half-assed

I point at the two empty stools by the bar and ask if I can have them. The maître d’ asks if I am a guest, and I shake my head. She winks at me and leads me to the bar, pulling a chair out for me. The front bar at The Ritz is full. I am meeting a woman I have never met. A blind date for friendship.

The bartender smiles at me in a boyish, charming way and asks me what I’d like to drink. I slowly read through the menu to fill time and settle on the pinot noir. A soft, smooth and easy wine to keep me company while I wait.

It’s the first time that I am out at night in Paris since I arrived two weeks ago. It is getting cold, but I want to feel good and am wearing my favourite silk and lace mini dress that I thrifted in NYC in the summer and a dusty pink cashmere sweater that I bought the day before I left.

New York is still etched into my heart with pangs of nostalgia that I’ve never experienced before. But here I am in Paris instead and actually happier about it than I had imagined. My new friend arrives, dispelling my thoughts of the past few months, tiny and elegant, dressed in all black from bottom to top.

Black heels, a long black pencil skirt, a black cami, and a black sweater wrapped around her shoulders. She apologises for being late, orders the same wine, and we begin to exchange stories. She’s from Texas and, after a career in the oil and gas industry, has moved to Paris to be with her fiancé and embark on her ‘soft woman’ era. She shares some sentiments about learning to purposely drop some balls in her life to find true happiness. It was a slightly different argument than saying “you can’t have it all,” and it has stayed with me until this morning.

It was this summer, right after my breakup, that I declared to my friend, “From now on, I’m half-assing everything!”. I had poured so much of myself into the relationship, into the move to New York, into the life that I thought I had been building with someone that I loved.

All my life, I have given the things that I love maximum commitment and effort, but it has not made me happy. I decided that perhaps what I needed to do instead was to start half-assing everything and deciding that that is enough.

‘Enough’ has become a mantra these past few months when I consider aspects of my current lifestyle that feel messy or half-assed but are otherwise contributing to my day-to-day functioning. My lack of food in the fridge or of proper mealtimes. My haphazard attempt to consistently produce work that results in income. My uncertainty about where I am supposed to live. My attempts at staying in touch with the people I love, which had been discriminatingly narrowed down to only those who can meet me at a level of self-awareness and maturity that matches where I am headed. My insufficient sleep patterns as I slowly return my nervous system to homeostasis after the most activating few months of my life.

Whatever it is, my effort, care, patience, limitations, love, appreciation, hope… is enough. It has to be. Because I have realised that just because something could technically be better or done better or more efficient or more perfect doesn’t necessarily mean that it has to be. That better doesn’t make me happier. But that accepting an imperfect, messy life and letting that be enough does.

This morning, sitting in my bed looking out this window, writing these words to you, I appreciate how completely letting go and letting myself do things in this more lax and half-assed way has led me here. Living in the fifth arrondissement in central Paris in a beautiful two-bedroom apartment with high ceilings that I have sublet until the New Year, hopefully giving myself enough time for parts of my life to settle and replenish in ways I need them to before I have to make any further decisions about what is next.

It is writing and the art of noticing that have offered me the calming ability to see the agency I do have in my life. Writing has held a thread of self-respect for me in a time when it felt like everything I had had fallen apart. It has shown me that what is really happening is that my life is finally falling together.