According to Merriam Webster, pretty can be defined as “appearing … pleasant or nice but lacking strength, force, manliness, purpose, or intensity.”1 In other words, pretty ices the cake—it’s beauty without substance. I’m telling you this because I recently watched a popular coming of age drama on Amazon Prime called The Summer I Turned Pretty, which is based on a Jenny Han novel of the same name. This is not my typical genre of television, but when I started it I had a lot of laundry to fold, my husband was working extra shifts, and I really wanted to escape from the long days of summer parenting. The headlines and sagas of suffering that usually suck me in, that spiral my heart into sadness, were not something I could handle on this particular night, so I picked a romantic teenage dramedy, something I thought would be light and summery. (And it’s important for me to note here that I recognize this is privilege in a paragraph. Having the option to step away, to ignore suffering—that is privilege.)
Now, I wasn’t wrong in thinking this show would be an easy escape. I watched episode after episode of the first season over the next week and then, because I can read faster than I can binge watch a show—I do have little kids to attend to, after all—I finished the book series. Three books in three days. (In case you’re wondering, the show was actually much better. Rarely would I say that, but the character development is well done.) Over the next week, I finished watching the second season during shift nights or when the kids took an unexpected nap. And while it was fun, it let loose something inside, sent me careening headfirst into a midlife crisis that, if I’m honest, I haven’t fully recovered from.
I’ll confess that, in the past few years, I’ve avoided reading fiction—despite the fact that fiction was my major in college, because I know I can get completely folded up in the pages of an alternate reality, and then I forget to focus on the serious things, the important things. So I abstain for a while, and when I come back to it, as I always do, I tend to fall straight down the rabbit hole. And that’s what I did with this show. I spent the past couple of weeks living in my head, in Cousins Beach (which also happens to be filmed in Wilmington, where I went to college). My days were tinted with my own rosy nostalgia as I let myself feel all the feels alongside Belly Conklin and her two Fisher boys.
When I think of summer, I think of green pastures and forests draped in kudzu vines. I think of denim cutoffs and Rainbows flip flops. I think of laundry baskets filled with fresh corn for shucking. Of sunroofs down for dancing. Of sand and sea oats and salty air. I think of warm waves along the Carolina coast, and friends jumping off rough wooden decks into the sound. I think of my uncle’s boat, of sandbars and suntan lotion. I think of hamburgers and ice cream at Island Delights and late nights spent watching Sex and The City with my best friends. I think of all the boys I thought I loved in high school—the one with the Vans, the one with curls, the one with the guitar.
Once, while in high school, I asked my mother if she still felt the same in her forties as she did when she was seventeen. I don’t remember her answer verbatim, only that it was some combination of yes and no. I guess I’m beginning to understand her answer for myself. You always live with the memories of who you once were. You change, you get older, but you’re still you. So here I am, on the cusp of thirty-seven, swooning like a teenager over a season of life I’ve already crested.
If all goes well, there’s no more falling in love for me. No more dreaming about where I’ll live, who I’ll marry, or what our kids will look like. These things that you dream about as a teenager, as a young adult, they’ve sort of all passed at this point in life. They’ve been realized, which is a beautiful thing. But it also means that I’m now heading into a stage of life that feels uncertain. Our culture doesn’t romanticize your late thirties, your forties, your fifties. It doesn’t show us how to navigate your personhood while mothering, or how to rekindle a flame when it flickers. It prepares us for the mountaintop moments while leaving us alone for the rest of the journey, the descent between mountain and valley as we look for the next peak.
*
Here’s what watching The Summer I Turned Pretty did for me: it let me relive the tensions of high school and college, those feelings of first love and first heartbreak. It reminded me of being fourteen, crying alone in the middle school bathroom stall. It gave me compassion for that girl who still lives inside of me—insecure, painfully aware of her faults. It reminded me of being seventeen, absolutely devastated because the boy I thought would maybe? ask me to prom unexpectedly dropped out of high school without a word, after months of shared glances in the hallway, months of late night phone calls, conversations whispered into the night. It reminded me of being twenty, trying to figure out who I wanted to be—second guessing myself even after gaining a little confidence, after finding my own friends, my own circle outside of the people I’d known all my life.
All these versions of myself, sometimes they reappear—the old insecurities, the unfulfilled desires, the big dreams. They might disappear for a while, but something will inevitably trigger an earlier me, and then I feel those old aches again, emerging from someplace deep inside. Something as benign as a television show or a novel can prick my heart, and I find myself lost, awash in a sea of doubt and loneliness, groping around for an anchor in the dark.
I fell into this wishing well, this dark column of stone, wanting to be eighteen again, on the cusp of graduating high school, with every opportunity on the horizon. I wanted the chance for a do over—to be a bolder version of myself this time. To say the things I wish I hadn’t kept hidden, to take life less seriously, to laugh at myself, to enjoy making memories with my friends.
When I was a little girl, my mother said I couldn’t go to sleep without asking her a million questions: What if there’s a fire? What if there’s a tornado? What if someone breaks into our house?
As an adult, I’m still asking these what if questions. They just look a little different.
What if I hadn’t visited Wilmington in the spring, had instead chosen to go to Chapel Hill? What kind of community would I have found? What area of study would I have chosen?
What if I’d taken that Americorps job after college, working with refugees in Greensboro and living with my best friend? Would it have changed my career path? Would I still be living in Greensboro?
What if I’d committed to those salsa lessons with the boy who a gave me a rose freshman year of college? Would I be a better dancer? Would I ever have dated the man who is now my husband?
What if I’d actually pursued a writing career after college? Would I have written a book by now?
