Ladies, gays, and theys:
Grab your glasses of wine, cosmos, or cups of tea––we don’t discriminate in this house. Strap in. We’re here to break down a doozie.
Sometimes we all wanna be the main character, but in this category… yikes!
Oh, Miss Caroline Marie Bradshaw. A fashion icon. A writer. A friend (debatable). And honestly, a simp. But honestly, we’ve all been there before, some deeper than others, but that’s neither here nor there.
If you’re anywhere near social media, watch streaming services like Netflix or MAX, or if you’ve simply caught wind of what’s been trending lately, you would know that there was a recent re-watch phenomenon of Sex And The City. You simply couldn’t escape from the Sex And The City conversation. Everyone and their mothers were talking about the SATC women and the drama that followed them. It’s a fantastic series, ahead of its time, sometimes a product of it too, but all in all a great watch for a girls night or one-on-one time.
It’s all fun and games until you’re screaming through the TV screen, because Big called Carrie for lunch––another one of his methods to string her along––just to tell her he’s getting married????
Don’t say I didn’t warn ya.
From hiding in my room with the volume down as a 10-year-old so I could watch the series on the E! Network, or being a tween and seeing clips on Youtube because I was fascinated by these women’s friendship and fashion, to now stress-watching and clutching my pearls as a twenty-one-year-old woman. When it comes to serious love stories full of tragedy, angst, passion, love, and lust, these gals have it all, and you just can’t help but empathize and sponge up the feelings and melodrama with them.
As many rewatches of SATC I have under my belt, I would like to say that my absolute favorite scene is in Season 2 Episode 18 where the girls have an absolutely divisive but relevant conversation, that in subtext touches on these rejection wounds that women carrie-d essentially.
In this episode, Carrie was invited to Mr. Big’s engagement dinner, which is A1 level category of emotional terrorism in media, if you ask me, but she decides not to go––arguably one of the best choices she made in the show––instead, she has endless cocktails with her girlfriends. Their conversation circles around the Curly Girl complex, ah The Way We Were, and how life is supposedly divided by the simple girls and the k-k-k-katie girls, which is an outdated thought (to a certain extent).
Carrie goes on a spiral to rationalize her situation and I stopped to think:
How many of us question ourselves to the point of exhaustion and hysteria? “Why not me?” “Was I enough?” “Was I too ‘this’ or ‘that’?” scrutinizing every single detail of these situations, instead of letting go of our own personal hells. Your very own Mr. (or Mrs.) Big. The one that got away. The one that we fought tooth and nail to get them to see us. To believe in the potential of a “we.”
Really itching for that cosmo right about now.
I question: What must these beautiful, smart, intellectual and talented people want to prove so badly to avoidants like John James Preston? The hot shot that could never be tied down. Must we truly strip ourselves and our dignity just to feel that we deserve love? These wounds that eternally open in cycles of late night calls, mid-day lunches, docile assailants of our minds twisting and turning our insecurities against us, preventing us from seeing what’s right in front of us? To a point so bad that we have to put the blame on ourselves and let the hurt back in because it’s what we know?
This event is so common that I guarantee if you ask your friends, at least one of them will have this type of situation on their hands, if not you, the reader.
I’m fascinated and heartbroken because, unlike Katie, many like Carrie say too many goodbyes, but not necessarily for good. Too many let the elevator doors close, but don’t move floors.
Let those Hubbles and Bigs rot.