Feeling Younger

It happened. I turned 30. Woe is me. Just kidding--but this milestone has been accompanied by certain clichés: hangovers are more severe, working out is becoming necessary, and I've somehow started to feel like it's really go time. No more dilly-dallying.

Which is why I've really been enjoying TV Land's Younger. The protagonist, Liza, is a 40-year-old mom and divorcée who, after 15 years out of the workforce, pretends she's 26 to get a job in publishing. In getting a second chance at her twenties, Liza reawakens the youthful spirit that laid dormant throughout her marriage. Produced by the guy who brought us Sex and the City, Younger plays out in the typical New York sitcom manner, with plots introduced and satisfyingly resolved in 20 minutes. But there's a narrative through-line that keeps me coming back, besides the will-she-get-discovered anticipation. It's the idea that self-exploration shouldn't have to end when your twenties do.

In other words: "nevertheless, she persisted." 

The show is lighthearted and goofy, but it gets certain things right about millennials and this zeitgeist. For one, it affirms that the ubiquity of social media is both exhilarating and daunting, and that what goes on behind the 'gram isn't always so picturesque. What I love about the show is how effortlessly it empathizes in two generations (X and Y) the struggles that we as women face in excelling in our careers and love lives. The challenges differ according to age but are universal: how do I get taken seriously? How do I figure out what I want?

At 30, I'm smack-dab in the middle of these two generations. For example, the geographic and emotional shifts I made in my twenties are now mostly quelled, but my career is just taking off, not yet fully embedded. Like Liza, I find myself wondering whether everything will work out (though my fears have less to do with fraud than climate change). More personally, though, I find myself still comparing my choices to my peers' and the lives they've constructed for themselves. Whether it's the patriarchy, the millennial highlight reel on social media, or my ever-questioning brain, I don't know, but sometimes the self-imposed pressure of go time mixes with self-doubt and I wonder if I'm just following a formula for success instead of designing one for myself.

Thanks to this character on Younger, though, and her 26-year-old coworker (played fabulously by a millennial whose pop culture appearances I grew up with, Hillary Duff), I'm feeling like time is elastic. Funnily enough, in season two there's an episode featuring a character who is a thinly-veiled Meg Jay of The Defining Decade. When I was in Copenhagen at age 25, trying to figure my life out, I devoured her book, which reminded me to live a life of intention and to eschew the notion that your twenties are a throwaway decade. To see this theme pop up on the show felt circular, like I'm doubling down on that intentionality while also asking some new (but similar) questions. It's funny to remember the same concerns I had then take a new form now, like: what does a (queer) partnership mean for me? How do I make a stable life while holding onto adventure? Younger and The Defining Decade may not be able to answer these for me, but they're providing a helpful lens nevertheless.

Girls, Revisited

It seemed weirdly epic, Sunday night, to be sitting in the dark in K's apartment, binge-watching Season 5 of Girls in preparation for that night's premiere of the final season.  Back in 2013 I wrote about feeling like an 'emerging adult' as I handed in my master's thesis on the show, and now, in 2017, more endings and more beginnings are emerging for me. It's been 3.5 years since leaving Denmark, a year with K, 3 years at Twitter, 3 months since leaving, 3 weeks since the Trump era has begun. So much has changed since that blog post, and yet I still find myself wanting to find some full-circle niceties on which to judge the interim.

still self-satisfied, always wanting more 

Like Hannah, Marnie, Jessa, and Shoshanna's world, my circumstances have changed and I'm older, but the patterns of progress and closure still feel messy. Unlike them, though, I hope (to god) I've evolved more than they have. Marred by immaturity, obliviousness, and lack of self-awareness, the girls of Girls are just barely adults after 6 years, yet I keep watching the train wreck for the few, sublime moments of heart that Lena Dunham pulls off. What continues to fascinate me about the storytelling of the show is that the characters, while perhaps caricatures of people, are inexorably who they are. This is different from saying they know who they are, but they chase after some vision of what they want, at all costs. This kind of storytelling is bold; it may diverge from realism into satire, but there's a certain steadfast adherence to depicting the messiness of emerging adulthood in the show's style, stories, protagonists, and comedy that I admire.

It would do me well, in this time in my life, to appreciate that I may not ever be done, baked, out of the oven. I want to remember my former appreciation of the process, not outcome, of adulthood, as I described in the blog post. It's hard to remember, much less accept, that change can feel like crisis, loss, or adventure, and that curiosity eschews closure. These notions are hard for us as we settle into our adult lives, where bank account zeros and career achievements and personal milestones start to feel more like must-haves than guidelines. But believing in the process (especially creatively) means taking risks, and this gets harder as we start to decide, 'well, this is it, this is my life.'

Today, though, on a walk in the sun with icicles dripping off roofs and a podcast in my ear, I vowed to remember my potential to change for the better. Instead of nostalgia for the grad school days of being broke and wistful, I'm choosing to see the past three years as a continuation of emergence into that flow of adulthood. My Danish may be rusty but I'm fluent in queer. I may not long to see all the movies all the time, but maybe I've consumed enough stories to know how to tell a good one someday. We'll just have to see how it plays out.