Nothing beautiful

on "Girls" and surviving

Hi, thanks for being here. I’ve been on a bit of an unplanned hiatus because I’ve been nursing my sick cat for the last few weeks, effectively making it difficult to write. But! I’m hoping we’ll be back to more regularly scheduled essays (including for paid subscribers—thank you for your patience! Sorry!) Without further ado, here’s an essay on one of my favorite shows Girls. If you’d like to support this project as a whole, consider upgrading your subscription. xoxo.

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I take an edible to cure a hangover. I spend the next ten hours too high to do much other than lay in bed. I walk around my apartment in my pajamas, forgetting where I am for what feels like minutes at a time, but likely seconds. I’m miserable. Googling how to become less high. I’m not panicking, only pissed. Around eight pm, Annie comes home with a bag full of pastries. I’m sitting on the couch staring blankly ahead, touching my bruised lip. She sympathizes with me though I know I’ve done this to myself. She reheats a chocolate croissant, then feeds it to me, then another then leaves me in my daze on the couch. I consider watching something to put me to sleep. It’s not yet nine pm. I have to stay awake for a few more hours otherwise my sleep will likely be ruined for the rest of the week. I put on Girls. Season one, episode one.

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I guess it’s because the night before, following a wild few hours of reverie for Charlotte’s birthday, we were standing on the corner of A and 7th. Kate was calling a cab. Charlotte and Alyssa were about to walk back to their apartments with me in tow. I would sleep in Charlotte’s bed fitfully, but thankfully. Spared from a too-late trek back to Bed-Stuy after a marathon of bars and dancing and kissing. Before that, two men tried to entice us to their after-party. Which just meant what was likely a grim hour or two in their midtown apartment where it would be as difficult to escape as it would be to remember why we would have agreed to go in the first place. We not-so-politely declined.  

In their last-ditch efforts to bait us, one of them says, the four of you look like you’re on an episode of Girls. 

The next morning I go home on the train looking insane. My hair is so fried from the bleach. Braless in a tee shirt and wearing Charlotte’s underwear under a now stained silk skirt. I realize that the man wasn’t all that wrong. I will live the rest of the week like I’m in an episode of Girls. 

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Episode one: Marnie yells, “I am never coming back to Bushwick” and the words almost escape my mouth after I trip in the darkness on the way to a party for someone I think is cute. I arrive at the almost-over event with a bloody hand that I hide under the sleeve of my jean jacket. I mention it to no one. It’s not so bad. Sing karaoke anyways. At home, I realize it is very bad. I’m back in Bushwick a few days later. 

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Since the beginning of the year, there have been other Substacks and think pieces trying to diagnose why everyone is rewatching the show. Possibly nostalgia for the 2010s and a time when the internet was not a place the majority of us lived. Yes, the brain-smoothing nostalgia of seeing the characters wield iphone 4s and conduct late-night Google searches of HPV does evoke a simpler time when you couldn’t just call a doctor on demand from an app. Yeah, it’s nice to see people our age not living behind screens. Or maybe it’s reassuring to see how four friends can fail each other in unique, pedestrian, but devastating ways. Although to me, the show has never been about friendship. I don’t find the problem Marnie and Hannah spat over in the first two seasons—who’s the good friend and who’s the bad friend—to be all that compelling. The answer is obvious. They are both bad friends. As we all are. That’s comforting to see on screen, but there’s something else that is so comforting, or maybe that’s it. Girls is a show about comfort. The pursuit of comfort. Surviving ritual humiliation not for one’s art, but in the pursuit of a comfortable existence. The belief that one day the mess will make sense. 

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Episode two: At the gallery opening, Christian reads my piece and no one laughs at the parts that are meant to be funny, like Hannah reading a story she wrote on the train about a fake internet boyfriend who dies. I text Gaby that I’m rewatching Girls, how difficult it is to watch Hannah embarrass herself over and over. Foot in mouth, just like me. Gaby replies she is all of us. 

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My relationship with humiliation has improved since moving to New York. I can’t say I completely have gotten over my inability to gracefully be the butt of the joke. Humiliation is a condition of living here. It’s a requirement to do one undignified thing a day. Buy a chip lunch at the bodega. Let your nearly bare ass touch the subway seat. I bike behind a girl who has one hand on the handlebars and the other grasping a Whole Foods grocery bag that’s hanging on by a thread. For some reason, it pisses me off that she is faster than me. I call her a bitch under my breath. Evil of me! She’s done nothing wrong! The fact she is still faster while also carrying groceries is enough. It bothers me that she’s suffering in such a pedestrian way. I can easily picture myself in the same position. A few months ago, I remember talking to Mitchell about how humiliating it was to be alive. Maybe this isn’t the worst thing in the world. To be humiliated is also to be humbled. He agrees. 

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Episode three: Recognition. The spaces of Girls I encounter sometimes by accident. Adam’s dirty bathroom in my otherwise sane men friends’ apartments. Luckily, no one pees on me in the shower. Sharing a bed with my friends when all else fails. Hannah references two bars in Prospect Heights that she says are in Cobble Hill. I’m confused in Greenpoint, wondering how Hannah afforded to live here. Supposed to be somewhere else, instead standing on the subway platform and claiming you’re at the best party ever. The train speeds past, rustling up a breeze of trash. 

