19.

R.I.P. the Imposter.

I knew something had changed for me at work when, one afternoon a couple of years ago, I walked down the hallway to my office, balancing my drink on my sandwich and stabilizing the whole setup with my chin as I slid open my office door. I was working then at a magazine at which I managed a group of junior editors, whose cubicles were in a row outside my office. Three of them were huddled around one of their computer monitors, not an uncommon sight around the features department, where people often help one another with tricky on-screen issues. I smiled and raised my eyebrows at them as I b.u.mped open the door with my hip, to acknowledge how goofy I must have looked. They smiled back. After setting my lunch down on my messy desk, I realized I'd forgotten to take a straw. I stuck my head out of my office, preparing to ask if anyone had a spare.

"Hey, guys," I said. As soon as I spoke, all three of them swooshed their heads 180 degrees away from the computer toward me, seemingly startled. They wore identical half smiles and wide, surprised eyes.

"Sorry-does anyone have a straw?" One scooted to her desk and another fumbled in drawers-a bit too solicitously, in my view. I glanced at the screen, and noticed, underneath a few windows with legitimate-looking doc.u.ments and websites in them, one web page with rows of shoes peaking out. It was obviously Zappos. If we were in a silent movie, there would be an organ chord heralding the moment of discovery that just took place.

The thing is, I couldn't care less. Those young women worked like Oompa-Loompas well into the evening, whereas I had long since realized that there was very little that couldn't wait until the next morning, or come home with me at 5:30 if truly critical. I would never have begrudged them a little personal time at work. I was a bit ... not stung, exactly, but surprised. They were hiding Zappos from me, of all people? Surely they'd seen the blue, black and white Zappos boxes arriving almost monthly at my office! I said nothing. If I had spoken, the only thing I would have said was "Cute boots," because they were cute, but I didn't want them to have to stammer an unnecessary explanation. I got a straw, and went back into my cave.

As I ate lunch, I thought about it. I realized I couldn't remember the last time they opened their cl.u.s.ters to include me in their conversations about recalcitrant boyfriends or their favorite reality shows. We had a nice rapport, and they seemed to feel comfortable speaking their minds about work matters around me, but clearly, I was not one of them. When had that happened? The fact that I wouldn't have minded if they ordered shoes from their desk was completely irrelevant. The point was, they saw me as someone who might mind, and that's what put me in a different cla.s.s of workplace denizen. Just as my tween and teen nieces and nephews look at me as a "cool" adult but with narc potential, I had become a "cool" boss, but a boss nonetheless.

It didn't seem too terribly long ago that I was one of those women, shiny, taut-skinned and eager to please, striving with a smile, even as I was outrageously underpaid. When I was 22 and an a.s.sistant at a magazine, I smuggled toilet paper from the ladies' room home in my purse each week, in part because I was broke, and also because I felt somewhat ill-used. But that was as subversive as I allowed myself to be. Otherwise I was a good puppy, volunteering for the extra-credit projects and laboring over a six-word caption for half a day, grateful for the opportunity to do so.

The captions quickly became blurbs and then stories and features, but over the years my att.i.tude remained the same. I was the goodest girl among the good girls magazine publishing tends to attract. I never said no, no matter how silly or doomed to fail I could foresee a project was, and I was conscientious in the extreme. This all made me very successful, if you define success in terms of raises and promotions and TV spots and parties and making a name for oneself relatively young.

Most people would define success that way. I certainly did, but in the last decade or so I realized that definition was not entirely suiting me. The rumblings of a shift began when I was around 31, and the second-in-command at Glamour magazine. We were closing (that's when all futzing over fonts and facts ceases and the pages of a magazine leave the building one by one to go to the printer), and it was a wicked closing-some stories had come in late, some had legal problems and our editor-in-chief had made countless last-minute changes, which meant that a large crew of us were working late nights. I caught a glimpse of myself from above, as if I were not me, but me looking at a nannycam video of me. What I saw was pretty gross.

