Watching Girls for the first time at (nearly) 39

Sorry to add to the Lena Dunham this, Lena Dunham that discourse BUT Lena Dunham has a new book out about her experience working/starring on Girls. During its original run, I remember catching bits & pieces at friends’ apartments but never really taking to it myself. Watching Girls for the first time as I hedge toward my forties, what strikes me is that it captures what it can actually feel like to be wildly insecure, preposterously self-centered, and overly dramatic in your twenties. So many coming-of-age stories give us young people who are improbably perceptive about themselves and others. That wasn’t my experience at all: I was deeply self-involved, often incapable of seeing much beyond my own immediate wants and anxieties. I remember so many conversations where I was one of at least two people who were speaking past each other completely, each with our heads so far up our own asses that we were effectively having separate conversations. We were not always becoming ourselves in some luminous, coherent way: there was confusion, performance, projection, and a lot of earnestness mistaken for insight. (There was also humor in it, though I probably couldn’t see that at the time.)

The messiness of being a twenty-something is partly what I found myself thinking about when I went back and looked at my archived Instagram posts. In the last four or five years, having a big grid became gauche and at some point I curated mine way down, stripping away what had once been hundreds of traces. Combing back over those images, I found myself wondering: who exactly was I trying to erase? Someone really into herself? Someone who participated fully in the aesthetic excesses of her moment? Chunky necklaces, scarves, belts: yes, I wore them! Patterns? Yes and mixed in six out of every ten outfits! Peter Pan collars, side parts, ballet flats, little mustache twee bullshit—yes, yes, yes to all of it! I was. I did.

I’m realizing that there is something a little sad about wanting to disown that person. She was not embarrassing for being excessive, performative, or aesthetically earnest. She was just of her time. She was trying things on. She was participating in the visual and emotional idioms available to her and there was something profoundly ordinary in that messiness. There is a tendency some of us have when looking back to want to narrate one’s younger self as more coherent than she was, or to skip over the awkwardness and self-absorption as if they were deviations from becoming a person, rather than part of the process itself. For me, so much of being a twenty-something was experimentation with identities, aesthetics, opinions, ways of speaking, ways of being desired, ways of being taken seriously. Some of it was sincere, some of it was performative, most of it was both.

Maybe what I was trying to erase when I deleted those posts was not vanity, exactly, but vulnerability—the visible record of having once been unformed. But I feel less interested now in disowning that person than in recognizing her with some tenderness. She was self-serious and ridiculous, occasionally insufferable, often earnest. She wore chunky necklaces. She confused drama for depth. She had conversations in which no one was really listening. And she was becoming, even in all that excess.