I think it’s clear to say that I’ve been watching an awful lot of Derry Girls lately. The vernacular, the syntax, the vocal inflections—they’ve creeped into my everyday lexic and language to a point that I may not even remember what I used to sound like. Sometimes I wonder just how much I’d recognize myself if I were to see an older version of me. Or well, I suppose you might call that a younger version of me. But the point still stands. The version of me from as recent as last week is more a stranger to myself than any individual person I could meet on a train or in a coffee shop. That is— if one is to believe people actually meet that kind of way anymore.
When I was a wain, I’d watch as my friends and loved ones discussed their own meet cutes and the simple in which ways their lives crossed with someone else's. I loved the branching effect that this has on a life. How my aunt went to school with my mother’s sister-in-law and how they met their best friend at the clearance section of the Nordstrom Rack. I love knowing the comedy of errors that can bring two people together, love how the conversation you have with someone in line at Market Basket can lead to a lifelong friendship or how your neighbor can become your Maid of Honor.
This is the Nora Ephronification of life, all cream sweaters and chance encounters. Timeless Mowtown records and dazzlingly white kitchens. Lengthy monologues about life, and people who see you and love you, flaws and all. Also, just really great perms.
My life is a little less like When Harry Met Sally, and more like, When I Get The Chance I’ll Finally File My Taxes. There are so few cinematic moments in my life, or moments even worth remembering, that I can often go entire weeks where even I forget I exist. Part of this, at least personally, is due to the fact that I tend to exist more wholly and more readily in online spaces than I do in the real world. I am trying so ceaselessly to remind my “audience” that I am a person with thoughts and feelings and history and value, that I fail to factor in the time to actually live that purported life. My community tab may be well-stocked, but my actual real-life community is in desperate need of a grocery run.
I guess what I am feeling right now is the pervasive question of: Is watching so much comfort TV getting in the way of me living a life that I would watch? Who would make a show about this life? And if my life doesn’t warrant a pilot, does it warrant its own existence?
This is one of the many culprits to my ever-changing identity. New hats and costumes to try-on during the never-ending solo search for self-discovery. Costantly seeking betterment and advancement to “be something.” A journey that I seldom allow others into. We hear time and time again to "protect your peace” and “no new friends,” so much so that we fail to take any risk or initiative to meet anyone new— to expand our bubbles outside of the comfort of our favorite brainless sitcom.
I actually knew the name of one of my neighbors once, but only met him because we were both on Grindr. A very romantic start indeed. This is unfortunately how I meet most of my friends now. An app serving as the necessary social lubricant to facilitate any and all human interactions. Of course, I can’t entirely dismiss this form of connection, as it clearly brought me someone who I hold in high esteem and a relationship that I have grown to cherish. Still, I could have accomplished the same interaction by simply knocking on his door when he moved in, no nudes required. And that was just one person, I wonder how many hundreds of thousands of people and relationships I have robbed myself of by moving about the world in this fashion.
I also wonder how many hundreds of thousands of people have seen my nudes, and if any of them even liked them?
Most days I stomp around downtown in a meticulously selected outfit hoping for the chance to talk to someone, but I am also so afraid of being man-ed on the street that I wear overhead headphones and avoid eye contact. The insular world that I, and many people I know, exist in is a touch hostile to the concept of human spontaneity. The death of the Rom Com as well as the death of its sister, the long-running comfort TV series, as many have cited, may be aligned with the death of our own ability and willingness to accept or seek out organic connections. Now if you bump into someone on the street you’re more likely to be asked if you want to, “double it and pass it on” than for your number or out for a drink. For many, the only place we now see organic human interaction is in a Netflix series from the 90s.
I write all of this from a beat-up couch where I now eat the majority of my dinners (typically some combination of two to three Trader Joe’s frozen staples) while my roommates and I watch what I affectionately call “Dopamine Dump TV.” This particular evening it is an episode of Degrassi: the Next Generation, which features an assortment of the ugliest clothing styles from 2011— a visual assault of the chunkiest belts and statement necklaces I’ve ever seen paired with just an ungodly number of layered tank tops and polo shirts. We watch this on a free channel that plays reruns of Degrassi exclusively, and features commercials for a D2C razor brand that I am more than certain has been out of business for nearly a decade. This, I know, is a version of junk food that offers little by way of nutrition. And I also recognize how self-indulgent it is to complain about the lack of emotional and spiritual nourishment I receive from a lifestyle I am at least partially culpable for.
It feels good, comfortable, to slip into this way of living. It is less anxiety-inducing to sit on the train listening to the podcast you hand-selected than to talk to someone new. In this way you can control nearly every piece of media you interact with on a daily basis. It is more comfortable, to watch the same show a dozen times with your roommates than it is to actually go out and do anything new with said cohort. You can, and I often do, choose to never slip outside of your bubble. You can insulate yourself from the world entirely, and given the state of things, I don’t know that I, or anyone else for that matter, could really blame you.
There is a near-constant onslaught of stimulants fired at you like a high-speed train from the moment you open your eyes, to the moment you fall asleep. We are met with such a glut of content that our poor little brains (mine I think looks like a cute cluster of bouncing cotton candy grapes with anime eyes) that to be alive is to be overwhelmed.
I’ve also noticed myself using that word, overwhelmed, a lot more lately. Perhaps it too has burrowed into my lexic and language like the phrases from my favorite unobtrusive television shows. Perhaps it is just an automatic placeholder word, much like um or slay! (which is the girly-pop variant.) Or perhaps I am, like many of us are, actually truly and entirely overwhelmed by whatever it means to be a human right now.
I told my sister all of this, or at least, a less eloquent version of these fears. She has always been someone I can go to for a bit of sage advice (some basil advice as well). She reminded me to take it easy and remember the things that I used to do when I was a child, the things that used to bring me joy and comfort, and to allow those things back into my life in whatever way I could manage. Is it necessarily healthy to function like it is 2007? Probably not entirely, I think the lip rings featured in Saltburn are a good enough indicator of this fact, but there are certainly some changes that I can and will be trying to implement, at least personally.
There’s this TikTok (says the boy who just claimed to be living like it is 2007— look, I’m a multifaceted work in progress alright!) that shows grainy video cam footage from a bedroom window. The text reads, “It’s summer 2007, you have no plans and you’re bored.” And for whatever reason, this is the most pleasantly numb nostalgia bait I’ve ever been served. This, I think, is our version of Derry Girls. This is our looking back at a simpler time, at our childhoods and all its peaceful mediocrity. I try to remind myself that if I can look back with rose-colored glasses for those times, for the person and life I had then, then in another 20 years I can look back at this current period in my life with that same reverence. I try to remind myself that monotony is the default, life is and should contain periods of boredom, of stagnation. If your life was like a movie all the time you’d be exhausted and— say it with me, overwhelmed.
It is a good thing to change, it is a bad thing to change. Both are true. Neither are true. Your life looks like what it looks like, and in fact, that is what it should look like. But I doubt that that makes any of this feel any more comforting.
Shoutout mount hood