No Captain | Lane 8
I don’t want to hear if you are different
I don’t want to hear how we’re the same
When you gonna show me how you love me
That’s the way to make me stay
The night we arrived in Ubud, I got the stomach flu. It sucked to be sick in paradise. But if you’re going to be sick anywhere outside of home, Bali ain’t bad.
While Jen and Miranda explored, I stayed in bed watching season four of You’re The Worst in and out of consciousness. I’ve always loved this awesomely weird show and their awesomely awful characters - especially Gretchen. Her ability to balance states of “most fun person ever” to “thiiis close to being unemployed, homeless, or, arrested” always made me laugh and feel like I had a fictional sister the messiness that is my life.
This season, however, there we some slightly more serious moments. The episode where she goes home and reconnects with her childhood friend who reveals another side of who she was felt uncomfortably familiar as I watched it and is still lingering with me. And towards the end of the season there was another sentiment that felt uncomfortably familiar - Gretchen screaming about the fact that no one fights for her.
I know this isn’t some revolutionary or unique concept but it’s one that struck a cord because it’s something that I’ve been thinking about a lot lately. I think a lot of people want to know that they’re worth fighting for. But when people haven’t in the past, it sometimes made me question if I’m worth anything at all.
The other week a friend of mine and I were talking about this and she told me something that surprised me. She shared that she had no doubt that her fiancé loves her and wants her as his for the long haul. But if she thought back to those moments when things were rough, if she had walked away, she didn’t think he would have run after her. She didn’t think he wouldn’t have fought to change her mind and make her stay, but instead would have accepted her decision and gone through his own shit.
That is still sitting with me. Especially after watching this season of You’re the Worst and listening to this song. I don’t know where the idea of the grand gesture came from (oh wait, Disney and every rom-com made ever) but I’m questioning it more and more.
I’m questioning the expectation that someone else has to make some grand gesture, or some grand display, to prove something…or more truthfully, validate something for me. Because I’m questioning the idea of the grand gesture at all. Because as beautiful, or meaningless, gestures can be, taking a relationship and distilling it down to one moment, one action, and having that define its worth, feels at odds with how I live every other part of my life.
