Author: Benjamin Rosenstock

For my final blog post of the year, I wasn’t sure what to write about. Girls aired an amazing two-part finale to a great fifth season last night, so I could write about that, a sort of check-in since my last post about it. I could write about the finales of Better Call Saul or Shameless, or the second Story Slam I went to, or any other arts-related thing I’ve been to on campus.

But I most want to write about goodbyes, and friendship, and closure, and the high school I went to that’s closing in 2019.

A lot of my friends and former teachers have posted things about what Harrison High School meant to them and why they’re so sad about it, and at first, it seemed a little odd to me. Justified, maybe, but there are three more years before the school will actually close—it seems weird to be reading things like “I’ll miss you, Harrison,” like it’s already all over. There are a few more years! We’ll still be able to visit! It’s not closing tomorrow!

But, of course, one of the things that sucks about endings like this is that you have to create your own ending. Maybe there will be some day down the line, in 2019, when there’ll be a Harrison closing party, and everyone will come back to Farmington and catch up and reminisce and be sad together. But we can’t wait for three years to start the grieving process. Everything is set in stone now.

It’s easy to argue for why Harrison shouldn’t be closed, or to name the specific qualities that make it great. Aside from the football team and the IB program, there’s a diversity at Harrison that just doesn’t exist at other schools in the area. Really, though, I’m not one of the most qualified people to argue for why Harrison—the building, the school—is objectively a great school. All I can tell you is what my very subjective, personal perspective is, having been a student there at four years.

High school is kind of where I became a person—at least, the person I am now. Sometime around 2012, I kind of hit on something and started liking myself more than I was used to. Before that, I’d considered myself a pessimist. Seeing the world as full of douchebags and evil people somehow seemed hip and fun to me, and being a consistent user of sarcasm, I thought I was supposed to self-identify as a pessimist. Then I kind of realized being happy and being sarcastic weren’t mutually exclusive, and I started looking at everything more positively, and I stopped worrying about at least a handful of my insecurities, and I started accepting sometimes that what would happen would happen, and I went into my senior year at my peak.

I still sometimes think of my senior year of high school as my peak, even after three pretty good years of college. There was just something so beautiful about senior year, about facing the gaping hole of the future and not knowing exactly what it would be like but being excited for it. There was something so bittersweet, so oddly beautiful in its somberness, about hanging out with my friends and having fun but knowing that it was almost over. I had more friends than I ever had, and I was more confident than ever. I genuinely liked spending time with myself.

Remembering my senior year of high school reminds me that as much as college has helped me become a smarter, more open-minded person, it’s not where my personality was formed. College may have given me new experiences and pushed me out of my comfort zone, and I’m really happy with how it’s gone, but high school is where I had the most years of actual change.

And it’s hard to think of a life before high school. There were 14 years of my life before, and I have a ton of memories from then, but somehow I’m unable to conceive of myself as a real person with real experiences before then. Facing the void at the end of 12^th grade wasn’t terrifying just because of college; it was terrifying because it felt like I was leaving my own life entirely.

So when I think about Harrison closing, that’s what I’m most sad about. The place where I became a person who I actually liked is not going to exist. And no matter how happy I am now, no matter how grateful I am that I got to experience Harrison while it was still there, the fact that it’s closing kind of sucks.

***

There’s a curious thing that happens when some sort of end is approaching: everything leading up to the end seems to happen specifically to provide you with a sense of closure. Conceiving of an ending as a sort of real-life TV season finale has been written about ad nauseam, by myself, by my fabulous friend Chloe Gilke, and by anyone who consumes much too pop culture. It’s a classic case of life seeming to imitate art.

I’m at the end of my junior year of college, which makes next year my last year. That’s really terrifying, and I kind of hate talking or thinking about it for a variety of reasons. For one, I still kind of feel like I’m 17 years old, completely dependent on adults who know more than me and unable to live on my own or do my taxes or think seriously about a career. Another weirdly big thing: I’ve made a bunch of new friends at The Michigan Daily who are all freshmen and sophomores, so it’s deeply sad to me that they’ll have at least one or two more years there without me. It’s like I’m facing a two-year case of FOMO between the time when I’m done at the Daily and the time when most of my friends are.

