Published
I grew up on reruns of I Love Lucy. I grew up thinking this made me special.
My mother had a nightly ritual of poking her head into my room, worried she’d heard me crying. In reality, I was kicking my feet back and forth, laughing hysterically at one of Lucy’s famous antics. I was lucky enough to have an old TV in my bedroom—one that required you to get out of bed to change the channel. It was a system that demanded commitment, but as an only child, the TV was my greatest friend, and I was happy to oblige. I’ll never know what my little demon laugh must have sounded like. But I do know that I wanted to be just like Lucy.
Lucy wasn’t just funny. Her wheels were always turning. She was perpetually on the verge of something bigger, something she wasn’t quite allowed to have. I didn’t yet have the language for ambition, but I understood the feeling of wanting to step into a life that looked brighter, more fantastic, more important than my own.
There is something disorienting about that kind of wanting. As a child, dreaming like this felt like a possibility. As I got older, it felt more like distance. I lived with the sense that I was watching my life like a movie, and yet I could feel my skin sticking to me—a slow, ever-present squeeze.
Maybe I’ve never been present a day in my life, which may explain my overwhelming ache of nostalgia for things that occurred only moments before. Instead of living through my experiences, I treated them like boxes to tick, markers of a life well lived.
Life was a constant performance, and my self-esteem was hanging by a few fragile hooks. I believed that if I did everything “right,” if I followed every rule—and I knew the rules—I would get all the things I longed for. Take risks, but not too many. Have desire, but keep it aimless. Shoot your shot, but with an air of apology.
And then my body interrupted this flawless performance of mediocrity. Sudden, searing pain— like someone hit me over the head with a bat. It felt as if my head had been placed into a vise. An endless, crushing pressure. I doubled over, dizzy, vomiting into the public toilet at the gym. A toilet that was oddly clean, a small mercy.
My brain? Well, she was bleeding. And a bleeding brain? Well, that’s a stroke.
For the first time, there was no future version of myself to escape into. I stared into my reflection in the ambulance window. That’s really me, I thought. No more if-onlys—if only I ticked off one more box, then I’d finally have it! The impossible, foreboding, unnamable it.
No. There was just me. In this body. In this hospital bed. In this ICU. A nurse telling me I had really thick skin as she tried, again and again, to pierce it with a needle. You might think it was Death I saw, but it was actually Life who paid a visit. It was all the lives I had already lived.
As I lay in my hospital bed watching reruns—not of Lucy, but of old shows like Cold Case and Major Crimes—I was transported back in time. To a life that was mine, but felt like someone else’s. I saw familiar faces, people I once knew and still know, guest-starring on shows we had once fought to be on. As if it were life or death—getting cast as a white supremacist’s girlfriend who ultimately gets murdered.
Someone once called me a missed opportunity. Girls like Jordan? They’re a missed opportunity.
At the time, I knew he meant I was too old to “make it.” This now felt ironic because the doctors and nurses at the hospital repeated the phrase “You’re so young” as an almost constant mantra. Too young for a stroke, bordering on geriatric for a pregnancy. Ah, to be a woman.
Now, I think I understand it differently. I had spent so much time trying to become something, become someone, that I had never fully been where I was.
So how does one not become a missed opportunity in their own life? Maybe it’s staying. Maybe it’s letting yourself be seen in the moment you’re in, instead of waiting to become someone worth watching.
I think I misunderstood Lucy. I thought she was always reaching for something bigger. But what she actually does is go for it, no matter how embarrassing or ridiculous she might look. She uses every ounce of her imagination, not to escape her life, but to move through it and transform it in real time.
She isn’t living in some imagined future version of herself. She’s intimately inside her own body, committing completely to whatever she’s doing, even when it fails. Especially when it fails. And we love her for it.
I, on the other hand, was always thinking about the next thing, the better version, the life that would make all of it meaningful later. I wasn’t using my imagination to live. I was using it to keep myself small, never good enough for some make-believe panel of judges.
As the weeks pass, I can feel the gentle tug luring me back into my old beliefs. The delicious and delirious chokehold of wanting, warping my perception—like looking through a peephole from the wrong end. In its familiarity, it’s easy to forget to be here. To feel the weight of the thing.
The trick is to stay out. I want to stay new. I don’t need to grasp or pull or chase. Still, there are days when the comfort of the known rocks me back to sleep.
And when friends stop me on the street with a concerned look in their eyes, saying, “Oh my God, how are you doing?” I still find myself asking, “Why? What happened?”
