(‘Kim, there’s people that are dying,’ is the meme I quote to myself as I proofread my self-indulgent birthday musings on ‘sOmE tHiNgS i leARnED tHiS yEaR’, in which I do not dwell on the wide-ranging implications of a global pandemic. I hope it goes without saying that there have been countless lessons in the exhausting multitudes of this past year and that this post is about a very small and hopefully lighthearted corner of mine.)
Pretty much everyone who knows me well is fully aware (/sick of hearing) that this was the year I became indoctrinated into the hallowed church of Sex and the City. I learned what it meant when people say they’re the Miranda, Samantha, Charlotte, or Carrie of their group of friends. And although I love Miranda’s intensely relatable cynicism, and aspire to Samantha Jones-levels of boldness and self-assurance, I have to acknowledge the difficult truth that, in many ways, I am a Carrie.
True, I don’t have Carrie’s bizarre wardrobe of crop tops and capes, and I sincerely hope I’m not as much of an unrepentant narcissist (she wrote, in a personal essay on a personal blog that absolutely no-one asked for). I don’t write a popular weekly column that somehow manages to pay for an airy Manhattan apartment and fund a costly addiction to designer footwear. Every episode, we listen to Carrie’s endless voiceover ponderings, her so-I-got-to-thinkings, her couldn’t-help-but-wonderings, until the moment of revelation: a ‘Suddenly, it hit me…’ or the immortal ‘And just like that…’ In between my total mystification at the idea that someone allegedly pays this woman for her journalistic insight, *I* couldn’t help but wonder: do I have more in common with Carrie Bradshaw than I like to admit?
The more I think about it, the more I see myself excruciatingly reflected in Carrie’s episodic mini-arcs of self-discovery. Barely a week goes by when I don’t think I’ve had some groundbreaking moment of clarity about who I am or what I want to be doing with my life. Imagine ‘new year, new me’ energy, but it’s every single Monday morning. I’ll have one early night and instantly think I’m a changed being after a lifetime of bad routines, only to then spend the next fortnight watching back-to-back Selling Sunset until three in the morning. One good research day and I think finally, have arrived, am true academic powerhouse! – followed by weeks of staring, uncomprehending, at my own notes and wondering how I have managed to spoof my way into a PhD with so few cohesive thoughts. I’ll read one memoir about an average millennial woman’s journey to self-acceptance and vow to live by her wise teachings, but give it one hour and I can be found googling is everyone I know laughing at me in one massive group chat? I listen to one empowering disco anthem and decide I am every woman, and it is all in me, a high that does not last longer than it takes me to type my first passive-aggressive per my last email of the day. Like Carrie, I am in a perennial state of feeling briefly galvanised by epiphanies, and then I trip into the next episode and continue to be an absolute mess.
I’m sure most of us probably do this to some extent. You do Dry January and announce I’ve realised I don’t need to drink to have a good time, and then a week later you’re sick of elderflower cordial and you’re sucking box wine straight from the nozzle. You make one nutritious meal from scratch, marvel at how wholesome and healthy it is, declare yourself a newly-converted foodie, buy a cookbook, start having thoughts like what if I started growing my own herbs? (you don’t have a garden) and then immediately go back to existing on a diet of coffee and Pringles. You decide you’re going to try running for some exercise. You go running three times. You feel so refreshed and virtuous afterwards. You can’t help thinking oh my god, this is it – the first chapter of your journey as an Athlete. You will be like one of those people who writes a book about how they went from starting the day with tequila in their Earl Grey to doing 5ks at five a.m. (‘Running On Empty: How Strava Saved Me From Having A Breakdown’). And then you don’t run again for six months and surrender to the slow muscle atrophy of working from home, regularly putting your back out from simply sneezing too hard.
You watch a documentary on how social media is ruining our lives, and you’re transformed. You resolve to waste less time in the internet chamber of never-ending screams. You pin a smug out-of-office tweet saying you’re logging out for a while, like some kind of eighteenth-century duchess announcing her retreat to the countryside for the rest of the season. You spend two whole weeks off socials and return gushing about how improved your mental health is from not spending all day doomscrolling. You went for daily walks and read seventeen books and got really into découpage with all the free time. You’re like someone who went travelling on their gap year and Found themselves; you’re tripping over yourself to tell everyone about how much more productive and wholesome and generally better life feels when you’re not glaring at Twitter wondering why no-one’s liked your joke about service delays on the Tyne and Wear Metro. The time away has really made you reevaluate your priorities. You’re actually considering just replacing all your apps with a rotary phone from the 1890s, for a simpler, happier existence. One week later and you’re live-tweeting Love Island with one hand and uploading photos of your collapsing homemade sourdough with the other. Normal service has resumed.
(I say ‘you’. All of these are me.)
I remember as a child reading Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials, a world in which each person has a shape-shifting dæmon familiar that settles on a single form once their human reaches maturity. As an adult, I feel constantly on the alert for the turning points that will mark the changeover from messy, nebulous young adulthood, to fully-manifested grown-up. I think I attach so much weight to these feeble instances of imagined enlightenment because on some level, I believe they could be part of the grand volta of my personal narrative, the watershed moments that will decide my pathway, my priorities, my personality (Miranda or Samantha?) once and for all.
And just like that… I hope I can recognise now that not every whim and notion is going to mark the start of a momentous self-actualisation. Perhaps I could speculate that acknowledging this fact might actually be a crucial epiphany in itself; but let’s not, so to speak, get Carried away.
Cover photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash
good strong words 
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