Do you all LOVE Girls on HBO as much as I do?
I know people are ALL over the map on this one and I can see why.
Unlike the ladies of Sex and the City, does anyone REALLY want to see themselves so much in these characters.....because it sometimes it isn't pretty.
I see myself a lot in the main character of the show Hannah, especially when I was in my 20's. Hannah is unselfishly selfish. A total know it all who knows nothing. Insecurely secure. A smart idiot. She is literally a walking contradiction. She doesn't know it though and neither did I when I was her age.
When I was younger, like Hannah, I thought I knew more than I did and I couldn't stop talking about all of my grand ideas, but I had NO idea how to get them going. I would get drunk and dream, but I couldn't turn plans into actions. I was dramatic, sad, happy, crazy, and then serene. I was so many feelings so many days and I am glad that my body knows how to feel all of these things. That is what growing up is all about.
My Crush, he isn't as emotional as me publicly, but he is a man that cries and I love it. The first night we met my parents for supper my mom told him that I "had worked so hard on myself making myself into this real live person. A person who could feel, help, show compassion, who wasn't ruled by only my mind, but by my heart, too." It was a super sweet sentiment. Crush cried. In front of my parents. It was just one of those life moments that means something, that gets frozen in time, that you think about many years later and you can actually recall exactly how you felt.
Crush wasn't raised to feel. Unlike Hannah and me, he had to stay stoic and strong. As a child, he was taught to be seen and not heard.
In his 20's, he didn't go out and get drunk and sloppy and fall down and vomit and cry and order pizza and have to make calls to his friends the next day and apologize for what he did. He didn't come home late and eat his roommate's snacks and try to order late night Thai and then didn't hear the doorbell when the crab rangoon came because he was passed out on the comfy couch 5 feet away from the door. He didn't go out to dinner with his best friends and cry because he would never have what they had and beg them to please understand how being single (and selfish) in a big city is so hard.
Because it is. But, life is hard and finding love is just one part of the big puzzle.
Sometimes I admire Crush for living this clean life. This good life. This simple life. I make things VERY hard for myself. I color outside of the lines. I say comments that end long friendships in the matter of seconds. I feel big, I love hard, and I fall from grace all too often.
But, like Hannah, this is who I am. A mess of a person who just got her shit pieced together in her 30's NOT her 20's. The race won't be won and the lesson won't be done being learned until the day I take my last breath. I will always be a work in progress. I will always strive to be better.
I am glad I was a silly girl in my 20's. I smile when I think about how naive I was, how important my life seemed then, how nervous I was that I would never get......or deserve, what I wanted.
I can admit, with Crush, there has come peace. Peace that it will all by okay. That all the late nights led me here.......the knowledge that things do happen for a reason. You will never know the day your life will change, much like how mine did one morning last summer when I received my first email from my current boyfriend.
Be a mess. Be a girl. Never apologize to yourself (but do apologize to the friends you insulted the night before 3 dirty martinis in) for it.
(Also.....one of the best characters of Girls, Shoshana, looks so much my like my former assistant who is also a total frienemy of mine. It is almost scary. I tune in just to see the similarities and then shutter to myself while I eat popcorn.)
First of all, that dinner will go down as one of our lower moments in life, but it is pretty funny now to look back on. Second, you might make a comment that can end long friendships, but you're real friends stick around. I plan to watch a Girls marathon one night when Kip has a guys night! I'm afraid it will remind me of us in our 20s! Love you!
ReplyDeleteIt is funny now....I actually laughed to myself while I remembered it earlier today. Real friends do indeed stick around, thank you. You will LOVE Girls, LOVE IT. It will totally remind you of us. LOVE YOU!
DeleteI love that show. I don't think that Hannah can encapsulate a lot of different personalities, sometimes I see a younger bit of myself in her, other times, not so much.
ReplyDeleteI absolutely love Shoshana.
Shosh is THE BEST. Her on meth equaled one of the best things I have ever seen.
DeleteThe Mister and I spent the past couple of weekends watching "girls" and positively LOVE it. I'm not allowed to tell anyone that he watches it except our girls and they don't believe it. When Shoshanna comes on the screen, I laugh before she even says anything.
ReplyDeleteYES! Your Mister secret is save with me. When Crush was in town a few weeks ago, it was on and he tried to pretend it wasn't interesting him, but he couldn't look away. I laugh when Shosh comes on the screen, too. She is truly phenomenal.
DeleteI really wish I could have written the paragraph "When I was younger, like Hannah, I thought..." - I could never have articulated my teens and twenties so accurately :)
ReplyDeleteThank you so much! Your compliment means the world to me. I am not a seasoned writer and get insecure about it as sometimes I feel what I type only makes sense to me in my mind. You made my day, thank you!
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