I AM NO LONGER WAITING TO BE THE BEST

or the prettiest... or the smartest... or anything

Welcome to Club Reticent: Summer Series, consisting of six essays on acceptance, beauty, and gentler growth. The series runs weekly from July through September. Enjoy & Love you x

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It’s about 3:15 in the afternoon. My blurry silhouette in the mirror is two free Clicquot glasses too deep in an unfamiliar place with obnoxiously golden chandeliers to care about the ladies twice my age and half my awareness throwing who-do-you-think-you-are glances. I’m dizzy from the heat when it hits me that life is either about waiting or doing, and those of us accustomed to the waiting will have spent it all crying over lost time and first signs of aging. Somehow along the way I’ve gotten better, I don’t remember how now — but if I’m in this prestige room, standing arm-crossed, then I must have changed. Most positive change happens unconsciously, in the background; it’s only the bad change we remember well.

I know too much to stay indifferent: there’s angry emails from people that question my competence overflowing my inbox, there’s pressure to do more and better, there’s so much left unsaid. Oh the tension and no AC, you could crack and fry an egg on me. And yet I’m here, somehow. Do I deserve it? I don’t know. I climbed here, clawed my way in without acrylics or inheritance. This is a big room. This is the life of an important woman. It takes a toll. Living in whatever opposite realm of peaking in high school is.

What’s changed? Not much, but everything: I am no longer waiting to be the prettiest girl in the room to do the things I want to do. The smartest to get in line to speak my mind. The most eloquent to write, the most original to stand out. The richest to shop at Lafayette. You get the gist. I just… do?

The best, in any capacity, has not been reached, no pinnacle in sight and no hope for resolution, not just because the goalpost keeps moving but simply that I’ve gotten to understand I’ll never live up to my standards; it’s never enough. Two years ago I felt like shit and dreamt of traveling the world with some extra money for cabs and cocktails and having something that resembles purpose or forward motion; a little breathing through the nausea later, tonight, I’m in a cab en route to cocktail hour and my life’s purpose is clearer than a freshly washed window over a crescent moon, but it’s all useless because I think there isn’t enough people in my corner and I feel kind of ugly and bored doing the awesome above. You see? No dream can satiate the appetite and outrun the loathing, no gratitude prayer exists for the heatwave bad enough to make you want to blow your brains out, and if this cruel trickery is to last forever and I am to delay my happiness another second, I might as well fire back and take a little shortcut to abundance. Don’t scorn the player, scorn the game.

I live my life today the way I think a better me would live. Trust me, I fantasize about her often. I waited forever, left a thousand voicemails, ran a hundred miles, but that girl’s a no-show. She kept ditching me for better plans or something with more gratuitous prospects, and must’ve been so busy while I stood there through the rain, counting intervals in traffic lights and passing cars. One boring Friday I had a party to attend, and she cancelled at the last minute again. Could I afford a life so sterile, like an airport lounge or a reception desk, built just for waiting? I told her to get real: there will never be a me atop of every guest list in rhinestones, and there will never be a me with a better waist-to-hip ratio. Eventually, we both knew she’d never show up or reciprocate, so we stopped lying to ourselves and I went to the party anyway. Alone. When waiting takes most of your life, you might as well just stop. That night, something was born amidst the disappointment: the doing of impatience. No consolation prizes. The freedom of living here and now, today, imperfect. I had so much fun without her and woke up so ashamed but giddy.

They say don’t fix it if it ain’t broken, and in my case, don’t waste your days correcting what will always be distorted. I have never liked myself. The way my face moves. 85% of my body and all the cells that make up the four-limbed final boss of agony. The way I get flustered when faced with confrontation or cruelty and seem to only activate defense in retrospect. The way I can barely make myself work in the world and all the social clues that bypass me. There won’t be a miraculous day I wake up with a change of heart — at least, I have to be rational enough to assume the possibility of never truly being okay with the long list of things I’m failing to fix or accept. Well, is it impatience, neutrality, or something in between? All the time spent over railways and in my feelings has done nothing but confirm that life is a moving carriage, with or without. It doesn’t really care if you like your thighs in shorts or if your jokes were funny enough at Felice 56 for him to want you for something other than your first come, first serve body.

At the window seat, passing through the calming Flemish fields in a rusty Thalys (acquired by Eurostar, and for what?) with the old logo still sealed into ornate fixtures and upholstered in the scratchiest, most unpleasant to the touch faux velvet, a gaudy attempt at Belle Époque that punches well above its weight, I find myself relating to it all. It’s what my life has come to be: opulence that’s bigger than a parody but smaller than truth. If I’m an impostor, should I sit still and pretend this is what I ought to be doing? That’s the plan. There is no other plan.