But, for now, the end of the school year isn’t a culmination of my whole college experience; it’s more just a culmination of the year I’m finishing. And several of my interactions with people have already seemed perfectly fitting with a season finale-esque ending. There’s been one big, cathartic drunken sharing of previously unspoken feelings. One pleasant agreement that a friend and I wanted to rekindle our dormant friendship next year. One final fiction reading my friend gave, which showed me how far she’d come since we first met in our creative writing class two years ago, and which somehow seemed a fitting last time to see her before she moves to Chicago.

Today I hung out with a bunch of Daily friends and luxuriated in the warm temperatures. At around 7:00, it was perfect out; the sun was beginning to set as a casual concert happened on the diag. It was my friend Melina’s last night in Ann Arbor until the fall, but my friend Karen is graduating and leaving in a week, so Melina and Karen had an emotional goodbye.

I got into a conversation with Karen about how, for all we knew, once all of us eventually left school, many of us would never see each other again in our lives. Sure, we’d all love to see each other again down the road, but many of us aren’t from Michigan to begin with, so we wouldn’t have much motivation to fly back. And life and jobs and relationships all get in the way of casual reunions.

I’m personally not that concerned about it because being mostly English, film, and communications majors, my friends at the Daily are mostly heading into similar fields. I know we’ll end up running into one another at weird times in the future, and maybe contacting each other to network and get new job opportunities. Many of us will probably end up in New York City or Los Angeles.

I talked to my friend Julie about all this, and she brought up high school. She said something that I’ve heard from a lot of my friends: leaving high school made them realize how little they really cared about keeping most high school friends in their lives.

I can understand that. I’ve experienced it a little. I think back to some of my friends I considered great friends in high school and feel no serious need to reconnect with them now. I mean, like, it’d be nice if I ran into them, but I only really think about many of them once in a while, if I’m in a particularly nostalgic mood. Most of the time, I’m focused on the people who are still in my life.

But the real reason I’m comfortable with where I am right now with most of my high school friends isn’t that I don’t really miss them. I do miss them! Even the ones I don’t actively think about I wish I could see again. Sometimes I fantasize about high school reunions when we’ll all reunite and reminisce.

It’s amazing to think about the fact that when college first started, I had a schedule to contact high school friends, some sort of systematic way of keeping up with them. I assigned people to different groups based on how often I ‘had to’ talk to them. Of course, it inevitably failed, and I don’t know how I thought it could actually succeed. But my happy surprise is that it’s unnecessary to talk to someone every single day or every week or every month or even every year to still feel love and closeness with them. It can wait.

When I hung out with my high school friend Allison last winter break, I wasn’t sure when I’d see her next. When she dropped me back off at home, I could’ve said, “Okay, I’ll see you over spring break, maybe?” or “Are you ever planning on visiting Ann Arbor?” or “Maybe I’ll see you in the summer, if our schedules overlap.” But I didn’t say any of those things, because I understood that none of that was necessary. I just said, “I’ll see you when I see you.”

So yeah, I’ll miss Harrison High School. Yeah, I’ll miss Karen when she leaves, and my creative writing friend Holly, and Chloe. And a year from now, when I graduate from college, when I do say goodbye to all of these great people in my life, it’ll inevitably be sad, because it’ll mean seeing them a lot less often than I did before.

But I also know it’s not over. It never really is.

At college, I’ve often felt the pressure to be a more cultured person. Especially as an arts editor at The Michigan Daily, it sometimes feels like everyone knows more about art than you—I feel like I have so many blind spots when it comes to movies (The Godfather, Forrest Gump), TV (Gilmore Girls, The Sopranos), and, especially, music.

To a degree, I’ve made strides to correct my blind spots, and it’s sometimes not that hard to do. I realized recently that I really didn’t know much of Kanye West’s music, and, like him or hate him, he dominates culture so much that I feel like I need to know him. So I’ve been listening to his music a lot, even if it’s in the background while I’m doing other stuff, and now that’s one blind spot that I’ve begun to correct.