What if I’d moved overseas when I graduated? Or what if I’d never moved, what if I had stayed in North Carolina? What if I never left Seattle or never left New York?
What if I had embraced my smallness early on: instead of always curling inward, finding my identity in being shy, who might I have been if I’d allowed myself to have a big personality in a small body?
*
To curb my obsession with The Summer I Turned Pretty, I quickly forced myself onto a different novel, and I found solace in Matt Haig’s The Midnight Library, a fantasy novel recommended by my best friend. It’s the story of a girl who, on the eve of her suicide, has an opportunity to see how making different decisions would have altered her life. It’s an interesting premise, made more poignant as I considered my own life choices.
The novel’s epigraph is a quote from Sylvia Plath which says, “I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want. I can never train myself in all the skills I want. And why do I want? I want to live and feel all the shades, tones, and variations of mental and physical experience possible in my life.” I feel every word of that, but it is a difficult way to live. Because if you’re always aiming for everything, then you focus on nothing.
Instead, it’s the main character’s revelation towards the end of The Midnight Library that I want to aspire to. She says:
It is easy to mourn the lives we aren’t living. Easy to wish we’d developed other talents, said yes to different offers. Easy to wish we’d worked harder, loved better, handled our finances more astutely, been more popular, stayed in the band, gone to Australia, said yes to the coffee, or done more bloody yoga.
It takes no effort to miss the friends we didn’t make and the work we didn’t do and the people we didn’t marry and the children we didn’t have. It is not difficult to see yourself through the lens of other people, and to wish you were all the different kaleidoscopic versions of you they wanted you to be. It is easy to regret, and keep regretting, ad infinitum, until our time runs out.
But it is not the lives we regret not living that are the real problem. It is the regret itself. It’s the regret that makes us shrivel and wither and feel like our own and other people’s worst enemy.
We can’t tell if any of those other versions would have been better or worse. Those lives are happening, it is true, but you are happening as well, and that is the happening we have to focus on.
I love that last line, and I guess what I’m burrowing towards is this: what if all the what ifs are keeping me from what actually is.
In this life, I’ve lived in North Carolina, Washington, and New York. I spent a semester in Southeast Asia. I traveled with my husband for seven months through seventeen countries before we had kids. I worked at an architecture firm in Seattle, and then I taught middle schoolers in Brooklyn. I’m in the early years of raising two lovely boys. I don’t really have a career, but I’ve lived a life of joy and purpose and adventure. I’ve had my fair share of fear and anxiety and loneliness and depression, but hopefully, there is time enough ahead to grow into a person more whole, more confident, more at ease. Hopefully, there is time enough ahead to turn compassion into action, words into stories, and tears into laughter.
Joy, I’m learning, doesn’t have to be all consuming. It can be the first sip of coffee in the morning, a quiet house, my kid curled next to me in my bed, my husband’s tender eyes. A breeze through the crepe myrtle branches in the backyard. The cold thrill of being barefoot in the creek. These are fleeting pleasures, but they are beautiful if I stay present to them.
On social media, a friend recently referenced a Ted Talk about the slippery bubble of happiness, about how we are constantly imagining happiness to be somewhere in the future.2 We think we will be happy when we are in a relationship, but when we get there, we want marriage. Then it’s kids, a career, a promotion. We keep pushing happiness forward, and we never grasp it. But happiness is here. Happiness is now. It’s in every season—not just the summers of our lives, but the springs and falls and winters, too. I can never be eighteen again, but I can embrace the sunset of my thirties and bloom right here.
Love,
Jenica
P.S. In case you’ve read to the end and you’re wondering where I stand, I think Gavin Casalegno seems like a lovely human, but I’m definitely #TeamConrad. If you know, you know. ❤️
Ordinary Joy
Words of Jubilee
I saw a post on Facebook with the quote below, which comes from author Leo Buscaglia, and I felt it really sums up today’s theme.
The majority of us lead quiet, unheralded lives as we pass through this world. There will most likely be no ticker-tape parades for us, no monuments created in our honor. But that does not lessen our possible impact, for there are scores of people waiting for someone just like us to come along; people who will appreciate our compassion, our unique talents. Someone who will live a happier life merely because we took the time to share what we had to give. Too often we underestimate the power of a touch, a smile, a kind word a listening ear, an honest compliment, or the smallest act of caring, all of which have a potential to turn a life around. It’s overwhelming to consider the continuous opportunities there are to make our love felt.
A Few Good Things
In a throwback to high school and college, I’m sharing my favorite albums, those that I listened to on repeat. In high school, it was old school Avett Brothers. Live, Volume 2 and Mignonette. I also listened to the first Jack’s Mannequin album as well as Tegan and Sara’s So Jealous album on repeat.
Besides The Midnight Library, I read two other sci-fi/fantasy novels this month: The Cautious Traveller’s Guide to the Wastelands by Sarah Brooks and Light from Other Stars by Erika Swyler. Highly recommend them both, especially the Wastelands.
Although I enjoyed watching The Summer I Turned Pretty, I also really like the series Modern Love, which is more realistic. Each episode stands alone, so it’s low commitment, and each episode is based off of a column in the New York Times.
Welcome to Joy & Jubilee! If you are new here, I am celebrating my first year of consistently writing in this space. Thank you so much to the many people reading and sharing my work. It does take considerable time and effort to write and write well—if you would like to contribute to the continuation of this project, you can do so by becoming a paid subscriber, by clicking the “Buy Me a Coffee” button below, or simply by sharing this publication with others. A paid subscription is a few dollars a month, and each subscription makes an impact.
Thanks for reading!
“Pretty.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/pretty. Accessed 17 Sep. 2024.
I really wish I could find the source. Apologies! If I find it, I’ll link it in the comments.