There’s one thing unusual about revisiting a TV present that when helped outline your twenties—solely to comprehend it now has one thing much more to say in your forties.
Just lately, I began rewatching Women, the HBO collection that made Lena Dunham well-known amongst my era. I bear in mind watching it when it first aired: a messy, uncooked, typically ridiculous present about that 20-something life that one way or the other felt like a mirror, even once I didn’t need to look. However now, watching it once more whereas residing in Brooklyn, a decade older, a bit extra jaded and much more self-aware, it’s hitting in a different way.
I didn’t count on to narrate so deeply to Hannah Horvath (Dunham’s character), a would-be author with a chaotic love life and a deep effectively of self-delusion. However there’s one thing undeniably acquainted in her inventive craving. The need to make one thing, to be heard, to dwell a life formed by her personal voice. And greater than that, her fixed confusion, paralysis, and the disgrace that comes once you don’t fairly get there.
Currently, I’ve been having what I can solely describe as a gentle identification disaster. Professionally, I’m often called a digital marketer, significantly within the search engine optimisation area. I’ve labored exhausting to construct a profession round content material technique, information, and digital progress—particularly because the pandemic shifted my profession focus out of journey & tourism and into the company world.
It’s work I’m good at and it’s helped me construct a life right here in Brooklyn that I actually do get pleasure from. However on the similar time, I’ve began to really feel unmoored from that label. The search engine optimisation business is shifting quickly, with AI reshaping the way in which individuals discover and devour data. And there have been a number of stories and research out displaying how AI goes to affect advertising and marketing jobs particularly.
And so I’ve been asking myself: am I nonetheless doing work I like, or simply work I’m used to?
Increasingly, I discover myself serious about writing once more—not simply weblog posts like this one or journey guides or “content material,” however actual writing. Private, sincere, typically uncomfortable tales. Like the type I’ve stuffed my Moleskine journals with and those I used to inform throughout my journey writing days. And, sure, like the type Lena Dunham wrote and continues to write down.
When Women first got here out in 2012, Lena Dunham’s Hannah Horvath character resonated with a era of individuals attempting to determine who the hell they had been and the best way to get by way of it with some sense of that means. And it nonetheless resonates with that very same group of individuals—together with the newer generations first discovering the collection now.
And right here I’m, a 40-year-old homosexual man residing in Williamsburg, trying again at my 20s and 30s with a mixture of satisfaction and remorse, questioning what’s subsequent. I’ve constructed a whole lot of issues I’m pleased with. However I’ve additionally shelved elements of myself that used to really feel important. The a part of me that advised tales for no motive besides to really feel alive.
So I’m beginning once more. Not with a particular play, however with a call: to write extra. To concentrate to the issues that transfer me, scare me, make me snicker or need to cry. To be much less afraid of being misunderstood, or not going viral, or not being ok.
I don’t know the place it will take me, or what it’d convey. All I do know is that I’m not executed but. With no matter it’s. If, like me, you’re additionally feeling that bizarre mixture of nostalgia, ambition, and inventive restlessness—possibly it’s time to begin once more, too.
Write the factor. Begin the present. Inform the story.
Even when it’s messy. Particularly if it’s messy.