But after listening to new music for hours, after going through playlist after playlist in pursuit of greater music knowledge, sometimes I need to just relax and play the music that I’m comfortable with. And that often means bands I discovered in high school or even middle school: Fall Out Boy, Simple Plan, The Story So Far, Yellowcard, All Time Low, A Day to Remember.

My Chemical Romance is one of those bands that usually gets dismissed as something you listened to when you were in your middle school goth phase. Pretty much any band classified as ‘emo’ fits that label. But you know what? I listened to the entirety of The Black Parade a couple days ago, and that shit is so good! Gerard Way’s voice is funny to imitate, but it’s so good, and the production is so good, and every hook is so infectious, and the lyrics themselves aren’t bad. The album got really good reviews when it was first released, being praised as “one of the most cohesive, engaging rock records of 2006,” “one of the best rock albums of the last decade,” and “a piece of work that will challenge every preconception you ever had about the people who made it.”

So why do people tend to laugh a little when that band is mentioned? Why do I feel a little reluctant to wear a My Chemical Romance t-shirt to a party that isn’t themed?

We all think of our tastes in music as evolving. We tend to think that whatever music we’re listening to now is the best music we have ever listened to, that whatever we listened to as kids was automatically worse because we objectively didn’t have as much musical knowledge. And so when we are reminded of those songs we used to like, we don’t get to enjoy them sincerely; we enjoy them ironically. We can dance to them and sing along, but we have to laugh a little and remind everyone around us that we know this isn’t good music; it’s just nostalgia working its magic. Apparently none of the music from our childhoods can be enjoyed on its own terms anymore.

Okay, let’s be fair: some music we used to listen to was genuinely shitty. I have no interest in returning to “Don’t Trust Me” by 3OH!3 or “Shake It” by Metro Station, though even those songs would still probably trigger a frisson of nostalgia at a party. There are some songs out there whose infectious hooks feel genuinely empty; I don’t really admire 3OH!3 for creating one catchy hit. There are some songs that are catchy despite not being especially well-crafted.

But most of the songs we loved when we were younger were great for a reason, and listening to The Black Parade, I don’t feel any embarrassment. There’s nothing ironic about how fucking good Gerard Way sounds when he sings, “My eyes are shining brrriiight” on “Famous Last Words.” There’s nothing ironic about the irresistible urge I have to tap my feet whenever the chorus of “Dead!” kicks in, nothing ironic about the heartfelt mourning of “Cancer” or the iconic piano opening of “Welcome to the Black Parade.” Great art resists irony.

In a way, I’ve already written this same article. In a post about the Disney Channel show Phil of the Future, I described the way people laugh at mentions of shows from their youth, as if those shows were enjoyable then but hold no value now. I argued that it’s worth it to check out the stuff that you used to enjoy, because there’s a good chance it’ll still hold some value. That’s partly what I’m trying to say again, but with regards to music—just because you liked something years ago doesn’t mean it’s automatically shitty.

But I’m also saying irony is a dangerous thing for art. It’s easy to dismiss your younger self, but think back to the time you first discovered those bands. Yeah, maybe “I’m just a kid and life is a nightmare” sounds laughably angsty to us now. But it held a certain appeal for a very specific generation, and it probably helped a lot of confused adolescents realize they weren’t alone.

And hey, maybe it could still help you as an adult. As adults, we’re so quick to layer everything in irony, but maybe what we could all use is a little more sincerity. And after all, if there was one thing Simple Plan and My Chemical Romance were, it was sincere.

Any college student is familiar with the word ‘procrastinate.’ I’m not going to pretend my habit of procrastinating and doing projects/essays/readings the night or even the morning before they’re due is unique to me, because I know most of my friends have this same issue. But I do get really frustrated with it, and I want to write about it.

Oddly enough, the biggest problem for me is reading. As an English major, most of my classes involve reading, and somehow that’s harder to get done than most of the assignments in my other classes. In the required natural science, foreign language, and math classes I’ve taken, I’ve had no problem getting the work done; I remember cranking out solutions to equations in high school math. There’s something steady and mechanical about getting math or science homework done, about answering defined questions until there are none left.

