Although I’ve only watched the entirety of the series through twice maybe thrice, out of all the tv shows I’ve ever watched, Gilmore Girls probably takes the cake for me. It’s witty, it’s emotional, and you (if you’re like me) you get invested deeply. You feel like you grow up right instep with whichever character you identify with. If you wanna talk GG I will swap the tea over coffee any day. When it comes to Dean, Jess or Logan I will fight you and I will win (#TeamJess).
I got deeply invested and felt myself grow along with Rory. She was my girl. I was her. I felt how she felt and walked roads she walked.
Until she stated walking roads I didn’t like. And then I uttered words we shouldn’t “I would never...” because most often what we would “never”, we end up doing.
And then the reboot happened. What a train wreck. I mean an absolute catastrophe. National disaster.
And RORY! What happened to her?! It’s like Lorelie grew and Rory...regressed.
I wanted to grab her by the shoulders and shake her and scream in her face! This isn’t how our life was supposed to go!!
But as a wise friend pointed out to me at this point in our conversation about Rory’s great regression: we grew with her- and when she showed up at the shore of the real world- she, like so many of us, couldn’t find all the potential we were bolstered into believing we had. Where was our great contribution to the world? How are we going to leave our mark on this world if all we drag out of the ocean of our younger years is a brief case full of ordinary?
Some of us faced this in our early to mid 20’s. We finished up college and merged into the busy highways of the professional world. Others of us faced this kamikaze mission right out of highschool and have found ourselves floundering for that much longer.
We showed up bright eyed and bushy tailed only to find out all the things we thought made us soooo special, barely distinct us from the survivor next to us.
We drag onto the shore and the monotony of the world chips away at us.
It’s so much more than realizing we didn’t get the Noah/Allie love story and farmhouse.
It’s so much bigger than realizing everything we thought made us amazing just made us human.
We show up and we’re disappointed to find ourselves on land and still struggling to keep our heads up.
We’re not just not “something special”, we’re lost. We’re in our 20’s or early 30’s and nothing looks like what we thought.
We not only missed out on the 13 going on 30 storyline, we missed the job, the penthouse, and the happiness.
I would venture so far as to say, we weren’t even looking to be the next big thing. We weren't hoping to Jeff Bezos part 2. But we are let down but how underwhelming our lives have turned out. So many of us just want a good old American dream life. Instead, we’re a generation of depressed, lonely, overworked, underpaid, anxiety ridden men and women who just wanted to get to this point in our lives and be where our parents were: married, working, raising kids, building the dream. The normal, monotonous dream. Yes it’s plain white bread- but it’s the building blocks we wanted. If we had it, we wanted to replicate it. And if we didn’t, we wanted to create it.
Instead we find ourselves dripping with disappointment. Find ourselves working jobs we don’t want, earning less than we need, to pay for bills we didn’t know about that come from expenses we didn’t find necessary.
Yeah. My 20’s have been the big event let down of life. But I know that once January gets rolling, I will no longer feel the sense of sadness that the holidays are over that I do right now. I will eventually find other things to look forward to, and these months become another sweet memory to tuck into my heart.
The January of my life is about to get rolling. And maybe yours is too. No, our Januarys won’t catapult us into something earth rocking and mind bending. But they’ll put us into a better light. That this season doesn’t last forever. And no, where we weren’t all born to be Ruth Bater Ginsburg or Rosa Parks, but we all have the power to impact someone’s life. I know many “mundane” women who have dramatically altered mine.
So go work the job you don’t want a little better. Hug your child that would be called an “oops” a little tighter. Smile at strangers a little more often.
Find joy in the ordinary, mundane, magnificent life you were given. And hold onto the hope that after January, is the spring.
The best is yet to come 💜
“For this light momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison, as we look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen. For the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal.”
2 Corinthians 4:17-18
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