This wisdom isn’t accidental or a result of free champagne; I have been talking to my dear friend’s little sister about acceptance. IT GETS BETTER I yell. But does it really? She’s going through the motions (as any teen would) and we’ve got things in common, so knowing that I dissect complex feelings online probably makes me a more credible source than AI or TikTok. But coming to me for acceptance advice is like coming to technocratic elites for empathy — conniving, believe-what-you’re-selling-first. Nonetheless, gritting my teeth, I’m flattered: an unassuming question from someone younger you care about renders an answer from your highest self, forcing me to abandon my selfish flesh for deference that stretches out from my feet in a holy glimmering staircase into the sky, to hell with all the grudges and hoarding, astral projecting out of my reality and coming back with the knowledge of someone I could admire. By trying to teach a girl to be gentler with herself, I’m teaching myself something of similar origin, too. There’s a fragile teen in all of us. There’s also a greedy monster to be tamed.

How have I been living differently? Spending recklessly or optimizing time? No, no. The change is subtle. Reverse engineering: turns out it’s not all about coming to terms with yourself. Acceptance in the age of social media and Ozempic is like a Sicily trip in a recession: doable, but at what cost? Sometimes it’s about ditching those great in theory concepts and doing things anyway at a soft inflection point. Stop praying to become more likeable — start praying to give less of a fuck! Can’t let all that baggage delay my dreams any longer. They’re more important than how I feel about myself. The teenagers I’m yet to guide are more important than my permanently hurt feelings. And surely all of this is bigger than the blonde ladies side-eyeing me for taking up limited space.

In general and in vain, I’m fascinated by the concept of deserving. Specifically how it ties into perceived self-value and appearances and where we place ourselves on the utility scale. In a way, I think, ‘deserving’ is a hostile concept: it implies a certain hierarchy that determines who gets the gifts of life and who’s been a really, really bad girl this year, all on some subjective moral ground that is obedient to the structure more than it is helpful. Post-soviet upbringing aside, being high-strung on the idea of working hard to see the fruits of our labor ripen only rots them. Cherries, mangoes, apples — I’m learning it the hard way. Have your cake and binge on it too, sprinkle cigarette ash over it so your life isn’t too sweet for the system. You don’t want to seem like the one lucky one out, do you? That would disqualify you. What if everything comes crashing down? Completely intrusive, unprompted, false, but expected. Shame runs so deep, digging through it feels like hand-whisking batter.

Growing up, I’d spend a lot of time at my grandma’s. She’d taped a handwritten note in the nook between the cradle and the handle of a landline phone that spelled out “If not you, then who? If not now, when?”. Come to think of it, such behavior was esoteric even for the most sought out Brooklyn tarot reader, let alone for a small-town Belarusian woman born in the fifties. I’ve an inkling it was an attempt at pep talk for phone calls. Every grandmother, at the end of the day, is just a girl. And by some flash association, I remember the quote more vividly than any of my childhood books. It aligns now: whenever I get in my head and start making up weird convictions like I’m not the right person for [this] or maybe I shouldn’t be doing [that] and when I try to think of someone who would be a better fit or should be doing what I’m not allowed, no one else comes to mind. If not me, who? If not now, when?

Life has a funny way of poking you in the stomach and tugging at your love handles repeatedly when you refuse to learn a lesson. Sometimes it comes to you and says: take this good thing, there is no trickery — pinky promise. But if you dare question my generosity or insult the mysticism, you’ll suffer restlessly at the hands of dopamine crashing and overthinking to the bone. Because joy doesn’t have to be balanced out by retribution, but especially because past pain is not a prerequisite for beauty to flourish — and by making ourselves believe we have it ‘too good’, we teach our neurons that we start from punishment as the default and work our way out. That’s capitalism. That’s misogyny. Most importantly, that’s nonsense. No need to get spiritual here, it’s just as neurological: the brain is hardwired to look for confirmation clues. Believe in joy, receive more joy. Believe in pain, get more pain. This is my newfound hobby now, angled at its prime point: how far can I stretch out the limits of my audacity? How can I experience more joy with no strings attached? I am exploring the intriguing concept of not wondering whether I’m deserving. I’m exploring the concept of not waiting. I’m exploring the concept of being in a room where my success is questioned and thrown into the corner for interrogation, and not being afraid of some karmic curse threads signed off with dislike of a few women. As the old proverb goes, jealousy is a disease. Kiss emoji.

On a journey again, as one should be, to acceptance or somewhere unknown, undecided and full of ellipses and question marks. To look in the mirror with no fascination but a certain relief. There is no need to cry about it, because life can still be nice and aesthetic and well-rounded and full of sunshine. Do you remember endless playtime that posed no question of deserving? Do you remember not questioning the good? Do you remember the morning mist before the guilt settled over? The architecture of your personhood before the shame scaffold? These are the roots I’m getting back to, wishing for things to have been more obvious from the start. We’re determined here. I’m an authority, I am forgettable, I’m a flop, I’m a star. All of these can be true at the same time. Some knowledge is lost along the way but gained back through time and reiteration. Bet on it, wish on it, sleep on it, do whatever you want, actually, you’re going to be fine. You knew these things. I didn’t.

Life is good because I said so. That’s all there is to it, really, at the end of an awfully humid day.