You know what weird thing I keep thinking about? The Cathy comic strip from the 90s. I don’t even necessarily remember reading the comic section of the newspaper when I was little (that was Laura’s section), but I guess that one made an impression on me?
I googled it yesterday and found this great profile of Cathy Guisewite, Cathy’s creator, that looks at the paradoxical feminism and “mostly middle class, mostly white femininity” depicted in the cartoon. The melodramatic but honest questions that seem to plague 30-something-women who are trying to figure out how to have a whole life – “Will I ever get married? Have children? Feel good in a swimsuit?... A tangled web of mindfuckery all packed into a few inches of squiggly line drawing: food issues…control issues, self-love and self-punishment, the desire to please authority, the gumption to rebel.”
Cathy the person talks about how she was 26 and working at an advertising agency in Detroit when the first Cathy strip ran, and how scared she was that her colleagues would see her most vulnerable moments displayed in the cartoon and think that she was weak. She says it represents years of transitional feminism when women were “sandwiched into an impossible generation.”
And I guess I’m wondering if we’re in another period of transitional feminism, or if the pressures and plights that privileged white American women think are unique to their generation are perhaps a bit more commonplace?
I’m just to the end of Season 4 of Sex and the City in my re-watch, and it’s so different to experience the show this time through the lens of someone older than most of the characters. There’s so much I can identify with now that I couldn’t before – the compromise and trade-offs. The nagging questions that seem to encapsulate your 30s. And surprisingly (to me), there are so many plot lines that capture experiences and trends that I thought were exclusive to the era of online dating. Turns out ghosting, women downplaying their (potentially threatening) accomplishments, toxic masculinity, and questions of how much compromise is too much compromise all existed in the pre-Tinder stone ages. Carrie’s landline didn’t ring in the same way my phone doesn’t buzz. Same same.
Anyway – Cathy just keeps popping into my head – because I see these little windows into my life and I think they must look like what I remember in those comic strips… sitting in a bathtub with my hair on fire eating a cookie and screaming “AACK!”
Things are just dark. Literally, figuratively, metaphorically, astrologically. It seems like every conversation I have with people right now is just each of us saying “This isn’t forever, we can do this” back and forth trying to convince each other until it feels true.
And so I’m saying this to all of us right now because I need to hear it: This isn’t forever. We can do this.
The vaccine is SO close. People we know are going to get vaccinated this month. This morning Fed-Ex and UPS started shipping doses in the US. The Santa sleigh/Christmas morning comparisons write themselves. On Pfizer and Moderna and Astrazeneca.
We’re like Jon Snow in the Battle of the Bastards. Suffocation seems imminent, but Sansa and Littlefinger and the Knights of the Vale are just around the corner.
Halle-fucking-lujah.
But even though Les Mis (and basically all of human history) promises us that the darkest night will end and the sun will rise – for now… we wait. We’re in the pregnant, paradoxical pause of Advent ,the darkest days in the northern hemisphere when we make room for the Light that is always coming.
We offer the little oil left in our lamps to one another, trusting that it will be enough. We hold onto faith, and each other, and Taylor Swift.
The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.
xoxo,
Alison
“The Weighing” ~ Jane Hirshfield
The heart’s reasons
seen clearly,
even the hardest
will carry
its whip-marks and sadness
and must be forgiven.
As the drought-starved
eland forgives
the drought-starved lion
who finally takes her,
enters willingly then
the life she cannot refuse,
and is lion, is fed,
and does not remember the other.
So few grains of happiness
measured against all the dark
and still the scales balance.
The world asks of us
only the strength we have and we give it.
Then it asks more, and we give it.
Things that made me laugh
(h/t Taryn & Jade):