Reading assignments have similar end goals, so it shouldn’t be so hard. When I’m told to read the first 190 pages of Women in Love by D.H. Lawrence, it seems easy. But there are a lot of problems. I tend to underestimate how long it’ll actually take to get through the readings while actually paying attention to what’s going on and trying to understand everything (down to particular words I have to look up). And even though I’m a frequent reader, I’m not a fast reader, so that makes it even harder.

But it’s more than just the logical factors. There’s always something that causes me to think “Okay, this is what I’ll get done tonight—I have plenty of time to get it all done,” then blink 12 hours later and realize I read 15 out of the 190 pages. Or sometimes not a single page at all.

It’s like some compulsion, some sick anti-addition to reading, some sort of reader’s block. I can’t tell for sure what it is. Maybe it’s partly dependent on my enjoyment of the reading—two of the few books I actually finished for class this year were The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford and A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan, two books I really loved—but it can’t be just that. Back in high school, whenever people said “I would like this book, but the fact that we have to read it for class makes me hate reading it,” I completely disagreed; reading The Great Gatsby and Of Mice and Men in class made me like the books more, because discussing them helped me learn what made them so special. But something has somehow changed a little in college, and I frequently find myself unable to read what I’m required to.

The worst part is that it’s not just being required to read, though. I haven’t read many books outside of class, either.

At first I thought that was because I was so busy reading for class that I didn’t want to read more when I had time to relax. Again, it is partly that, but that doesn’t account for all of it. I made it a goal for the New Year to read at least one book each month outside of class, but so far, I’ve failed miserably at that resolution. Reading increasingly just has this feeling to me of something that I have to prepare myself to do, something that requires an insanely focused amount of attention that I simply lack. I’m always thinking, always preferring to either cathartically release my stress-inducing thoughts by journaling or just kick back and watch TV or a movie, something that doesn’t require even the typing of keys or the willpower to keep going, because it plays on its own.

I could fix this if I made a conscious effort to just stop watching TV and movies for a while, even a couple weeks. I mean, after all, I still consider books my favorite medium of story. They directly place you in characters’ point of views in a way that most movies and TV simply can’t. I much prefer writing in a novelistic form over writing in screenplay format. And, as large as my movie and TV to-watch lists are, my list of books to read is far longer.

Yet I don’t want to forgo TV (the main medium that takes up my time—far more than movies), because it has something that books doesn’t to the same degree: timeliness. When a new episode of “Girls” airs, I want to watch it immediately so that I can read reviews, talk with people about it online, and generally just take part in the cultural conversation. I like staying timely with TV; at the bottom of my planner, below my daily homework obligations, I have a list of episodes from the week that I plan on catching up with as time allows. There’s a sense that I have to catch up on these various shows as soon as possible, especially when we’re in this period of ‘peak TV.’ There’s less motivation with reading—especially when so many of my friends are TV and movie enthusiasts.

Still, it feels wrong to be in this sad state of reader’s block, especially as an English major. It feels like I’m violating my identity knowing that right now, at this moment in time, I’d rather watch the newest episode of “Jane the Virgin” than read any of the books I’ve wanted to read. Hopefully, once summer rolls around, I’ll have more time to consume all kinds of stories—not just the ones that take the least effort to begin.

Today’s blog post is going to be pretty modest because I’m not sure what to write about. I have ideas swirling around in my mind, and tons of things I could write about, yet I’m somehow coming up empty for one main thing I want to delve into. See, I even included a picture of an empty notepad, shamelessly picked from a cursory Google Images search, to represent this post. Oh well. I’m just going to touch on some random things I’ve been up to and thinking about.

1. Recently my high school closed down, so I’m trying to tackle a big piece about what the school meant to me. I started writing it today and I was originally actually planning to use that as my post today. But I realized how hard it was to sum up four years, especially because those years were so huge for me—they were like a whole other life. It’s strange to think about those years as only a fifth of my 20-year life. It seems more like 45%, with college being another 35% and my pre-high school years being the 20% that I don’t remember as well and can’t analyze as deeply.

2. God, journaling is great. I’m perpetually behind in journaling because I write such verbose descriptions and it takes so long, but I’ve taken some time lately to catch up a little, and it’s been so rewarding. Seeing those pages full of text is nice to begin with, and having my stories out there in writing feels cathartic, even when they’re relatively mundane stories.