There I was, my hair frizzy and twisted up with a pencil, circles under my eyes, scarfing sushi in the back of a Town Car at midnight on my way home from the office for the third night in a row. The corporately funded Dragon Roll had been on my desk since seven, when those of us working late had ordered in. I had meant to eat it, but every time I was about to snap the takeout chopsticks apart, a page proof would land on my desk or someone needed me to weigh in on a decision. I'd hop up and put productivity and good nature before my own growling tummy. That resulted in me, five hours later, being driven home in a luxury company car, one in which Anna Wintour herself, the sleek and coiffed editor of Vogue, might have sat in earlier in the evening. I was dripping soy sauce on the sushi from a plastic packet, trying not to splash it on the plush leather upholstery.

Behold, the lowest moment of my fabulous career as a glamorous magazine editor: The raw fish was at room temperature. I knew I should chuck it. I gave it a sniff. It smelled OK. I paused. I was so ravenous that, yes, I ate it, forcing from my mind's eye all images of the microscopic larval worms that might be squiggling through the little slabs of tuna. There was a tiny, self-protective part of my psyche shouting inaudibly like the Who to Horton: YOU'RE AN IDIOT! DON'T EAT THE FISH! ANNA WINTOUR WOULD NEVER EAT THE FISH! I could barely hear it then. I think that whispering speck of wisdom and dignity was secretly hoping I'd spend the night bent over the toilet puking my lungs up so I would have to take the next day off.

I didn't get sick, but something clicked that night, like a light switch turning off, and for the first time, the phrase "work-life balance" felt meaningful to me. I knew I had to dial it back, and thought that simply meant working less and leaving earlier. And I did so as often as I could bring myself to. Whenever I lapsed into disgusting habits borne of overwork I'd mentally recite my new mantra: Anna Wintour wouldn't eat the fish, and that kept me on track. To an extent.

Setting limits and saying no to work proved terribly difficult for me, and in the process of trying to live saner I slowly realized why: I believed-despite the awards I'd won for my writing and editing and the fact that I was sought after in my field-that the only reason anyone kept me around was because they liked me. Some irrational part of me felt that if my relentlessly good att.i.tude soured or if I had a bad day, I would be out on my keister. It was absurd and there was zero evidence for the theory, but that's how I'd operated for years. In retrospect, I cannot believe how much of my success at work I attributed primarily to my personality.

Of course, it never hurts to be liked. If an employer has to choose between two people with identical abilities, the one who is perkier, more compliant, works until nine and who keeps a bowl of M&M's on her desk has the edge over the surly, resentful one who rolls his eyes and heaves great sighs when charged with a task. But the problem with the extent to which I took being liked was that if most of my value was in how others felt about me personally, I was at the mercy of their opinions. Following this logic, the quality of my work (which, after all, was what I was being paid for) meant very little. I knew I was talented, but not enough, I thought, to permit me to be human.

Anyone who has ever watched Dr. Phil could deduce that I had issues with authority growing up-more specifically, abandonment issues, which is probably why I felt like I had to be a perfect little pom-pom girl at the office or I'd be out peddling matches on a cold winter's night. But these days, perhaps because I've been The Man at work (though I, too, am working for The Man every night and day) and at least theoretically an authority figure at home, those issues no longer play themselves out in the workplace. My superiors at work are just that-my superiors at work, people who, by dint of the various choices they made and their ability and experience, are in the position to get me and others to do their bidding. It's like when my twin girls play house, and one is the older sister and the other the baby-they agree to certain roles and abide by them. They don't get all twisted up about the unfairness of it all, because it's really just a game, and they go back to their old relationship when it's over. These days, work is something of a game-one that, between nine and five or six, I take as seriously as those dark-souled guys who played Dungeons & Dragons in junior high, but a game nonetheless. When I'm the boss, which I have been on and off over the years, I feel that Level III Grand Wizard Overlord, or whatever, is my role for the moment, not my entire ident.i.ty. It makes me less intense about the whole career thing.

Just so you know, the sushi revelation was hardly sweeping, and did not instantly turn me into a wiser, more Zen person who took excellent care of her physical and emotional health. Even today, I sometimes sit and write until my b.u.t.t falls asleep and I have to stand up until it stops tingling. Praise from a boss still warms me and makes me feel secure. But gradually I became less invested in other people's opinions, in a good way. In caring less about how I'm perceived, I follow my own instincts, rather than aiming for what I think would please, which means I often do better work. It sure beats living in self-imposed insecurity. Through finding that I didn't get s.h.i.t-canned if I showed up unprepared to the occasional meeting or opted out of a project entirely, I began to know-really know, not just intellectually-that my worth at work isn't so tenuous.

