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.
Not too long ago, I began rewatching Women, the HBO sequence that made Lena Dunham well-known amongst my era. I keep in mind watching it when it first aired: a messy, uncooked, usually ridiculous present about that 20-something life that someway felt like a mirror, even once I didn’t need to look. However now, watching it once more whereas dwelling in Brooklyn, a decade older, a bit extra jaded and much more self-aware, it’s hitting in another 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 nicely of self-delusion. However there’s one thing undeniably acquainted in her artistic craving. The will to make one thing, to be heard, to reside 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 referred to as a digital marketer, significantly within the website positioning area. I’ve labored laborious to construct a profession round content material technique, knowledge, and digital development—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 website positioning trade is shifting quickly, with AI reshaping the best way individuals discover and eat info. And there have been a number of experiences and research out displaying how AI goes to influence advertising and marketing jobs particularly.
And so I’ve been asking myself: am I nonetheless doing work I really like, or simply work I’m used to?
Increasingly, I discover myself enthusiastic 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 put in writing.
When Women first got here out in 2012, Lena Dunham’s Hannah Horvath character resonated with a era of individuals making an attempt to determine who the hell they had been and methods to get via it with some sense of which means. And it nonetheless resonates with that very same group of individuals—together with the newer generations first discovering the sequence now.
And right here I’m, a 40-year-old homosexual man dwelling in Williamsburg, trying again at my 20s and 30s with a mixture of satisfaction and remorse, questioning what’s subsequent. I’ve constructed quite a lot of issues I’m pleased with. However I’ve additionally shelved components of myself that used to really feel important. The a part of me that informed tales for no motive besides to really feel alive.
So I’m beginning once more. Not with a particular play, however with a choice: 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 this may take me, or what it would deliver. 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.
