Handle with care.

I've listened to Alec Baldwin's podcast in which he interviews a particular inspiration of mine, Lena Dunham (26 year old creator, writer, director, and star of Girls on HBO) three times. Something in particular that she said sticks with me,

"...it’s like if you ask a girl in her 20’s, ‘Are you a happy person?’ I think she can say, ‘I have happy moments,’ but I don’t think it’s possible – maybe I’m – maybe people will radically disagree with me, but I don’t really think it’s possible to be sort of an at-peace human when you are between 22 and 30."

I can assure you, Lena, that Sass does not radically disagree with you but rather she completely understands and is so thrilled to hear someone else say it! In my reflection of this quote over the last week or so, it was really interesting for me, especially as a writer, to share Lena's quote with my boyfriend and then try to clearly articulate why it is that I agree. Especially since we are entering into a stage of our relationship where he might think I mean that our life together isn't an overall happy place to be. I also believe it to be ironic that I'm in this stage of life - radically changing, ever persistent quest for direction and stability - and I'm dating a real man who is obviously male (which makes our contemplation of life different from the start) and who is in an established state and quite comfortable with who he is. That's not to say that he doesn't have ambitions and some level of uncertainty as to where his life is going but he's got twelve years on me in terms of getting through those "figuring it out" phases. I tell him all the time that I'm more crazy than he even knows.

However, this dynamic forces me to really think about things and why I feel them because in order to explain them to him, I'm truly attempting to express emotions that I'm not sure he's ever felt (and if he has, it was years ago). I can't start a thought and trail off by saying, "ya know what I mean, right?" because he usually doesn't. Thankfully he's smart and worldly enough to at least respect and acknowledge my feelings even if he's never experienced them himself.

Anyway, why do we only have happy moments? Well I can speak for myself: to start, I've realized that my entire life until this point was completely structured and dictated by society. Go to elementary school, go to middle school, go to practice, be an athlete, learn an instrument, go to high school, pick a major, graduate college...........then what? After years of the world dictating the path I'm on, suddenly I'm supposed to come up with what to do next? Torturous. It's a constant quest for fulfillment and satisfaction that we used to get from our teachers and coaches on a daily basis.

Graduating from college:

Now:

It is also a time of great change within our friendships. People move away, we grow apart, and we are forced to acknowledge that the friends we used to include in our future wedding parties might not be there. For me, it's more about coming to terms with the fact that the friends I want in my future wedding party are people that I rarely get a chance to see and talk to. In a way, I've had to start over and make new friends. This can be absolutely daunting and quite difficult as adults since we aren't forced to be a room together for six hours a day getting to know each other.

In love, we're either so badly on the hunt for it or we're in it and wondering all the time if "this is it!"

The general message here is that our world is rocked when we step into "the real world" (or at least mine was). I often feel like I've stepped backwards - I used to be so motivated and such an over-achiever in school, what happened? Now I can't even get motivated to get my mail half the time. It's almost more frustrating knowing that my lack of motivation derives from a lack of direction. I have drive but I'm not sure where to place it.

I think it's pretty fair to say that 20 something girls are completely out of their minds (or at least I am). I over-analyze, I change my mind constantly, and I guess whether I'm actually out of my mind or I'm not...I feel it. I feel very lost most of the time, which is why I try to re-create the happy moments over and over.

Why do we party in our twenties? Because our bodies are more tolerable to the abuse and we like popular music? Yes but also because it is a happy moment. We can completely forget about all of the BS I just typed up, if even just for a few hours. Why do we sometimes crave too much attention in our relationships? Because we are a little immature and naive? Yes but also because it is a happy moment when someone is adoring you and outwardly expressing his love for you, we want it all the time. Why do we exercise and stay in good shape? Because it's easier to maintain a body at this age? Sure but also because running on a treadmill blasting Rihanna is a happy moment, again free from all of the crap I typed up there. So much about this stage is about escaping the uncertainty.