I am still occasionally surprised that no one has noticed that my people-pleaser b.u.t.ton is permanently broken. There are days when I feel as if I'm slacking off, or that my head is back at kindergarten drop-off, where my daughter Vivian wouldn't let go of my hand, and no one notices or cares. It just reinforces the fact that my expectations of myself when I was younger were off the charts. Now not only can I state my opinion with the confidence that I know what I'm talking about, but I have leeway to be outwardly grumpy, petty and exasperated every so often, which is critical to my mental health. I am no longer capable of keeping a lid on negative emotions indefinitely.

Oh, and I can afford toilet paper now, the good kind, not the scratchy, one-ply commercial-issue kind.

Having other demands on my time, such as a family or a compelling interest in things other than work, which you're more likely to develop as you get older, further complicates the life-balance issue. It's a toughie, and the "you can have it all" line of c.r.a.p that women my age grew up with doesn't help. Next to the block-print letters "YOU CAN HAVE IT ALL!!!" (three exclamation points, always three) on the banner waved at us by our parents and popular culture and the commencement speaker at our graduation, there is an almost microscopic asterisk. When you find its mate at the bottom of the flag, there is a list of caveats, written in mouse print, that is as long as my arm.

YOU CAN HAVE IT ALL!!!*

*Some restrictions apply. Not available in all areas or to all socioeconomic groups. Void where prohibited by law. "All" includes unlimited guilt for never feeling as if you're giving anything its proper attention. In having it "All," we make no representation that you will have enough of any of it, or that having it "All" will make you happy. By that we mean that while you may have a relationship, you will likely be unable to nurture it; you may have children, but you will almost certainly not see them as much as you would like; you will have money, yet you will never feel as if you have quite enough. Your plants will die (even the spider plant the florist a.s.sured you was unkillable) because you're too tired from having it "All" to water them. You will be ignorant of the important matters facing your nation because you haven't read a newspaper in forever. We are not liable for any slip-and-fall accidents that result from your marbles spilling out of your head and onto the floor, and waive any responsibility for the losses and/or damage having it "All" might cause to yourself and your loved ones. You should give it "All" up and contact a health-care provider immediately if agitation, depressed mood, changes in behavior or thinking that is not typical for you is observed, or if you develop suicidal ideation or suicidal behavior. In short, you may feel like s.h.i.t, and wonder what's wrong with you that you need an anti-depressant just to drag your a.s.s out of bed in the morning, because doesn't everyone want it "All"? And that's not our fault.

When I had my daughters six years ago, I did manage to have it "All" for a couple of years (the intense, high-octane job; the husband; the rewards of parenthood and the gym membership) and I've never been so miserable. Having it "All" turned me into a guilt-wracked, short-tempered zombie with a dried-up raisin for a brain.

Here's an example of how having it "All" can turn you into someone you hate: One winter morning, my husband and the girls and I were in the elevator of our apartment building, rushing out to preschool drop-off. After that, I was to shoot uptown on the train to my office, along the way grabbing breakfast and dropping off prescriptions and buying baby shampoo and diapers to schlep home that evening, and my mind was churning with all I had to do. Paul was holding Sasha, red-faced and dripping with boogers, still crying over a toy I said she couldn't bring. I had Vivian, bloated to twice her size in her pink down puffer jacket, who was clutching a waffle with peanut b.u.t.ter, and making little brown handprints on my (beige!) shearling coat. Sweat ran down my lower back into my waistband, I had to pee and my head was throbbing because I hadn't had my coffee yet.

The elevator stopped on another floor, which, in my crabbiness, made me inordinately annoyed-as if it were my private express elevator-and then made me feel selfish and guilty for feeling that way. A well-meaning, elderly neighbor got on, and smiled, looked at the drippy Sasha and a peanutb.u.t.ter covered Vivian and evidently saw this as the perfect moment to say, "Enjoy every minute with them while they're young, because they get older so fast!"

I seriously wanted to punch him, although of course it wasn't his fault. Tone-deaf as his comment was (I don't know any parent who would have enjoyed that sticky, screechy elevator ride), it shined a white-hot spotlight on the fact that I wasn't even enjoying the pleasant, loving, truly joyous moments as much as I might have if I hadn't been exhausted and driven witless by too many details swimming around my malnourished, anxious brain. I walked around all day, every day, feeling thick with guilt, remiss and impure, as if anything I did, no matter how necessary or worthwhile, was stealing time from something else I should have been doing. It wasn't that anyone-my kids, my bosses, my husband-was demanding more of me than they had a right to. It was all just too much.

