys.
(Some men really are sincere, but it’s hard to tell the difference.)
We tell each other keep going, don’t give up because God knows what could be right around the corner. And I know, I just know, that we will all be okay in the end.
Being single in San Francisco, I’ve met so many phenomenal women it feels cruel I’m still only into men. I’ve come to accept things will happen when they’re meant to happen. We never know what’s around the corner, when we might go on our last first date, when we’ll carve a permanent zip code for someone else in our hearts, when we’ll miss being single with all the freedom in the world: the luxury of time, the excitement of meeting new people, the simplicity of tending only to our own needs.
Someday too, this chapter will end. We’ll be onto weightier decisions entailing more than ourselves. Will we look back on today cherishing the weightlessness we once had? Or will we have spent it pining for the next chapter to begin?
Happiness is a byproduct of having lived the life we were meant to live.
Younger me wanted to fast-forward to the next Good Part, the next milestone: driver's license, graduation, first job, first apartment, first relationship, company fundraise, first customer… It was one goal after another, then onto the next. I didn’t want to spend time living life on repeat, accumulating a collection of loose experiences rather than penning a plot that could be something great. I was too immersed in the busywork of living to realize the stuff in between is the Good Part.
All those diversions and winding roads were the story.
Humans have an insatiable appetite for narrative. We want to know what’s next. We want a linear progression that amounts to something heavy and weighty. We want our experiences to be cumulative and fateful. We want to imbue our lives with meaning.
I’ve since come to believe happiness is a byproduct of having lived the life we were meant to live. I don’t think happiness can be pursued deliberately with lasting results.
What’s the hurry? We’ll get there soon enough.
I practice taking the long way home.
I tell myself, ‘Patience, dear heart.’
I smile in spite of myself.
I sing anyway.
