Are You Really Missing Out on Your Life?
Or are you exactly where you need to be?
There’s a pinch in the Vermont air this morning that reminds me of late‑August back in Portland—the kind of breeze that insists you bring a sweater but rewards you with sun‑warm shoulders by noon. It’s beautiful here in the Green Mountains, no doubt, but the beauty arrives with a quiet ache: I was supposed to spend this summer differently. In my mind’s cooler, I’d packed tennis shoes dusted with red clay, market‑fresh dahlias spilling from a tote, and entire weekends surrendered to novels while my cats formed a comma around my legs. Instead, I’m measuring my father’s medications, coaxing spoonfuls of yogurt past lips that once argued politics with dazzling stamina. I’m re‑learning the geography of a childhood that feels, in equal measure, both sanctuary and snare.
I keep asking myself a question I can’t quite answer: Am I losing the plot of my own life? At thirty, I feel the drumbeat of milestones—marriage, children, a calendar filled with traditions I haven’t yet built. Friends text photos of cramped backyard dinner parties, heads tipped in laughter under strings of cafe lights, and I love them for it. I also mute the thread for hours at a time, my jealousy an embarrassing stowaway that keeps whispering, You should be there. I loosen my grip on the phone and tighten my hold on the wheelchair.
If you’ve ever pressed pause on your plans to show up for someone else, you know the strange double‑exposure that follows. One version of you chops zucchini in a Vermont kitchen; the other drifts like a ghost through the life that might have been unfolding 3,000 miles away. The gap between them flickers with guilt, resentment, and that primal fear of arriving late to your own party. I wish I could tidy those feelings into a moral that snaps shut with a satisfying click—my writing often ends that way. But the honest, unfiltered draft sitting before you is ragged and unresolved, threaded together by nothing sturdier than curiosity.
Curiosity, though, can be a life raft. When the answers dry up, the questions keep us afloat. I think back to something I wrote earlier this week—What the Dying Teach the Living—where I argued that questions can be more generous than conclusions. I still believe that. So in lieu of a neat takeaway, I’m offering the inquiries currently rattling around my ribcage:
What if “missing out” is less about location and more about attention? Could I be as present at a bedside as I might be at a dinner table, if I only let myself notice the miracle of breath moving in and out, mine and his?
What if the timeline for marriage and children isn’t a straight shot but a spiral—wider in some places, tighter in others—still capable of landing me at the doorstep I long for, but on its own imaginative schedule?
What if tending to my father is not an interruption of my becoming but an apprenticeship in it? An accelerated course in love’s most muscular form, the kind that will make me a truer partner, a braver mother, a more tender friend?
I don’t pose these as pep‑talk platitudes. Some nights I believe them; other nights they wilt under the fluorescent hum of a hospital hallway. Yet each question keeps a door cracked for possibility, and possibility—however shy—lets hope wander in and sit awhile.
There are flashes of ordinary joy here, too. This week, Dad and I have been watching Wimbledon from his hospital bed, the television a soft hum in the background of our shared quiet. He still remembers the players’ names—some of them—and lights up when a rally goes long, his eyes following the ball with something close to wonder. (We were both glued to Rinderknech v. Zverev for the entirety of the match’s nearly five-hour duration.)
For a moment, it’s as if we’re back on the couch at home, me stretched out beside him, our snacks balanced precariously on a tray. I watch his face more than the screen now, taking in the familiar shape of his smile, the dimple that deepens when he’s truly enjoying something. And I realize: this is a moment I’ll miss fiercely. A moment stitched into my memory with golden thread, proof that this—for all its mess and bewilderment—is also a life.
Maybe that’s the quiet truth pulsing beneath the Fear of Missing Out: wherever we are, something luminous is happening, and we are invited to notice. Yes, the loss is real: the farmer’s markets I didn’t stroll, the tennis matches I didn’t play, the flirtations that flickered out because I was time zones away. But alongside that ledger of absence, another list keeps lengthening: the exact pattern of my father’s laugh when I get the joke right, the new strength in my arms from steadying his body, the fierce, almost feral love that shows up only when everything decorative has been scraped away.
So today I’m setting down certainty and picking up questions. I don’t know when I’ll return to Portland or how many dinners I’ll host in that apartment pulsing with imagined life. I do know that I will walk back into myself carrying skills and scars and stories I never asked for—but wouldn’t trade. And maybe that’s not missing out at all. Maybe it’s a different route to the same bright clearing where love waits, a little windblown, wonderfully surprised to see me.
Until then, I’ll keep asking, keep noticing, keep loving the messy middle. If you’re reading this from your own detour, know that I’m right alongside you—collecting questions, fumbling for light, and discovering, in spite of everything, that we might already be exactly where we’re meant to be.