When the girls were four, I hit a wall and saw that I had to give up at least some of it to make my life more manageable. Everyone exhibits different symptoms of Having It All syndrome, and here are a few of mine, aside from the aforementioned urge to punch old people.

You look like c.r.a.p.

You feel even worse.

You do most of your food shopping at convenience stores-mmm, mini rice cakes and Kraft Singles for dinner!-because you can't get to the supermarket before it closes.

You are irked when you receive a wedding invitation, because weddings take, like, all d.a.m.n day! If you're asked to be in a wedding, you feel that the bride is genuinely inconsiderate.

When a friend suggests that you take some time for yourself, you laugh ruefully. How naive can one woman be?

You say diva-esque things that would normally never come out of your mouth, like "In what universe would I have time for this?!" and "I'm sorry, but that's unacceptable," to members of your own family.

You fall asleep while playing Sleeping Beauty with your kids and they grow hysterical because their magical kiss of true love fails to awaken you.

You break down in tears because the icing on the carrot cake that you ordered for dessert on the one date night you and your husband have in four months is b.u.t.ter-, not cream cheesebased. "It's like, I. Just. Wanted. Cream cheese. Frosting. Why is that so hard? Is that so much to ask? SOB!"

You become livid when your husband suggests that maybe it's not about the frosting.

You hate your husband.

You have aphasia for common words, including your beloved children's names.

It doesn't matter, because you kind of hate them, too.

But not as much as you hate their babysitter, who gets to spend way more time with your kids than you do.

You're sort of glad your office has no window so you won't see that it's nice out.

You can see why I quit my very intense job and took another that was three days a week so I could order bits and pieces of it "All" a la carte, instead of trying to force down the Have It All deluxe platter. Friends at work said I was "brave" for "choosing" to scale back, after I'd achieved so much and may not be able to resume my career at the same level if I someday wanted to. I didn't feel brave, and I didn't feel as if I'd had a choice. I felt like I was losing my s.h.i.t.

It was an adjustment. Adrenaline continued to course through my veins at the same breakneck speed as it had when I needed it to propel me through my day, even though my days were considerably less demanding. At first I didn't know what to do with the extra electric energy. The first evening after I left my new office and headed to the train, by habit I began mentally plotting the route home and the errands I could knock off along the way-what did I need at the drugstore by the subway, the supermarket on our corner, did we have anything at the dry cleaners, takeout for dinner?-before I realized that I didn't have to do anything but go home and see my girls. For once, there was nothing that couldn't wait a day or two, because my life now included time in which nothing was scheduled. It was a strange feeling, not simply going from ch.o.r.e to event to obligation, and it made me a little anxious, but at the same time it was nice. I knew I'd done the right thing.

After a couple of months of decompressing, success for me began to include the luxury of being able to finish a thought, watching my girls in ballet cla.s.s without thinking of the messages I had to return and remembering why I married my husband. I could also sleep at night, and I became a better friend, because I wasn't surrept.i.tiously ordering groceries from an online food delivery service while on the phone, supposedly helping them process their deepest anxieties. It was only then that I realized I didn't even want it "All."

It was hard giving up a huge, important job, though, with the t.i.tle and the money that came with it. I loved the job that I quit, and I missed being in charge of people who might actually listen to me, as opposed to my kids, who took their orders from SpongeBob. I missed being able to sum up my ident.i.ty on a business card and slide it across the table, and I missed having the recipient automatically understand that I was someone to take seriously. All those things left a huge career-gal-shaped hole where they used to be. It was difficult to will myself not to care too much about what went down at my new, part-time job, because as a consultant, it was no longer my place to do so. I had to remind myself that I chose this new way of doing things, and that being a less important person in the work world didn't mean I was in fact a less important human being.

At the same time, though, I felt more relaxed and able to meet the new expectations I'd set for myself, and because of that I did not feel any less successful in life. In fact, I felt more so. In my case, not being able to have it "All" simply meant that there were too many good things for me to choose from, and I had to be selective for the sake of my sanity. I didn't see it as a failure, although I know some do.

I saw a b.u.mper sticker once that said, "If at first you don't succeed, lower your standards!" It cracked me up, because I live and die by that motto at home. If I can't get the nail out of the wall without making the hole bigger, I hang a picture over the nail and call it a job well done. Resisting the "having it all" mind-set, I found, can't be seen as settling for less. I think that's more about being freethinking enough to decide what success means to you, and not buying in to the easiest, quickest definition, the only one that presented itself to me when I was young. Just as there is more than one definition of "hot," but you don't find that out until you no longer fit the most obvious one, there is more than one definition of "success," which you can only appreciate when you've lived long enough to have tried a few things on for size.

Success to me for now means thriving in my little niche of the work world, raising kids who are smart and kind and finding a way to laugh several times a day, rather than being a big name high on a masthead. My definition of "success" wouldn't do it for everyone, of course. It all depends where you started. Strangely, even as well as I did at work, I was never particularly ambitious. I was driven more by the need for a pat on the head than fame or money. I would think that achieving career success might be harder if you have the kind of concrete hopes and dreams that you are led to believe should be attainable in a linear progression. If you do X, Y and Z, and you want it badly enough, you can be what you want to be. That was never the way I thought, and it is very often not the case, which can be a blow if you're a Formerly who has done everything right.

The other day I ran into an old friend, Karen, who mentioned a guy she'd set me up with when I was around 25. John was gorgeous-tall, thin, with high, planar cheekbones and long, dark, potential rock-star hair. He was, in fact, a potential rock star, hoping, strategizing and even planning on how his life would be different once he broke through. I'd never heard him play, but in terms of the look, he was good to go. I thought he was incredibly hot, and found his dreams for the future charming, if a bit impractical.

The spark got snuffed out over Italian food, when he asked me what my dreams were. "I don't know ... I'd definitely like to get a raise or a better-paying job so I can get a place of my own," I replied. I was freelancing at a tabloid newspaper at the time, and doing little pieces here and there in magazines. He wasn't buying it, and pressed me for what he felt sure was my real dream, the one that would presumably provide insight into my true self. "Come on," I remember him saying. "You must have something you really, really want to do." I told him I didn't have a gigantic, sparkly, long-term dream like his, that I was more of a follow-the-happiness, day-to-day kind of gal. As I said it, it sounded unromantic even to me, but it was the truth. I worked at magazines and newspapers, and really wanted to do well, but had no ambitions to run one. I worked with words, but didn't think of myself as an artist. Such ideas and definitions would occasionally shoot through me, but they never seemed to take hold. They all felt grandiose.

He shook his head in a mixture of disbelief and resignation. "You have to have a dream, Stephanie. You need to dream bigger."

Wow, did I ever feel like a big old loser at that moment. At 25, part of me thought he was right, that there was something wrong with me for having such low expectations of life. Didn't everyone have some lofty aspiration? If I didn't, how would I ever fulfill my potential, whatever that was?

At 42, it's a question I still ask, but am too busy to spend much time pondering. I have a remarkable husband and two scary-smart little girls who awe me every day with how their little lawyer minds work. I have a job with people I like and respect, an outlet in my blog and other projects, and make enough money to buy my girls the Hannah Montana microphones they crave, because their dream du jour is to be rock stars. (More like Pink than Hannah Montana, Sasha a.s.sures me.) I have friends who are extensions of my family. With the exception of an overwhelming baby jones in my early 30s, which felt more physical than anything, none of these things were particular goals of mine.

Still, they make me happy, just as I'd imagine they would had I set them as benchmarks and then achieved them. Perhaps because I don't have pie-in-the-sky dreams, or any kind of a bucket list, I'm delighted when things go well. That's why finding success in smaller things is possible for me.

I wondered about John, though, especially when Karen said the music thing didn't really work out. We didn't have time to do a full debriefing, so I don't know what became of him. I hope that he, too, has learned to appreciate a broader-based version of success. I'll bet he has-otherwise he'd be a miserable aging rock-star wannabe, and I can't see him doing that for very long. People tend to upend themselves after a fall, even from a lofty height. A few decades on this planet makes you realize that a diversified success portfolio means that if one aspect of your life is in the s.h.i.tter, you're not a total washout.

