Recently I tried watching
my favorite movie, the BBC's 1995
version of Pride and Prejudice.
I'm the kind of person who
has 10 favorite movies and 10 favorite music albums and I consume
those same few media over and over with no interest in anything new.
So I've already seen this
version of Pride and Prejudice a million times. I know the
script and the soundtrack backwards and forwards, every change in
vocal pitch, every facial expression, every joke, the length of every pause, every outfit, every
hairdo, every camera angle, etc. For many years this movie has been a
comfort to me, a cozy blankie to cheer me up when I'm sad.
The problem was that I
haven't watched it in two years, since before The Acutely Shitty Thing.
This recent viewing didn't go so
well. I barely got through the Netherfield Ball before bursting into
tears.
I was a different person,
with different eyes, the last time I saw this film.
In my previous life, P&P was
a deliciously subtle comedy/drama about sex and money between landed gentry folks
in Georgian England. It was about fancy language and horse-drawn
carriages and raised eyebrows and authentic period costumes.
Now when I watch it, it's
about how I'm too old to have a family.
Now it's about how I was once
young and beautiful and stupid as fuck, and now I'm old and smart and
bitter and wrinkled and pretty much out of eggs. It's about how men
of all ages universally prefer women in their late teens/early 20s,
and how I wouldn't have wished my hot mess of a 20-year-old self on
anyone. When I was
young and trusting and giggly and naive, I didn't have the education
or social skills to attract a quality man, and now that I have the
education and social skills, I'm too repulsed and resentful from dealing with so many bad men to even be
interested in finding any good ones. Asking me to fall in love again would be like asking me
to play with stuffed animals—something I haven't done since I was a
kid and would require a level of imagination and suspension of
disbelief that my brain is no longer capable of producing.
Now it's about the privilege,
guidance, connections, upbringing, rank, wealth, and social acceptance I've
never had and never will have. It's about all the things that once seemed
so close but in reality were hilariously out of reach. It's about how, for most
of my life, I believed that with enough preening and etiquette
practice and education and accomplishments and determination, I could work my way into
the middle and upper classes and seamlessly blend in there...and then
finding out via the corporate world that I'll never fit into those
circles without a) LOTS of plastic surgery and b) becoming an insufferable snob.
Now it's about the multitude
of opportunities I've squandered, about any one
of the respectable careers I could have had if I'd just picked one
thing and stuck with it, and about knowing how to plan a career and
make a living to begin with. It's about the heavy
chains of class and floating between the bottom two classes after
rejecting the rescue ladder when it was offered because it
looked like a ladder to Hell.
Jeez, what a horrible movie! Springing all those dirty feels on me at once.
You know, when I was
young, I took the concept of “the future” for granted—the years gaped before me and there was seemingly an endless amount of time to
have all the harrowing adventures and intellectually challenged
lovers I wanted.
This movie made me realize
that, biologically and chronologically, that chunk of time called “my future” is over.
I don't have “my whole life ahead of me.” The most important parts are already
behind me, and now it's just cleanup and damage
control—trying to plug the leaks while the ship is already half
sunk, or patching the roof while it's raining.
I'm like that grasshopper
in Aesop's Fables that didn't prepare for winter. Unlike the ant, I didn't prepare
well, I didn't lay any foundations for success, and now there is no
success.
Imagine that.
 |
| Especially if you were born a prince, your childhood tutor was Aristotle, and your stepmother was Cleopatra. |
Sometimes I think, “Well,
I did the best I knew how with the crappy life skills I was given.”
Ehh, not a whole lot of
consolation there.
I often wonder what
overachievers think of their younger selves when pondering their lives. While we losers might
say, “God, I was so fucking dumb back then. If only I'd done x,
y, and z. How could I have been so stupid,” do
overachievers say, “Wow, look at all these beautifully strategic
decisions I made that worked out nice and neat just like I designed from the beginning. I
handled everything with the utmost maturity and all my calculated risks came up roses every time”?
Example: the Duchess of
Cambridge, whom Americans still call “Kate Middleton” seven years
after her name was changed upon marriage. My main fascination with
her, and similarly with Grace Kelly and Jackie O, is how orderly
their lives were/are. They never impulsively dyed their hair blue or pierced
their noses, never rebelled, never ran away
from home to be a pole dancer in Hawaii, never made a drunk rant at a wedding, never had an ex
release their sex tape, never said anything controversial that
destroyed their careers, never fell for any scams, never eloped or
got divorced, never made any tacky, tasteless, or truly bad decisions
in their lives. No lapses in judgment or integrity, even if their
families were feuding. Every moment of their lives seemed appropriate
and tasteful and carefully planned, from birth until death, like a
storybook arc.
How does a fallible human
even do that???
You know what I hate are
those “no regrets” people. They say shit like, “All the
mistakes and hard times made me who I am today. I learned so much
from all the bad times that I would chose every one of them all over
again!”
Fucking
sociopaths.
Whenever I look for life advice
on the Internet, the top Google results are usually the same people
regurgitating the same BS phrases over and over (like “no regrets”
and “do what you love”) without questioning the validity. It also
seems like most people who write “advice” online are following a
formula to “make money online working from home!” i.e., “Write
a generic blog full of useless filler text posing as 'advice,' pepper it with
ads, and earn passive income from each click!”
So I try to stick to a) asking real people I know
personally, and/or b) reading books published by legit publishing companies and
written by real counselors with credentials from accredited schools.
But sometimes it's 3am and I'm lonely and something's bothering me
and there I am reading fluff content by some 24-year-old “digital
nomad” who puts fucking butter in his coffee.
Either that or I'm deep in
some other abyss on YouTube.
Anyway.
Finishing my
formerly-beloved 6-hour Pride and Prejudice movie was painful,
but I did it, because one of my goals for the year is to stick with
things and finish them, and be persistent and patient even through
obstacles and discomfort.
That movie used to be my
comfort food, and now it makes
me queasy.
I guess that's how grief
is. Things I used to enjoy now make my heart crack open in despair.
Things I used to cherish now haunt me. Just when I think I'm over it
and I'm at peace with my decision, a coworker asks if I have
kids and when I say no they ask “why not?” Or my mom goes
off on yet another diatribe about how abortion is murder because that's what
she heard at church and she's the type who parrots what she
hears and she's elderly and forgetful and I don't think she remembers
that I was the one who wanted to keep the baby and the father did
not.
In short, there was my innocent
carefree life before the abortion: I could wear lacy lingerie
for whatever unworthy schmuck I was seeing and pose for sexy pictures
and think it was all in silly cheesecake fun. I didn't have much baggage to
hide. I could date, dance with, and tease men and not be
filled with visceral, red-eyed hate.
And here is my life now,
after the abortion: I have a lot of baggage to guard, backstory to defend, a
lot to remember, a lot I wish I could forget. The idea of a romantic relationship makes my blood boil in disgust. Smiling is an automated muscle contraction my
face does when a camera is pointed my way. My laughter is dark, smirking, sardonic, or polite conversational
noise--vocal chord memory like singing a scale. Ha ha ha.
Squint your eyes so it looks real.
Raise your pitch at the end so it sounds real.
Pride and Prejudice
was about things I can't do anymore, like watch romantic movies
without remembering that I poisoned and buried my own baby so that
some high school dropout down in Florida would stop harassing me.
Maybe it's time for some
new films.