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My embarrassments are long and various. It’s comforting to think about everyone else embarrassing themselves in equal measure. A hidden dream can be embarrassing. Desire can be embarrassing. Knowing you shouldn’t do something but doing something anyways. Embarrassing. Trusting someone who is only going to disappoint you (and who everyone reminds you will) is embarrassing. Walking in the wrong direction. Going to a bar that’s widely known as “the boyfriend store.” Two men stop us outside for a lighter. They’re waiting for their friend. Is he hot, either I or Charlotte ask. One of the men stammers, he is very nice. He’s embarrassed that I asked, but he should be embarrassed that he is wearing a ten-gallon hat. Then again, we’re all doing what we can. But if embarrassment is just a fact of living, I’m not sure if these things are embarrassing at all. 

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Episode four: Running then getting ice cream immediately after. I listen to the ice cream truck’s grating jingle. I might just have to, I say to Ben. We’re packing up his apartment. He pulls out an ice cream sandwich from his freezer. I beat you to it. The melting center drops onto the floor. I think of Adam comparing ice cream to sweet mucus. The incessant song continues in the distance. I finish the ice cream and still want more. 

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Recently, a mentor told me that good writing should answer these questions: does it feel trustworthy? If someone reads this, will they feel gratitude for having been seen? 

James Franco once critiqued the show, particularly the portrayal of the boys in the show. He couldn’t see himself in the characters. They’re too big of losers, he claimed. I don’t need to dissect this for the pleasure of this particular irony to be felt. Of course, anyone who is self-serious isn’t going to see themselves in the show. I meet someone recently who isn’t afraid to admit how much of the show mapped onto his first few years in Brooklyn. I was in high school when the show came out. He was in college. It didn’t hit too differently. 

I see myself in the show. I saw myself in it when I was twenty, twenty-four, and now.  Watching Girls is like hearing Rilke's line for here there is no place that cannot see you over and over again. Even if being seen sometimes feels mortifying. 

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Episode five: On Thursday, I get good news at the doctor’s and want to reward myself. I’m up at Columbia. Underdressed. The wind is powerful. I’m squinting at my phone trying to figure out the fastest way to Williamsburg. I consider biking, but quickly am deterred when the map warns that the only route there includes “hills and stairs.” Although I’m wearing shorts under my dress, it keeps blowing up despite my constant readjustment. (Hannah: I definitely don’t care about putting on proper pants. You can through life wearing shorty shorts and offend almost no one.) I don’t have many fears, but if I had to pinpoint one, it would be showing my ass to all of New York City. Which I guess I often do. 

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Girls is a show in which nothing really happens. I spend a lot of time thinking about my writing lineages. Easy to point out the literary ones. And I’ll say it here because I don’t know where else to say it: without Girls, I don’t think this newsletter would exist. Sandy, Hannah’s short-term boyfriend in season two, gives her essay the critique that nothing happens. It’s a fair summary of the show. And it’s a similar critique I’ve received, even recently. In Ava’s most recent essay, she writes: what does it even mean to be open to criticism? Girls received variations of the same critique over and over. And its gleeful ignorance of these critiques makes the show what it is. Unapologetically un-self-aware while being entirely self-conscious. I’m always saying there has to be some balance between these two states of self: awareness and consciousness. Like the women in Girls, I haven’t yet found this balance.    

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Episode six: I write a blog post and find a really good hot dog. This is news! I call my friend. She doesn’t pick up. 

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Any time something good happens, it seems absurd or unrealistic. Getting the dream job at the magazine, or spending a romantic day with a stranger, or falling in love with your friend’s boyfriend who happens to be perfect for you. Everything else hurts, even if everything is mundane. Rarely is anything beautiful. When it is, it’s a miracle. There’s so much waiting. Not even waiting for something good. Just for anything to happen. Yes, I’m talking about the show. Yes, I’m talking about myself.

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Episode seven: I ride over the Brooklyn Bridge in an eight-dollar Uber Pool from Manhattan. It’s not heinously late, but the G was out and I couldn’t bear the transfer to the bus from the L. The man I share the Uber with won’t look over at me. The driver keeps looking at us from the rearview. 

A few weeks ago a much older adult asked how I planned to make a life in New York. I don’t fault him for asking. It’s as much of a fair question as it’s impossible to answer. It made me wonder what that actually means. Making a life, versus simply living it. The adult probably meant how did I plan to start saving, own property, and all the other mundanities adulthood anywhere else promises. When would I make a life rather than setting money on fire by paying rent in one of the most expensive cities in the country? 

I text Charlotte that I love being in a car driving fast through the city at night. Brooklyn and Manhattan stare each other down. Whose spectacular lights shine brighter? I’m not a poet. To be honest, I spend so much time not noticing. I notice the way I feel now. Exhilarated. Unhappy. In love and out of it. No, let me rephrase: I text her how much I fucking love this city. I know it’s cringe to say this. But this is the life I’m making.