Like many graduating college seniors, I had little clue what I wanted to do with my oh-so-practical liberal arts degree. I wound up in magazines because it was the best steady paycheck I could envision that didn't require me to wear panty hose in order to earn. Magazines felt tangible to me, unlike the investment banks and large accounting firms that reached out to college seniors back in 1989 to recruit them. (Note to younger readers: Once upon a time, there were lots of investment banks, and they magically all made money.) I didn't feel as if the world was my oyster so much as there were only a handful of things I might be good at, and writing was one of them. And ever since that turned out to be the case, I have become addicted to feeling competent, in a way I never realized could be so gratifying.

Which is probably why it took me only about six days into my maternity leave to know that I didn't have what it took to be a stay-at-home mom, not that it was a real option for my family, for financial reasons. Granted, I had twins, and that was exponentially harder than I imagine it would be to have one. Still, there was no question that I could not be with the kids all day every day, at least not happily. The lack of structure combined with sheer tedium was grueling, especially on no sleep and with leaky b.o.o.bs. I tried yoga to get in the live-in-the-moment mind-set, but there were no Mommy/Baby/Baby cla.s.ses. Meditation was not an option; I'd fall asleep, I was so tired, only to be awoken by one or another crying infant. Xanax would have helped, but I was nursing and so thought better of it. Feeling as if I was a good mom would have required me to give up any semblance of agency and just roll with what the day brought us-the exact opposite skills that had made me so successful at work.

When I went back to work after three months, I was overjoyed to be at my desk with a coffee I could drink to the bottom while it was still hot, and full of admiration for women who could do what I couldn't. I raced home to see my babies every night (pumped milk in Baggies in a cooler), and appreciated them all the more because I had gone to work. Even now that the girls are older, parenting requires a calm and a divestment from any specific outcome, which doesn't come to me easily. I have learned to feel competent as a mom, in my own way, but I still have that "thank G.o.d it's Monday" moment when I drop them off at school. And because I'm older, and have more than one thing in my life that makes me feel successful, I feel less guilty about my need-my desire-to work.

Working-mom guilt is huge for nearly every working mom I know, of course. But while I still have some (like when one of my daughters desperately wants me to chaperone her cla.s.s trip to the organic farm "like all the other mothers," and I have to say no), it's not as crippling as I imagine it would be if I were younger. All the overhyped Mommy Wars silliness feels to me more of a young woman's battle, one that's more about ident.i.ty and feeling useful and successful in the world than about whether there's a "right" choice or a "right" way to raise children. I'm positive that if I'd had the girls when I was younger, and circ.u.mstances permitted me to stay home with them, I would have taken up the banner of Stay at Home Mother and used that same banner to impale anyone who sought to belittle my ident.i.ty or my contribution to society as such. But as an older mom, with that diversified success portfolio, I don't feel as though I need to pick a lane. That's a delicious freedom that makes being a mom much easier.

All of this circ.u.mspection doesn't mean that women my age always feel hunky-dory about all their choices. It seems as though we're fated to fret, at least a little. My family and I spent one weekend this past summer with my friend Olivia and her crew, and once the kids were (finally) down, we got to drinking and philosophizing about life. About half a bottle of wine in, Olivia got to musing, in a big-picture kind of way: "I sometimes wonder, could I have been doing something these past years that's worthy of a couple of column inches in the Times when I die? I love what I do, but I'm not changing the world. I always a.s.sumed I would when I was younger, but now I think, is it going to happen on my clock?" she said. "Tick-tock, take stock."

Olivia had just had a milestone birthday-40-and so I guess was in inventory mode. Depending on when I catch her and if she's sober (which she generally is), Olivia is clear that she loves her job as a hospital administrator too much to make a switch any time soon, and would not want the kind of career that would dig into her time with her two boys. But she still wonders. "You make choices, but you can always still mourn the path you didn't take."

That's one thing I've managed not to do, so far, even after a full bottle. It appears I'm too busy mourning other things, such as my fuller head of hair and my erstwhile ability to pick up men on the subway. When I'm feeling good, which is most of the time, I focus on the choices I've made that brought me to where I am now, which is to say, feeling good most of the time. As long as I keep my eyes on the prize-remaining happy, helping my family and loved ones to feel likewise, and earning enough to cover what is truly needed-I expect to look back at a successful life career. Rather than asking myself What would Anna Wintour do? I can ask myself, What would I do? and know that I'll likely hit on the right answer for me. And just knowing that I will never again feel the need to steal toilet paper from the corporate restroom or to eat warm sushi in a moving vehicle makes me feel as if I've achieved a lot.

