Hey Hey Hey Hey. Mmmmmooohh. Whoa.

Is suffering in silence the new gaslighting? This GenX-er (two thumbs pointing inward) wonders about it!

Been thinking deeply about how GenX deals with uncertainty or emotional fear or pain in middle age.

Well, obviously, as a GenX poster child, I watched the documentary BRATS that Andrew McCarthy did as an extension of his memoir, which I enjoyed reading last year. And I have absorbed a couple of other incidents that has me questioning when and where and how we are allowed to express our full range of humanity, including its weaknesses in a society that increasingly believes only SOME people deserve care 🇺🇸

I read a lot of celeb memoir! IT’S FUN!

First off, I had fun watching BRATS. Well, I thought I did, until I was taught I was wrong by random posters on “socials.” I was excited for it to get released, so I immediately watched it before any discourse flourished about it online. It reminded me of the time I saw La La Land with one of my bffs Samantha. We went to see it the very week it opened at a weekday matinee in the Cineramadome at the now shuttered Arclight Theatre (the greatest movie theatre relationship of my adult life.) Watching that movie in Los Angeles, as an underemployed actress, who loves living in Los Angeles with one of my besties from drama school was so charming and satisfying (the chills I got in that opening freeway number, WHILE SITTING MERE MINUTES FROM THAT FREEWAY!) Then the hate came. And I had to keep my joy to myself, unless I felt open to having it (aka having ME) criticized for enjoying a piece of culture. So, last Friday I texted a thread of friends, where we share what we are watching all the time, the very simple, “I liked BRATS!”

It didn’t even occur to me the backlash about it would be so negative. Did I think it was perfect (no, is anything?) did I think it had awkward moments (yes! I found the inclusion of the inelegant conversations part of what I found compelling about it!) did I think it was supposed to be anything other than this examination of one’s crazy young adulthood grappling with fame and its mild dark side (compared to, say, being institutionalized or signed into a conservatorship or all the other documentaries about that stuff we feel we are owed?) No. I did not. But what I wasn’t prepared for was people saying the documentary was “whiny.” Sure, I smiled wryly a little at his own perplexity of why he felt so hurt by the media not taking them as seriously as they felt they were at that time (I am an actor myself that longs for the kind of jobs that presented to this group of performers and opened doors for them in Hollywood, but I have also been at it for a long time now and have seen the utter randomness of how careers can bloom over timing, proximity, luck and accident, so I try to manage the “myths” of meritocracy to get out of my head and keep moving forward.) I like when people are vulnerable, flawed, messy, mysterious, perplexing and I couldn’t figure out what felt so offputting about his particular journey with that part of his life to a large swath of commenters. It was his life. He reacted to it how he reacted to it. He found it worthy of a documentary because it was a shared pop cultural phenomenon among a certain generation. I enjoyed it, texted friends and moved on, then proceeded to sit back and try to uncover the mystery of why I felt rankled by the hate dump online over it.

Me in the in 1980s in South Carolina with my mom. Wanted to be Molly Ringwald but was pretty much an Ally Sheedy! Maybe I was a Sheedwald?

Here’s where I kind of landed with my feelings: