You don't get to call me a ho

Can you like, for one second, stop pretending your life is a TV show?

-          A boy

I studied in an all-girls school, an all-girls college and now am, quite literally, working in an all girls workplace (damn you entertainment journalism). What I mean to say is that I do not understand the minds of men. At 24, I still adopt my black rapper alter ego when meeting a new male so they think “I am one of the dudes” (What do you mean, all men don’t say ‘yo shizzle my drizzle’?). I’m not one of the dudes. I’m a girl. A girl’s girl. A not so much, but totally girly girl. And so when a boy tells me to, “stop pretending my life’s a TV show”, my literal reaction is, “Yo (insert N-word), don’t be suppressing a ho’s dreams!”  

I have always lived my life like I was in a TV show. For eg: In a fit of depression yesterday, I spent the whole day listening to Anne Hathaway’s moving 2-minute rendition of “I dreamed a dream” on youtube – you know like background music to my misery. Sometimes, I wake and open the day with a monologue in my head like Meredith would in Grey’s Anatomy – using entertainment metaphors instead of medical. It’s what girls do. 

There is no group of girlfriends in existence who haven’t had “Which one of the Sex And The City girls are you?” discussion yet (I am Charlotte, if you really wanted to know). The minute you mention a TV show, one of the girls HAS to pipe up, “I am so Christina Yang. You’re totally like Calli.” It’s what we do, search for ourselves in TV shows and then try to follow their life patterns. I spent all my college years using Grey’s Anatomy as my relationship handbook. And now 30 Rock is supposed to help me guide me through my 20s. I, for one, love Tine Fey’s fucked up Liz Lemon. I want to BE her – which is basically me – except under better lighting and with better makeup.  

Why do we do it? I don’t know. Because we overthink? Men think about sex every seven seconds (Is it sexist, even if science says so?) –but we can’t do that... so that opens up a lot of clear spaces in our minds. We just do it to keep the voices from taking over. We do it because we need a prototype – a prettier, more hardcore version of us that we can aspire towards becoming. The women on screen live out our lives for us in fast forward – we watch them and learn from their mistakes, revel in their success (she can get a cute boy? – then so can I. She can get her life back on track? – So will I. She does Power Yoga every morning? – So will....fuck this, it’s just fiction) and when they are sad – we feel like their compatriots.

I remember a conversation with a female friend where she told me, “I need to keep thinking of my life as The Truman Show. There HAS to be someone on the other end watching otherwise... what’s the point?” She then sank into a puddle of depression right before me.

The possibility of no one watching was scarring.

We bitches be crazy y’all