20.

The Formerly Purge.

I've done a few closet purges in the last couple of years, with my Formerly friend Rhonda sitting by to make sure I don't cave in and keep everything, as well as to remind me of the nuttier things I did while wearing some of the clothes I'm donating. There's a touch of the bittersweet, like when I'm reminded how intensely I felt for the guy I was dancing with at a particular bar in a particular pair of sandals. I then remember the blisters I had the next day and the agony I felt the next week when he didn't call and I stalked him like the insecure hot mess that I was, and I'm happy to give them to Goodwill. Rhonda and I laugh, are grateful that we're not young and raw anymore, and we move on to the next item.

These are some of the questions I ask Rhonda to ask me when we do the Formerly Purge.

1. Does it fit? If it causes me any pain-and that includes emotional pain at the sight of my flesh oozing over my waistband-I know what I have to do. Yes, even if I can b.u.t.ton it. Yes, even if it was expensive. Yes, even if it's nominally my size. I should be able to wear it comfortably, so I can breathe and bend my extremities.

2. Can I sit and pick something up from the floor in it without my a.s.s showing? If not, are there any occasions at which I'd want my a.s.s to show? How often do I expect to be engaging in activities in which I'd want my a.s.s to show? Not often? I need to get rid of it.

3. Did it ever look good? Sometimes I buy things and grow to hate them but keep them out of principle to remind myself what an idiot I was to buy them in the first place. There is no room for useless self-recrimination in the life of a Formerly. Nothing good ever comes of it. Buh-bye!

4. Does it have any writing on it? Labels and writing that is incorporated into graphics are exceptions, but by and large, a Formerly doesn't need her T-shirt to do the talking for her. That shirt that said, "I'm hotter than your girlfriend," that someone gave you probably isn't going to get a lot of wear.

5. Does it have a tear, run or split seam that I've been meaning to get repaired for years? I'll take it out of the closet, put it in my bag and see if I actually stop at the tailor. If I don't, I don't hang it back up for later. Out it goes. Life's too short to have stuff like this hanging over your head.

6. Does it have cla.s.sic potential? A trench coat, a leopard-print jacket, a pair of dark denim jeans, a well-cut blazer. Even if I haven't worn these in a few years, I hang on to them. I can always reevaluate later.

I'm happy to say that I am no longer in a state of fashion emergency, now that I have better choices, wisdom and, of course, more of a facility with all things Formerly. I am often still late for getting my daughters to school, but this is now their getting-dressed issue, not mine. I get dressed every morning with new clothing and mix in a few old standbys that I think will always work for me. I haven't missed anything I've given away-well, maybe that leather skirt, just a bit, even though it was too short-because hanging on to outdated clothing can be just as stultifying as clinging to an ident.i.ty or a lifestyle that doesn't work for you anymore. If you do that, you become another version of THOSE women (Google "Joan Van Ark images" and you'll see what I mean), and frankly, I'd rather be me.

21.

Formerly a Formerly.

About ten years ago, right around the time I got engaged to my husband, I was having coffee with a good girlfriend. Let's call her Jackie. She and I had spent countless hours over the years trying to solve such nuanced relationship issues as to whether a guy who cheats on his girlfriend with you could ever be faithful to you, should you and he get together for real; if you really like a guy but despise his '70s cop moustache, how long you have to wait to say something; and what the fact that he lives in a studio with nothing but a single bed and a stack of take-out menus might reveal about his long-term partnership capability. We had been sisters in singledom.

That crisp autumn day, Jackie was meticulously trying to tease out any potential speck of meaning that there may or may not have been in an interaction she'd had recently with an ex. She'd run into him unexpectedly on the street.

"I mean, when he said it was good to see me, did he mean, good to see me, as in, Hey, good to see you, or do you think he meant it, like, It was really good to see you and I'm having pangs of regret? I did look good that day, thank G.o.d. Not that I'd get back with him, but you know what I mean." I said I didn't know how he meant it, because I wasn't there, and I wasn't in his head.

