Maybe Basic is What Bonds Us
I promise I’m trying to be serious
Last fall I was sitting in an IMAX theater when my good friend slipped me an edible in the middle of the Taylor Swift: Eras Tour film. An experience to say the least.
I am certainly no Swifitie. But I am a great friend and I love the movies and I love movie popcorn. I agreed to attend knowing I’d only be able to sing along to approximately three songs including the smash hit of my adolescence, “Our Song.” Taylor Swift’s music has always felt too literal to me. I joke to friends that she makes songs for girls to cry to after being ghosted by mediocre men. Nose in the air, I love to offer criticism when asked about this pop supernova with billion dollar commercial success. But in a near empty Chicago theater on a beautiful fall day, I found my skin prickling with goosebumps when she sang “Champagne Problems” to the glittering sold out crowd at So-Fi stadium. And by the end, I was gleefully belting out the lyrics to ‘Style’ while my friend and I watched a little girl in the rows below be twirled around in a tulle dress by her father. Big smile on my face, it clicked for me.
I was the most insufferable girl in high school. In 2013, I discovered Tumblr dot com. And with that, I built my personality on music. On fashion. On trends. On the praise of my AP English teacher. I was desperate to not only be cool, but to be the one to define it. I suppose growing up in rural Ohio, I had an insatiable appetite for identity. In a town of four stop lights, three pizza shops, and of course, weaponized Christianity, I was starved to something else. Anything else. I lived in a place that felt like the butt of an enormous joke. I desperately wanted to push and shove my way to the outside so I could turn and look inward to laugh and feel in on it. Well beyond high school, I spent years carefully curating and cultivating my identity around taste. I pissed on anything mainstream. I could never own a pair of UGGs. I wouldn’t be caught dead posting my Starbucks latte anywhere on the internet. And after I moved away, on occasion, it would give me a prang of joy to scroll Facebook and see the girls who gossiped about me in high school announce their engagement to a balding twenty-something-going-on-thirty-something man. Alone at the dinner table, I’d laugh at their happy meal-eque rings and their tacky french manicures before swiping over to Instagram to check if the mediocre man who’d ghosted me had checked my story yet.
Literally a screenshot I took just now of my Pinterest home page
The word ‘basic’ has almost become a slur used against young women to dehumanize them. To make their life choices feel invalid. We live and we love and we laugh about it drinking wine out of our glasses covered in script writing. Something like “But first, wine” If it’s Halloween, maybe the glass says, ‘Pass the boo’s.’ What I failed to understand growing up in that corny small town was that my life choices up to that point had already been made for me. I was trying to write my own narrative with incredibly limited resources. And as much as it pains me to think about the lengths I would go to in order to feel individualistic, I have to remember I was just a kid with infinite access to a brand new social media landscape rife with comparison. Of course I listened to Lana del Rey and tried to smoke cigarettes driving home in my beat up Mitsubishi from my job at the mall. I was probably one of hundreds of thousands of girls all experiencing the same thing. I think, then, it would’ve saddened me to know my experience was not unique. I was not unique. But now, older, just a tad wiser, I think these experiences we have as women are what unify us. It’s what draws us to compliment each other in the bathroom after a few vodka cranberries. Or in the Aritzia dressing room.
I think women constantly strain themselves throughout their journeys in womanhood. Whether it’s for men, for our jobs, for the validation of other women, maybe our mothers, our mothers-in-law, I think many of us work tirelessly through adolescence and into adulthood to make our identities enough. We try to make our decisions in life, may it be the cities we live in, the furniture we buy, the endeavors we pursue, the people we date, feel valid to an audience we project ourselves to daily online or in our offices.
I still prickle when I read Taylor Swift headlines. I feel that the woman millions of people idolize is sometimes nothing but a product from the minds of Universal executives. But I also think she sometimes is just another girl who body checks herself in the mirror after a large meal or misplaces her hair ties all over her house. I can think both things and she can be both things. Women are more than their #OOTD or the cocktail they order. They are more than who they date or the music they listen to. And all in all, I promise, it’s okay to be just like other girls.
Greta Gerwig may have already touched on this a little bit.