Sassarella Says...if you are one of my fellow 22-30 year old female peers, YA-YA! If you're not and if you think this is a load of crap....I'm telling you, it's not crap. It's very real. Handle us with care or we might just bite your head off :)

"You have exhausted all of your talking rights by being crazy" - Lorelai, GG

Big decisions: where to live, where to go to school, who to love, where to work, who to trust, etc. Smaller decisions: what to eat, how to exercise, when to vacation, train or bus, small or medium shirt, etc. No matter what the decision, big or small, I always seem to turn my mother for answers. Ecstatic, depressed, neutral, enraged....I turn to her for explanations. Now this is not a new epiphany, I've been doing it since I was old enough to make decisions and experience emotions but I've been thinking about it recently as I continue to grow into my relationship. I wonder when I will begin to turn to him for all answers and explanations. I wonder if I will ever turn to him in the same way that I turn to her. I wonder if it's okay that often, not always, but I often turn to him but still feel compelled to know her take on things before making a decision or coming to a conclusion. Does this mean I'm not a grown up? What does that say about me and will it ever change? Does it have to change and why is it something I even think about? I've been mulling this for a couple weeks now, trying to figure out how to make it interesting to write about, and on Sunday night, after a mini-meltdown of course, it came to me....

I had a really nice weekend. I worked at Rhino Friday night like I usually do. Saturday we got up and went grocery shopping; we bought fruit and veggies to make juice and I stocked up on snacks, sushi, and magazines for my night in. After he left for work, I nestled into his bed and watched three episodes of Shameless, followed by the Beyonce documentary on HBO, followed by another five or so episodes of Shameless. On Sunday we got up, went to the mall where I got new work kicks and mint green jeans for the spring and then over to Maddy's Tap Room for a friend's birthday celebration. I caught up with the girls, especially a Miss B.Ryan who had just returned from Peru the day before, it was a great night. We left on the early side, which I was happy about and he even offered to sleep at my apartment (WOWZA!). I danced around my room while blasting, "Pursuit of Happiness," the Lissie version, showered, and sat down on the bed. As I sat, he played his game on his phone, and I felt like crying. I couldn't tell you why, although, I believe some of my angst was about looming work projects that I just didn't want to go to sleep, wake up, and deal with, but they are not worth crying about!

"I'll be fine once I get, yeah I'll be good."

I text my mom to see if she's still up and as I wait for her to respond, he starts to notice that something is wrong. Rather than tell him that I feel like crying for no reason, I pretend like I'm fine but he's not buying it. A few minutes later, I step outside into the hallway to call her. I tell her what's going on, that he's here and it has nothing to do with him, that I can't pinpoint what the hell is going on, and she says, "well, maybe ya just need to cry...go ahead." I laugh a little and she goes off on a tangent about her day. By the end I felt better but I think he was a little freaked. "You never leave the room to talk to her, what's going on?" he asked. After some hemming and hawing, the only thing I could say was this, "I don't think you realize all the time how messed up and all over the place I feel. I think it's most definitely a gender thing, as much as I hate to say it, as well as an age thing. I get it...I'm in my 20s, I'm supposed to feel crazy, I'm supposed to feel jumbled up and confused, I'm supposed to have emotions that change at the drop of a hat....and frankly, I do. Sometimes when I feel those things, I turn to her because she has 24 years of experience dealing with me. She has 24 years of knowing me and while you and I are together a long time....1 year of knowing me is just not the same as 24. I consider myself to be more mature than most girls my age but sometimes I just want to be a kid and I think she understands that better because...well, because I'm her kid." This he understood. He loves me.

She's always going to have more years on whoever I turn to in tough times, decision times, and confusing times. Whether it was a conscious decision or it wasn't, she knew to just talk about nothing to me instead of trying to figure out why I was upset. I can't say that's a golden rule because sometimes I know deep down why I'm upset but don't want to say it so you have to dig it out (LOL craaaaay) but she can pretty much tell the difference simply because she's my mom.

It's funny and it's a weird dynamic because there are times when, for example, I'm ready to move in with the man but I feel like I have to have a conversation with my mom about it first. We've all talked loosely about it but before going in to sign any papers, I feel like I need to hear her say, "Ok, yes I support you." Does that mean I'm really not grown up enough to make that kind of decision? I want to say no because I want to say that if that were the case, I'd probably still be eating glue at a pre-school. I also want to say no because I want to move in with him and I don't want to hear that I'm not ready. Anyway....

