Hanging in Midair

I have started so many posts – about my obsession with fat (both my own and the consumption of – I'm attempting to eat good fats at every meal), about what happens when I read about diets, about discovering that way more people than I thought thought I got too slim (!) last winter, about trying to make peace with the fact that I may never be that slim again.

But it's hard to write when you haven't slept properly in days, when you spent time you used to spend blogging (and time you used to spend working and exercising and doing all sorts of other things) on the phone with New York editors and New York HR people and your family, hoping desperately someone will say or do something that tips you one way or the other.

The job offer is on the table. According to a former executive editor I contacted, it is a compliment to me – both the salary and the fact that someone would pluck me from London for the job. But the job is not my dream job.

I love to write. And at least as much as I love to write I love to report – I love asking people questions; learning (as I have often put it, not very poetically) things about things. A new friend said recently that she hoped to one day get as much joy out of her job as I seem to get out of mine. An old friend pointed out that even when I am not delighted by the subject matter of what I'm writing about – "driving the typewriter"-type-pieces, as an old mentor of mine used to put it – I still light up when describing some factette I've learned or person I've met in the process.

But this job does not involve writing – or at least not in the way that I know it. It's only a slight oversimplification to say that I'll be coming up with (hopefully fun) little stories about fitness, diet, fashion, nail polish, and probably the occasional home decor or travel or... well, anything I can make relevant. I'll be paying other people to write them, and then – if the edit test I did is any indication – I'll then spend a very large chunk of time rewriting them, plus coming up with headlines and captions and meeting with the art department and, I don't know, doing all the things that editors do.

Some of it will be fun, I'm sure. Some of it will seriously suck. I won't have to worry about getting in enough work to pay the rent, but my time won't be my own (and I'll have, thanks to the American way, very little vacation).

I'll have to leave London, but I'll be closer to my family (which 8 years ago wouldn't have been such a great thing but now seems more appealing).

I think about doing it for a year (the longest I can bear to think about right now) and go back and forth between "no way" and "hell, yeah." I'm about to get my citizenship, so I could come back to London if I hate the job. What is a year, right? People go on six-month secondments all the time, don't they? (I considered going on one myself – to Los Angeles – several years ago.) At the very least after a year in New York I'd likely have better contacts to freelance than I do now. (After I had a stable job, though, would I have the nerve to quit? I can be terribly conservative sometimes...)

What do I really want? I want to be happy. Sometimes I'm happy in London; sometimes I'm not. (London in August at age 35 and single is a horrific time to assess one's happiness in a place – everyone is away, there's not much going on, and the weekend could be pretty empty. Weeknights are super easy to fill, should one want to.) Would the ratio of happy to unhappy change at all in New York? I just don't know.

I always thought (or really, dreamed) I'd meet someone here – someone who called me darling, loved books and lazy Sunday lunches and the country (and me, of course, me!), and maybe even wore those hideous pinkish-red trousers that only men in this country seem to wear. Maybe we'd have kids who said "Mummy" – maybe they'd be little boys who wore those girly little T-strap shoes no little boy in the US ever wears. Honestly, I never really got to the kid part – it's sort of an embellishment.

I've always been a daydreamer. It's hard to stop. Hard to think about going back to my country, where I'm just the same as everyone else. (Except not the same, of course, because I'm me – yes, I know that.) But maybe it's time to stop letting daydreams get in the way of real life.

Everyone I know has thoughts about what I should and shouldn't do, sometimes well-meaning and sometimes not. I'm easily swayed by (almost) all of it.

It's (possibly) interesting to watch someone you know grapple with a decision like this (at least good for the "what would I do in her place?" game, if you're prone), but when the popcorn is gone and everyone goes home it is just me who has to live with the consequences of whatever I choose.

I have to call the HR woman in 15 minutes to discuss details.

Someone – I'm too tired to try to figure out who said it first – said there are no mistakes in life, only lessons.

I know I'm lucky to have this choice to make, but still I want someone else to make it for me. Or to make me OK with whatever I choose.

I've been craving food and drink and anything that might possibly take the edge off. But I know that I need to make this decision whole; not colored by the post-binge haze of gray. Ten days clean.