"Well, he said it like, 'It's good to see you,' with the emphasis on 'see.' I think if he was like, 'It's good to see you,' he would have meant me, it was good to see me. The way he said it, it sounded just, like, friendly. Oh, G.o.d, I don't know. What do you think?" I replied something about it not really mattering, since she didn't want to get back with him anyway, so who cared what he meant?

This went on for maybe 45 minutes. During that time we covered whether he was still seeing the woman he was rumored to have been seeing after they'd broken up, what would definitely have to change if my friend was to take him back, if his saying "Good to see you" was, in fact, an indication that he wanted to reunite and myriad other possibilities and eventualities and hypotheticals. I had a flash of us in a comic strip, a drawing of two well-dressed chicks at a cafe table. Jackie's voice bubble, filled with teeny-tiny type, was taking up our entire square.

Finally, I couldn't stand it anymore. I thought she was being ridiculous, whipping a five-word comment into a giant, frothy meringue of meaning. "Jackie, here's what I think: I think if he does want to see you again, he'll call you," I snapped. "That'll be your answer! Or if you want to, you can call him and see what's up. Either way, if it's going to be something, it will, and if it won't, it won't."

I instantly regretted being so sharp. Jackie looked stung, and then started casting her eyes about for the creamer. I stammered an apology and said that it was just, I don't know, I had a lot going on, with work and planning the wedding and everything, and she didn't ask me about any of that. She said it was OK, and that she was sorry, too, but I could tell it wasn't OK, not totally. After that, and especially after Paul and I got married, things were never the same. We saw each other less and less.

The thing is, a few years earlier, it could just have easily been me on the Jackie end of that conversation, or if it had been her, I would have been totally into holding a tuning fork to the timbre of his every utterance. It was part of understanding what was going on around us, and working through our single-gal stuff. Nothing had changed in our dynamic, except my outlook and where I was in my life. After getting together with Paul, and having it work out so straightforwardly, it was clear to me that examining the minutiae of male-female interactions only got you so far and that with time (and usually not that much of it) everything becomes clear. I didn't need to fill my brain up with froth, because I had more solid things to think about. In short, I was done with all that. And just like when a smoker quits smoking, the smell of smoke becomes more irritating to her than to someone who never smoked, so were these kinds of conversations.

I get the exact same impatient, "grow up and get over it already" kind of response from some of the older women I speak to about the shock and unsettled feelings I've had throughout this process of aging out of young. In the comments on my blog posts, as well as when I just get going on the subject at a party, some of them see my focus on the tiny, subtle changes in my looks, my outlook and my relationships as tedious and whiney, especially when I rant about the negative ones. I posted about when Sasha pointed out my "girlstache," the one I thought I had eradicated through various painful means in my 20s. "All that frettin' is terribly unattractive," one woman in her 50s wrote on my blog. "Definitely not hot." Her feeling is that she gets hotter every year, and that I was putting myself and other women down by calling myself "formerly hot." (Trying to explain that you're being ironic kind of kills the joke, so I gave up.) They've been there and back, and from their perspective, I just don't get it, "it" being whatever bigger-picture outlook they've come to develop in the years since they were Formerlies, going through what I am. Some of them may simply not have felt the Formerly shift as acutely as I do, and many of those who did don't remember it. In any case, they seem to have found their new balance in the world, and realizing that you're suddenly no longer young and no longer treated in the same way by the world is not something that affects them day to day.

In truth, I appreciate the fact that some older women readers think my priorities are misplaced (although if I have to make it clear one more time that, yes, I still consider myself hot, just not in the same way, I think I'll just go ahead and make "Currently Hot" T-shirts and wear them daily to save my breath). Partaking in their worldview flashes me forward to a time, not so very long from now, where I probably won't be immersed in this kind of thinking, and won't have as many fresh b.i.t.c.h-slaps and observations to blog about. "I am tired of wishing I had the body I once had. It's been a long haul but I am learning to appreciate the one I possess now, in my 50s, with my great skin, health and intellect," wrote a woman named Lisa. At 42, I'm sick of it, too, but at the same time, a part of me obviously still wishes for mine to look closer to the ideal. I look forward to the time when my emotional life catches up with my intellectual one, and I can 100 percent fully revel in my other gifts, gifts that I already know will be my foundations going forward. I'm more than halfway there.