Microdosing My Dream Life

Existential FOMO for the British baby I might never have

Beatrix Potter with her pet mouse Xarifa, 1885.

It came on like a head cold. Slowly at first, then with undeniable force. A tickle at the back of the throat before the flu. I started keeping my ringer on in the other room in case anyone maybe texted me wanting to hang out (sneeze). I accidentally booked two dinners on the same night and opted for eating both rather than rescheduling either (cough). I changed my flight to make it back home for the opening night of it doesn’t even matter what — full-blown fever. My FOMO is back. I’m sick with it. RSVPing “YES!!!” to your Partiful is the only cure. 

I tried the alternatives. I’ve bought into the notion of “protecting my peace.” I’ve dabbled in nighttime routine. And beyond a latent interest in breathwork, I’ve found isolation for the sake of self-improvement wanting. I don’t feel like talking myself into just staying home because I ought to finish my leftovers and I probably won’t miss much at that Beading Workshop X Non-Alcoholic Seltzer pop up I said I’d go to. I feel my best when committed doggedly to a no-flake regimen, and I try never to bail unless I have a really good reason. (Like for example I rescheduled a Hinge date last week because my left eye hurt and my hair felt oily. You understand.)

After all the backlash, the incessant insistence that no one is having as much fun as you think they’re having, I’ve become a FOMO apologist. I think it’s a necessary evil, a regulatory force. A proverbial panopticon, imposing a constant, low-grade fear that I’ll say “ugh I so would but I’m exhausted” to exactly the Oktoberfest-themed birthday party that would have changed everything for me. What’s a life without the belief in something more? Or at least the motivation to go and find out?

This summer, though, my FOMO started to bleed beyond the bounds of Saturday night. It morphed to become a fear of missing something much bigger, something verging on existential. As I near the twilight of my twenties, and the seedling of my life takes gnarled root, I feel a nagging sense of anxiety that I’m giving up another, better life entirely. 

I blinked and everybody was moving to Europe. Every other Instagram story solicited a month-long sublet in London, three months in Copenhagen, two between Tuscany and the Alta Via. Their dispatches upon arrival all beautiful, all purporting epiphanies and transformations. ‘Is it really as good as it looks?” I asked. “Actually, yeah,” they said. 

I’ve gone through phases in how long I’ve thought I’d live in New York. At twenty-three I copied the clichés of my fellow come-heres, shrugging and saying “oh, I’ll probably leave after I meet my hot husband and we have our first beautiful baby.” Now, though, I opt for the less hubristic but still hopeful truth: “I can’t imagine what will make me want to leave.” 

I love New York. I love loving New York. I love feeling aligned with the people that I most idolize. Smart, funny people like Fran Liebowitz and Nora Ephron who decry the notion of ever being elsewhere. No compliment makes me glow brighter than “I could see you staying here forever” (other than “you’re so pretty” because… let’s be serious). But in the same moment of that gushing pride comes a bracing whiplash. An immediate come down punctuated by a heavy thud. What, so I’m never going to have a yard? Oh god and my beautiful baby won’t even have a British accent? 

But still, though I yearn to raise a child who says “samwidge,” I remain firmly planted. I feel bound here, not only by my obsession with the city but by my deep, innate love of practicality. I’m too trajectory-driven for any leap of faith. Too by the book to stray. Too excited by progress to opt for anything that feels like a diversion. The fear of losing my unborn English child is supplanted by my fear of taking a step backwards or sideways. Of stymieing the relationships I’ve built here, the career that’s starting to take shape, of leaving something I love only to come back and find it will never be the same. 

Doing anything means opting not to do an infinite number of other things. One FOMO bears another. The opportunity cost of any choice is enough to send me into crippling existential debt. I’m a one-man woman, but when I think about living in New York forever, I can understand the appeal of an open relationship. 

So I started looking for mistresses. Keeping a list of the lives that would make me completely happy. I found my first one in June. I was at the Morgan Library’s exhibition on Beatrix Potter, where I learned about her summers in the English countryside, outside with her journal all day drawing pictures of mushrooms and squirrels. Someone got a hold of those drawings and insisted that she turn them into children’s books and then she became a global phenomenon and accidental millionaire. And then she fell in love with her handsome lawyer. Besides the fact that that lawyer tragically died, I’d steal Beatrix Potter’s life verbatim.

Then I found the laundryman from My Antonia. Willa Cather wrote that he’d unearthed the secret to contentment — afternoons spent outside with the newspaper on his knee, mornings and evenings reserved for delivering freshly-ironed clothes, picking up linens to be washed. He packed his bundles with rosemary and he always smelled of it. 

Then Ann Patchett with her book store in Nashville where she hosts readings and book clubs. Then Judy O’Rourke with her house in coastal Maine and her garden full of things like “glass gem corn.” Then my friends Kate and Theo in Kent, Connecticut. Kate is a teacher at the boarding school nearby. Theo makes cheese at a local farm full of rare and beautiful cows. The Appalachian Trail is all but in their backyard. 

The appeals of each are vast and varied. In every fantasy I’m some form of off the grid or self sufficient or honestly really rich. But in lieu of being any of those things at the moment, twenty-six and modestly salaried and addicted to Instagram, I cope with souvenirs. Little moments from every weekend away, every bullet on my list of perfect ways of being that I can mine and steal for myself now. I’m microdosing my dream life. 

On the bus ride back from Kent I resolved to start buying good Gouda because surely that would make me 10% happier (it has). Driving home from a weekend at the lake, I promised I’d never forget how much better I sleep when I read before bed instead of all that other hell (this has been really hard ever since I found the Graham Norton Show on Instagram Reels but I’m doing my best). I totally forgot to try drawing bunnies and squirrels, like Beatrix, but I’m pretty sure that’s going to be huge for me. 

Now the summer’s over and it’s Autumn in New York again. Everybody’s disembarking from their European Airbnbs, slouching towards routine. And after months of itching, stuck between what’s mine and what could be, of ascertaining what I’m missing in New York, I’ve never loved it more. In striving for perfection, I can have it all. A patchwork quilt of good cheese and books before bed and everything I ever hope to have, in little pieces, right now. And if what I hope is true is true, and I’m meant to be here forever, I can fake a pretty good British accent for that baby. Innit.