Big is moving to Paris
and now that I have your attention, some thoughts on aloneness...
It has never been easy for me to be “alone with myself.” Even that specific phrase triggers in me intense feelings of inadequacy and resentment. Being alone with oneself. That thing that everyone else can seemingly do and is always judging me for not being able to do. That thing I can never really improve at because deep down I haven’t really accepted that it’s something I should have to learn.
People have been telling me for my entire life, in various ways and contexts, that I am too reliant on other people, too eager to look outside of myself, too much. When I was in third grade, a friend of mine told me to “get a life” because I was constantly calling her house after school while she was out doing sports and playing outside with her brothers and attending activities like Girl Scouts and horseback riding. How much of an emotional vampire do you need to be for an eight-year-old to point it out? On and on and on through the mass humiliation ritual of adolescence, multiple too-long, too-codependent relationships, and volumes of juvenile, artless indie “literature” of the sort that gets criticized daily online for being symptomatic of the exact kind of desperate, vacuous insecurity I’m copping to right now.
One of my best and dearest friends, by the way!
None of this is to say I’m truly vacuous. There’s this way people talk about extroverted or externally-oriented people, especially online, that implies we have nothing going on upstairs, no inner life to speak of. Some of this, of course, is an artifact of the hegemonic influence of the Downtrodden Nerd over early internet culture. You get enough people with social anxiety and solitary hobbies together and they start talking about people who enjoy bars and parties and the basic company of other human beings like they’re barely ensouled. But nonetheless, there is a prevailing attitude that if you were truly an interesting, thoughtful, introspective, etc. person, you would see less value in sharing any of that or seeing it mirrored in others.
But what about when you do have a rich inner life and just find exceptional fulfillment in sharing it? What if there was another kind of Downtrodden Nerd who is downtrodden precisely because their attempts to connect with other human beings keep failing miserably in ways they don’t understand and feel powerless to prevent? What does it mean if the bigger the world inside of you becomes, the more alone you feel?
I am legally required to acknowledge here the importance of cultivating “inner resources.”1 But it is undeniable that there are certain resources that you just cannot drum up on your own, that there are things of value to us that we can only obtain from other human beings, that many of these things are even necessary for us to achieve real fulfillment in our lives. So, given all of this, and after we have sufficiently performed being self-contained so that other people do not tell us to “get a life” or think of us as vacuous emotional vampires, is it finally okay, then, to rely, to seek out others, to admit that we don’t want to be alone? What’s the harm? What do we really lose?
I couldn’t help but wonder…
There has been a lot of discourse2 lately on Carrie Bradshaw from Sex and the City, nearly all of which paints her as a kind of Avatar of Neediness3, a woman whose desperation to be loved sabotages every single one of her relationships. She is largely regarded as cringey, humiliating, and an unlikeable “pick-me” with no idea that the man she spends most of the show desperately chasing after is not really that into her. The image below, from the same episode in which she later finds out that “Big is moving to Paris,”4 has become a shorthand for the vulnerability-cum-self-debasement5 involved in trying to form a relationship with another human being.
I don’t think Carrie behaves perfectly in SATC, or is even a “good person,” but I do think she is a good television character.6 Her “desperation” to be loved, her preoccupation with relationships and men, and her reckless self-sabotage are true to life, and you can tell because of how desperate SATC viewers are to distance themselves from Carrie and her behaviors. Women assert that they relate most to Miranda or Samantha7 for the same reasons they sneer at each other for being “male-centered” for the same reasons they bemoan having to do “emotional labor” for friends struggling in relationships:
If you are a certain kind of person, it is unbearable to conceive of yourself as needing others at all, let alone needing sexual and romantic partnership, and to accept that vulnerability is the price of admission. The terms are simply unacceptable. You can be hurt, you can hurt others, you can be temporarily broken. You can be challenged. You can, even if only for a moment—and one which should be legible to those who love you as a reasonable lapse in composure—appear “out of control,” which, if you are a certain kind of person, undermines the project of your entire life. If you are this type of person, it is easier to observe others pursuing those dangerous, unacceptable needs, and judge the ugly and unbecoming humanity that transpires as a result.
I personally believe that any life worth living will have you standing in a doorway in a top hat with a whip in your mouth at least once.8 Nonetheless, we need places outside of us to put those needs and judgments so that we don’t have to identify with them. Carrie Bradshaw is one. The friend you talk shit about for being hung up on her shitty ex is another. And the annoying chick on Twitter who wrote the book with the naked baby on it and is way, way too happy to share her every passing thought with the world? The one who wrote this entire post as a lead-up to a different analysis of SATC that she didn’t even end up writing?
Well, who’s to say?
Another one of those phrases, like “alone with oneself,” that makes me feel ill. I’m sure that’s fine and everyone feels that way and there is no need to let me know otherwise.
A word which here (and nearly everywhere these days) means “tweets.”
Specifically female neediness, which is regarded differently from male neediness, but fuck, who has the time?
A meme-phrase which, much like, “Luke, I am your father” from Star Wars, is never actually explicitly uttered in the episode.
These are a few of my favorite things…
I am the only person who had more than 10,000 followers on Tumblr in 2014 who is capable of holding an opinion like this.
Every single one of these people is a Carrie, by the way. I have met one person in my entire life who could reasonably claim to be a Samantha, and she was still arguably more of a Carrie.
Figuratively. Usually.
Something lovely about Carrie is that she is kind of beyond shame. To be cringe is to be free.