Sassarella Says...I've decided that it's okay for me to turn to her and it doesn't mean I'm not mature enough to make decisions for myself. It means that I recognize her as the person who knows me best and that is reason enough to run some things almost everything by her...right?

It's a girl thing.

On the most recent episode of Lena Dunham's show, Girls, her character Hannah spends the entire episode with a very attractive doctor. They don't know each other very well at all, in fact they had just met, but she spends the next day or two at his apartment. They drink wine, they cook dinner, they play ping pong, and have lots of sex. Although about twenty years her senior, he makes her feel comfortable, asks her questions about her life, but dodges any questions relating to his own story. He tells her that he's separated from his wife, who now lives in San Diego, but not much more than that.

The episode ends with Hannah getting out of the shower, sitting on his bed, and confiding to him about how she feels lonely sometimes. It was as if the feeling just hit her in that moment and a rush of emotions poured out of her. Once she composed herself she looked up to see his freaked out face staring back at her and she was hit with the second realization of the hour, that they are actually strangers. She calls him out for making her feel one way but reacting quite oppositely when she lets her guard down but ultimately she spends the night, gets up the next morning to an empty apartment, leaves, and we are left assuming that she will not see him again. (We'll have to watch next week to know for sure but that's just my guess). 

As the credits rolled, by boyfriend commented, "That would never happen in real life, especially to her." My first instinct was to defend Lena Dunham because lord knows what I might look like onscreen...they say the camera adds ten pounds! However I refrained and focused more on the first part of the comment. I responded very calmly and sincerely, "I related to that entire episode." He was confused and quiet but asked me how. 

I was that girl, and still could be that girl if I didn't have him, who sometimes thought that anything was just crazy and random enough that it might work out. Here she meets a guy on the street and spends a weekend with him, who's to say that it wasn't meant to be? As for me, in college and as recently as a year ago, we lived through my dating madness where I existed on a fine line between lonely desperation, hopeful romanticism/optimism, and bitter jadedness. I fell somewhere in between all three, expressing and feeling bits and pieces of each emotional state. I overlooked minor warning signs on first dates that I would never overlook today for the sake wanting something to work out. Sometimes I claimed to just do things or date people for the stories (which there were many) but let's call a spade a spade, I wanted a boyfriend. Not to mention the fact that I always dated men a bit older than myself, like Hannah. During that time I rarely hesitated when asked to...oh I don't know...jump in the Potomac River in February wearing nothing but a bra and undies. Sure it made for a great story and an experience I'll have forever but in terms of a happy ending with the guy? Not so much. He was emotionally closed off but I looked past this, which he made easy to do, by always keeping me on my toes. We crashed fancy parties, went to nice dinners, and jumped into rivers so it was easy to forget that I actually hardly knew the real him.

I think a lot of women experience this same sentiment, especially in their twenties when life just seems oh so possible of anything! We're told that "it will happen when we least expect it" so why shouldn't we have hope that meeting a random guy at a coffee shop and spending a weekend naked playing ping pong with him will ever work out? If I had seen this episode years ago or if I wasn't lying next to my committed boyfriend, I probably would've been in tears watching the closing scenes. I felt like she wrote that episode about me. Anyway, it was somewhere around this way less detailed part of my explanation with my boyfriend that I saw his face was still quite puzzled and I simply said, "well there's a reason why it's called Girls, not Boys." He concurred and we ended the discussion there. 

I didn't bother to go into this amount of detail with him because I was pretty certain that by the end of any explanation I would be left with one reason for him, "it's a girl thing." Our highs and lows are so extreme in our twenties that when we're on a high with a guy, we grab on and try really hard not to let go because we know how low the low really is. The low means sappy songs, old episodes of One Tree Hill, and five more pounds around the waist. It's miserable, trust me I know. So we let ourselves get swept away in the hope that it might just work out this one time....because really, you only need it to work out once so why not now? We are naïve and blinded by our own spontaneity but looking back I really would not have it any other way. Sure I was les misérable a lot but I had a lot of fun too. And I think pretty importantly, I really know that I'm happy now because I can tell the difference from a time when I was faking it.

Sassarella Says...there's nothing wrong with having hope that the craziest of situations might work out. The problem arises when you've got no hope left. Hang in there, mAh LaDiEZ.