Sometimes when I’m home alone and doing homework I put on a movie or tv in the background. It’s too quiet otherwise and makes me feel lonely.
Tonight I watched “Diary of a teenage girl”, by far one of the most messed up, thought provoking films I’ve ever seen. It’s about a 15 year old girl in the 70s that seduces her mother’s boyfriend and goes on this sort of bender as she struggles to figure herself out. She is rough and angry and is desperate for love.
The movie ends with her saying, “so maybe no one loves me. Maybe no one will ever love. But maybe it’s not about being loved.” And dang, that GOT me.
It’s 10:46 pm and I’m 20 years old and it’s a Saturday night and I’m home on my couch reading about the EPA for my public policy class and eating spaghetti because it took me forever to cook dinner because I hate cooking. And I’m thinking about this thirst for love this young girl has. And maybe hers leads her down a really dark path but it’s not always like that. And maybe like her, we don’t even need it at all. Weirdly enough, there’s a Fall Out Boy lyric that comes to mind: “you are what you love, not who loves you.”
Maybe we are the things we love. We’re poetry and art and music and the sound on the roof when it rains and banana bread and running and the smell of fresh laundry. Is that enough? Is that okay?
I don’t know what I’m really trying to say here. But if you’re reading this and you want someone to understand you and love you and ache for you, maybe it’s not about that. Maybe it’s about that book you read when you were 11 that you never got out of your head or the sound of an orchestra tuning their instruments, maybe it’s the feeling of a good day’s work. It’s enough to understand yourself, it’s enough to love yourself.
Diary of a mad brown girl 