I'm fascinated with the mechanics of identity. How do we create and maintain a self? How do we untangle messages that diminish that self? How does art and Taylor Swift and Game of Thrones and Harry Styles’ chest hair affect my identity? Are we all just elaborate collages of influence?
But really I’m just asking why are you the way that you are????
This week is about what happens when an identity is threatened by shame, depression, rape culture, and criticism. And yes, it's about that Lena Dunham profile.
Good Reads
I’m Broke and Mostly Friendless and I’ve Wasted My Whole Life - Heather Havrilesky
Heather Havrilesky is slaying the Ask Polly column. I feel like she reads me for filth in the best way (not unlike a Ms. Didion in this piece).
This week she responds to a letter from someone who feels they've wasted their life. Her notes on how shame diminishes a person made me yell YES BITCH more than once. Here’s a quote about how our narratives about our selves are often the very thing holding us back:
“But your concept of yourself makes no sense. You got it from a rom-com…I’m determined not to tell a story about myself that started in some beauty-product boardroom, among unimaginative corporate marketing professionals. I fail at this quest often, but I’m still determined. I’m going to choose to embrace narratives that make me feel more alive and able to contribute whatever twisted crafts I can to this world, while I can.”
YES BITCH
Embracing narratives that make you feel alive is the most fundamental self-care practice. It literally builds character. Not in the way your dad meant it when he made you help him build a fence, but in the way that the narratives we tell ourselves become the very stuff we’re made of. And honestly, I’d rather the narrative I tell myself be positive rather than THE TRUTH. I’ve done a lot of self-hate under the guise of being “self-aware.” Who can relate?
Also a narrative that keeps us down is an impossible consideration of can I do this forever? Can I stay at this job/keep this partner/feel this way forever? How can we ever know? You can work in a restaurant when you’re 28 and know that you won’t be working in a restaurant when you’re 82. You can think you’ll be with someone forever and change your mind. You can feel a type of way and know that tomorrow you will feel differently. We are all constantly changing.
Read this if your own bullshit is getting you down (sup retrogrades)
(How to) Suffer Well: Depression Sitting Still - Sihan Tan
The tenants of a culture dictate not only how people feel about themselves but also how they move through personal emotion. (It's no coincidence that the citizens of a country that sucks the free market’s dick are losing their minds from connecting their worth to their job.)
Sihan Tan considers the image of suffering shown in a film by Chinese director who ended his life before the film was completed. The film gives a sense that suffering is inevitable, is endured in silent stillness, and ends lives.
We are often told to sit and feel the feelings. “But what happens when one has fallen out of love with suffering?” What happens when the suffering you’re told to endure kills you? What point does stoically shouldering suffering serve?
“Perhaps the measure of suffering should go beyond one’s ability or inability to endure, and should instead be centered, as Caoxi implies, on the role empathy plays. In case of suffering unwell, one must not neglect the importance of showing compassion not only toward others but also toward oneself, to allow the possibility for adjustments and recalibration. It is quite all right to move, after all, having sat so still.”
Read this if you’ve ever stared blankly at a wall because sometimes the depression hits like that.
How a Woman Becomes a Lake - Jia Tolentino
“These days of fear and sadness show no sign of abating. It’s been a long time since I’ve felt lake-like—cool and still.”
Jia Tolentino could write about a rock and I would be moved.
Here she is considering what times such as these are doing to people such as ourselves. There is a demand to meet these trying times with a fiery rage. Times up. We will not be silenced. We are ANGRY. But what has all that anger done to ourselves? our sense of self? our humanity?
Jia (I like to imagine we are on a first-name basis) revisits the myth of Daphne, the rape of whom is immortalized in this sculpture and numerous works of art. Daphne attempts to outrun her attacker but he is too fast and, being a god, can change form to meet her wherever she decides to settle. She cries out, “O help me / If there is any power in the rivers / Change and destroy the body which has given too much delight!” For Jia, “this plea is an expression of unimaginable resistance and capitulation at once.” It is a request to destroy her body to resist giving it to her pursuer, a sentiment most women who watched the Kavanaugh hearings know well.
“I tried to stop thinking about changing myself to better meet our era; I tried to remember that I’ve already been changed.”
Read this if you, too, forgot there was an olympics this year.
Hate Read
Lena Dunham Comes to Terms with Herself
You couldn’t pay me to be Lena Dunham.
(insert gif of her as Hannah Horvath saying “They’re not paying me at all” at the gyno’s office. I can’t find it and I’m lazy)
This profile is just………tiring.
Listen, I do think she is doing the best she can. It’s just unfortunate that her best is set on staying tone deaf as hell. I don’t see malicious ignorance in her like I do in, say, Amy Schumer. No, there is a sense of regression, that this is not the profile of a secure, adjusted woman but of one who is struggling and chooses to do that publicly. (But don’t get it twisted: I spare no sympathy for those with more money than me. What? You think the class war isn’t coming? lol)
Girls and Not That Kind of Girl were bangers but I just want to tell Lena that it’s okay to just be quiet.
It will be interesting to see if she can rise above the bullshit she’s been in for so long. I imagine dealing with a chronic illness doesn’t help you address the gaps in knowledge that make you problematic, but you can also just not be so publicly problematic.
Here are some quotes and final thoughts…
“This year, Simmons made new work about gender and photographed Cyrus as part of the project. Lena didn’t like being left out, despite not being a natural fit for the theme. “I forced you to do me,” Dunham says to her mother. “I pitched really hard. I was like, ‘I don’t want to get left out of this.’ ”
Is Tahani Al-Jamil based on Lena Dunham???
“I thought I was kind of proving weird girls can have love too. And now he’s dating somebody who looks regular and normal and like girls are supposed to look.”
Goddamnit. Your body is normal. NORMAL.
“But Dunham says she’s not doing anything that channels herself again — though she did give Camping’s main character a history of gynecological surgeries and chronic pain culminating in a total hysterectomy. Her new plan, she swears, is to be a conduit for other people’s stories that focus on themes she’s often thinking about. She’s also working with friends, like Nicole Richie, to help them develop their own writing.”
I don’t trust Lena Dunham to be a conduit for a game of Telephone. smdh
Rec of the Week
Hi. If you haven’t already clicked on my ass on insta, what are you wasting your time on the internet doinggggg?
My dear roommate, Beatriz, and I are collaborating to bring you the best content. We’ve written about what we would buy with $2 mil, how to clean up bong water, and much more.
It’s easier if you just check it out for yourself. Trust me, shit is fuego. Actually it’s the best thing on the internet.
Thank you so much for reading! 2GIRLS1COVEN is the best thing on the internet but this is also great.
Make a QR code out of this https://copypaste.substack.com/welcome or forward the e-mail in a chain and trick your aunt to subscribe.