Tag: writing

So I’ve been wondering

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I’m sure we all have our cultural blindspots. Bits of ubiquitous popular culture that we’re aware of, but have never really engaged in. One of those for me has long been Sex and the City. I could reference some key characters and ideas, tell you that the reboot and second film were rubbish, but not really much more than that. Oh, and that Geri Haliwell cameo.

While visiting a friend in, where else, New York City this summer I was challenged to rectify this oversight. We watched the infamous episode – actually one of the show’s last – when washed up party girl Lexi Featherston tumbles out of a window with a Splat! ‘Why is no one fun anymore?’ I enjoyed the experience, but had many questions. So I took seriously the challenge from my friend to watch the whole thing.

Cut to about three months later and I have just finished watching all six seasons, 2 movies and many podcasts. I couldn’t help but wonder, why have I waited so long to consume this wonderful show?

I’m sure all of us have been asked, with varying degrees of scepticism or eye rolling, whether we are a Miranda, a Charlotte, a Samantha or heaven forbid a Carrie. So much of the success of the show is that these women represented for a generation of women (and gay men…) archetypes that could encompass a vast and varied experience. That a hugely-successful show centred female friendship, and had women who, though on the surface were searching for love, were really choosing each other again and again, was and remains remarkable.

I think I chose the right time to watch this show for the first time. I may not be living an it girl lifestyle in New York, but I am a single person in his later thirties who has to navigate the world of societal expectations and 2.4 kids. Many of my generation grew up with this show and Carrie Bradshaw represented an aspirational idea of what being a grown up would look like. For me, I have come to Carrie et al not as an eighteen year old dreaming of my future, but as a millennial struggling through the landscape of ‘is this it?’

So many of the stories that the women of Sex and the City face are all about expectations. Their own expectations of themselves, their friends and the men in their lives. The expectations of the world around them. Not to mention the expectations and pressures of work, gender and love. These are things that have been at the forefront of my mind even before I started watching the show and I felt myself seen and heard in the stories of the women of Manhattan.

As I get older and see the different paths that lives can take around me, it is harder than ever to be content with the particular set of opportunities and challenges I have been dealt. I sometimes feel shut out of the more ‘conventional’ life choices of those with partners, children and a seemingly settled life. Yet I struggle with the idea of settling myself, as I have enjoyed the opportunities afforded me through being single and relatively carefree. It’s a bit like when Carrie has her Manolos stolen at an affluent friend’s baby shower – her friend simply cannot understand Carrie’s life and the value the shoes hold.

So many of the stories in Sex and the City’s 6 seasons are about these four friends grappling with what they want, accepting what they have, and coming back to each other through it all. One of the most moving moments for me is when Miranda, after years of cynicism, gently cares for her mother in law at the show’s end. She has learned to open herself up.

Without a doubt my favourite man in the show is Steve. When he says to Miranda ‘I love having your friends over’, I could shed a tear for a partner eager to accept the other as they are, including recognising that their friends are their family too.

These women, through it all, come back to each other. Sat at that table in the cafe. When Miranda shares her pregnancy while Charlotte is struggling with her fertility. When Samantha shares her cancer diagnosis (even at Miranda’s wedding – they are family, it needs to be discussed right away). When Carrie has yet another Big-related realisation or crisis – no matter what, they chose each other.

I know I have some people, friends and family, in my life who I choose to come back to. It’s hard when we move, things change, paths diverge. But I hope that we can all find those to return to time and again. Even if we don’t have wardrobes to match Carrie, we all need to find community and love like hers.

‘Go get our girl.’

Undecided

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The last few years I’ve felt a familiar push and pull. Sometimes week by week, sometimes day by day, often swifter. A push and a pull urging me forward and holding me back. It takes on forms that have shaped lives over centuries – should I stay or should I go? In this job? City? Relationship? But has also taken unique form, my own inner voice, worming deep into my subsconscious and my contemplations. How are you, Samwise, going to deal with this? What do you, Samwise, want your future to be? How can you get there? Why is it not working out? Why is it so hard?

Small decisions are easy aren’t they? I think they are for me, at least. I don’t find it difficult to decide what to do with an evening, or to just go for it and book those concert tickets. I don’t find it hard to organise my inbox or buy groceries. I think if anything I can rush into these small decisions too quickly. Somewhat impulsively, I decided to try out a new style of underwear recently. Suffice to say, I should have trod more cautiously toward that particular decision. Pants aside, as a teacher, there is much talk about decision fatigue – the idea that after a day of making hundreds of decisions for small people, you find yourself incapable of making any further choices. I can see the truth in this – a recent period of living with my parents has been lovely in part because they often decide what’s for dinner for me! But on the whole, I don’t feel burdened by choice in the day to day.

