Wanted, Not Just Needed
The trip was not mine to take. I took it anyway. What a weekend in New York with my college best friend taught me about the difference between being needed and being wanted.
It was not even my trip. My best friend's job sent her to New York. Her company picked the city, booked the Sheraton right in Times Square, set the whole thing in motion. All of the logistics I usually get stuck behind, the planning, the justifying, the where-will-everyone-be, were already decided by someone who was not me. There was a room already paid for, in a city I love, a few short blocks from the center of everything. And I almost let that be her trip instead of ours.
Because here is the math I always run first. It was not my work. I did not have a clean reason to be there. I had my own deadlines and my own calendar and my own list of people who need me in the places I actually live. Going felt like something I would have to earn, and I could not find the receipt.
I booked the flight into JFK, which is farther from Manhattan than I remembered and gave us an Uber fare I will not quote out loud. Thank goodness I got to ride in on the coattails of her corporate travel perks. I packed my laptop. And I decided something that felt almost radical in how simple it was. I would make New York my office.
Our first stop set the tone. L'Avenue at Saks, which is exactly as chic and fabulous as it sounds, the kind of room that makes you sit up a little straighter. Two college best friends, decades deep, catching up over a long lunch in a beautiful place. Nobody at that table needed anything from me. Nobody called me by a title or a role. We just talked the way you can only talk with someone who knew you before you became everyone's everything.
Then she went to work, and so did I. Same inbox, same deadlines, same me, just answered from a hotel desk with a view I do not have at home. I did not take the week off. I took the week with me.
I did not need permission to be there. I just needed to stop waiting for a reason good enough to say yes to myself.
And then there was the show. That was my contribution to a trip I had no hand in planning, the one thing on the itinerary that existed purely for joy, and I took it seriously. I picked Wanted, the new musical that had just opened a quick walk from our hotel at the James Earl Jones Theatre. I did not fully know what I was walking into.
It is the story of Mary and Martha Clarke, Black twin sisters in 1893 Texas who passed as white, told through a score that Solea Pfeiffer, Liisi LaFontaine, Ledisi, and Luke James sang straight into your soul. It's not lost on me that it was written by a descendant of those very sisters. A woman who took her own bloodline, the wanting and the hiding and the fighting to be seen, and put it on a Broadway stage. I sat in the dark next to one of my dearest friends and felt the whole thing land somewhere specific.
Because that is the word, isn't it. Wanted. We are so good, the women I love and I, at being needed. We have made ourselves indispensable at home and at work and in every group text, and somewhere in all that usefulness we quietly accepted that being needed was the same as being wanted. It is not. Needed is the room not functioning without you. Wanted is someone saving you the seat, booking you into the city, picking the show, for no reason but that your presence is a joy.
I came home full. Not caught up, never that. But filled back in, in that specific way that only happens when you let yourself be somewhere you did not strictly have to be.
So here is what I want to hand to every woman running the same math I run. The trip will never be cleanly yours. The timing will never clear. The permission slip you keep waiting on, only needs your signature, and you are allowed to sign it. Borrow the reason if you have to. Attach your yes to someone else's. Bring your laptop, make the city your office, and claim the evening that has no purpose but delight.
You spend so much of your life being needed. Let yourself, every now and then, be wanted.
Steal our itinerary
If I have talked you into it, here is exactly how we did it, start to finish, without spending a single vacation day.
Wednesday, fly in early. This is a travel day, so keep it gentle. Land, drop your bags, grab something good to eat, and take in a Broadway show before you call it a night. You are in the city now. Start like you mean it.
Thursday, no PTO required. This is the trick that makes the whole thing possible. You both work during the day, laptops open, the city as your office. Then you close the computer and the evening belongs to you. Dinner and drinks, out on the town, the real catching up.
Friday, fly home in the evening. Book a later flight so the last day is not a scramble. We had brunch at Maman, did a little shopping, took in a little more of the city, and then headed to the airport.
Leave Wednesday morning, back in your own bed by Friday night. Three days, two nights, zero vacation days spent. That is the entire case, and it is more doable than the guilt wants you to believe.
The real middle of all this, building a life and a business while still fighting to be a person inside it, is what I write about in Truly Yours. Come join me there.
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