When it comes to bigger than that, I’ve found my decision-making grinding to a halt. Decisions seem to take on a weight previously absent. Taking that job, making that choice, even going on that date, can seem like choosing a path with no way back if it goes wrong. Year after year, with jobs in particular, it has seemed recently like I am in a constant cycle of applying for jobs, second-guessing those opportunities, and then ending up rejecting interviews or offers out of fear or confusion. Yet the prospect of being job-less is also scary, especially while trying to secure a mortgage (more big decisions for me to spiral about…)

It has all felt like a slow car crash of paralysis. Sometimes I have felt, I do feel, like I’m vividly stuck; unable to move forward or make choices, out of fear that like pruning a limb from a tree, all those other green shoots and hopes will fall if I choose just one direction. Othertimes, I feel more deliberate, practical, considering choices rationally. But then this seam of bright emotion and fear cuts through me – What have I done? Have I missed the boat? What have you done?

It’s almost like I have some kind of fetish for flexibility. Maybe that’s a bit strong. But I certainly aspire after an idealised 2025 life of working from home. The idea of being able to do my washing on a weekday is certainly exciting. Of not having to balance health concerns with fears about upsetting the balance of work. As a teacher, it is a unimaginable dream to have that kind of work life. Often finding time for the loo is difficult enough.

I am increasingly aware that my jealousies and frustrations are focused on the things I envy and desire the most – one of those, at the moment, is the flicker of anger when I see or hear about other’s work schedules. After teaching primary children for almost fifteen years, the fear and desire intertwined in a ‘grass is greener’ way when considering other forms of employment is visceral for me. Not to mention debilitating when it comes to considering a way forward.

I don’t want to be fuelled by frustration or envy, but to find the next positive step myself, even if that feels hard to imagine at the moment. While discussing this with a friend recently, he decided to just ask ChatGPT (something I confess I have never done) and in listing my experience and qualifications to a freakily human computer generated voice, made me feel like this could be possible perhaps. That maybe I am not stuck, but just at a natural transition point. Suffice to say, ChatGPT had many useful suggestions and directions in which I could go. I need to strategise, with or without AI, to make some of those ideas work.

In that echoing place we find ourselves in sometimes, often when we can’t sleep or at the end of a long day, with different voices urging us on and holding us back, it can be so hard to navigate a way forward. But that is what we must, what I must, try and do. The vivid emotions of frustration and stress can burn us out; are reminders that something about the place we find ourselves in is unsustainable. I hope that in this fog of uncertainty, I can navigate a way forward.

What to Write When You Don’t Know

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I enjoy writing. I really do. I like the way that we can weave these artificially constructed letters and words together to make something fun, moving, entertaining or beautiful.

That’s why I started this blog. I just wanted some incentive to write. I didn’t really know what I wanted to write about; I just thought I’d try it and see what happened.

On the whole, I have enjoyed writing about travelling and ‘growing up’ and just life. Yet recently, just having the page hasn’t been much of an incentive to write. The last post was almost six months ago.

Why haven’t I written anything in a while? Well, busyness and laziness both play their part. It’s hard to make time for something like this when life is so full that extra time feels like it has to be downtime. But I think I’ve been forgetting something I’ve written about here before – writing is restful.

Yes, being creative with words is restful for me. Creativity is vital for us all to rest, in whatever form that takes.

It’s all too easy to ‘switch-off’ and binge. Whether on food, TV or even sleep. Rest like this doesn’t reach all the way down into my centre. Doesn’t calm those stormy depths of my soul which can lead to me feeling so exhausted.

Choosing to spend an entire weekend in PJs with the TV remote is sometimes needed, but doesn’t help me to process or make-sense of all the things that are inevitably playing on my mind.

Big things like ‘where am I going?’ or ‘how can I be more fulfilled?’ and smaller things like ‘what do I need to say to them?’ or even ‘what am I going to cook this week?’

So here I am.  At my keyboard. Typing. Attempting to turn letters into something that makes sense. Trying to help my swirling thoughts attain some kind of coherence.

I need to keep reminding myself that I have a reason to write. I have thoughts that won’t leave me alone. Hurts big and small which need to be faced. Things that need to be addressed, even if it feels like chipping away at an Everest of uncertainty.

I know that writing about these things, whether publicly or privately, can help. So I’m reminding myself to try. To pick up the pen, to make time, to marshal my thoughts and my words into something that might just make sense. That might just help me to calm those stormy waters.

So if I haven’t posted anything in a while, ask me why. Remind me to try. Ask me what I’m thinking about. If I say ‘oh, I’m OK’ then press on, because I’m probably just putting off something. Aren’t we all?