Whenever I’m feeling really bad about something, whatever it is, writing it out helps. It makes my emotions feel clearer and more logical. It helps me make sense of whatever confusing mix of emotions I might be feeling, and I’ve had a lot of that lately. As unhealthy as this sounds, I think I might start focusing more on journaling even if it means spending less time studying. It’s worth it for my mental health.

3. I’ve been thinking about one of the most differences between TV/film/novels and reality: reality doesn’t have as much big confrontations. That’s not to say there isn’t conflict in real life, of course, and in the right hands, the smallest of conflicts can become enthralling in writing or onscreen. It’s more to say that in real life, there are little simmering tensions and passive-aggressions, whereas movies use big, dramatic confrontations where all the emotions come out at once. Characters are dramatically brought together with grand romantic gestures and first kisses in the rain. They’re brought apart by cataclysmic shouting matches.

And sure, maybe I’m only describing the most melodramatic, cliché devices, but still, even the best stories have to fabricate big confrontations out of necessity. It’s just how things are; no one wants to see a romance movie where two best friends have feelings for each other but literally never act on them, instead just secretly pining away for each other, being jealous of each other’s partners, and slowly accepting that they’re never going to do anything about it out of fear that it’ll ruin the friendship. (I guess you could point to the general critical success of “Drinking Buddies” to prove me wrong, and good point, although I found the ending of that movie lacking for this precise reason: there’s no catharsis, and it doesn’t act on that building up of sexual tension.)

Good stories make a promise to the audience at the beginning—“this is going to blow up eventually”—and fulfill those promises. Aside from radical stories that purposely set out to subvert expectations, stories don’t tend to be set on ‘simmer’ the entire time. There has to be change.

I was thinking about this because of various times in my life when a confrontation seemed inevitable. To improve a certain friendship, I could’ve called out a friend for something shitty they did. To move past an object of my infatuation, I could’ve told her my feelings and accepted the result, whichever way it went. But so many times in my life, I’ve eschewed those big confrontations. Sometimes it probably would’ve been healthier to have those confrontations—but movies paint them as happening so much more often than they actually do. And honestly, sometimes I’m glad I didn’t confront somebody about something. Confrontation isn’t inherently the right choice. As unpleasant as it sounds, sometimes burying your feelings and letting them shrivel away can be the right choice. Especially as you get older and it becomes necessary to be a little fake once in a while.

At this point, so many think pieces have been written about Lena Dunham and her show “Girls” that this post is completely redundant. Still, I continue to see and hear inflammatory stuff about her whenever her name comes up in conversation with my friends, and whenever I read comments about her show on the Internet. So I’ve been thinking about her a lot, and I feel like sharing.

It is so clear to me that Lena Dunham is incredibly self-aware. It was confirmed for me when I read her great book, Not that Kind of Girl, which included such self-deprecating quotes as “I would be a horrible girlfriend at this point in my life, because I’m both needy and unavailable.” Dunham is a deeply insecure person who clearly knows her worst qualities, and contrary to popular belief, she’s aware of her privilege. By creating “Girls” and creating the character of Hannah Horvath, Lena Dunham is poking fun at the flaws she knows she has.

So even though Hannah Horvath is completely lacking in perspective, Lena Dunham isn’t. Dunham’s portrayal reminds me of how Louis CK described his character on “Louie.” He said something along the lines of “Louie is me, but amplified and with worse luck.” CK is purposely portraying a version of himself, but with less professional success and less self-awareness. Dunham is the same way, playing a woman with a similar background but with professional turmoil and a severe lack of perspective.

“Girls” is, in part, an exercise in empathy, testing the audience’s patience to see how much we’ll put up with. The characters of “Girls” are almost all seriously unlikable, and that’s not because Dunham realizes how terrible the characters are. Do you really think Dunham is trying to convince us these characters are always good, funny, likable people? Do you think Dunham could really portray characters this hilariously unlikable if she was a terrible person herself?

Good people tend to be the ones that know how to depict bad people. It reminds me of a comment on the AV Club about the new Netflix series “Love,” featuring Paul Rust as the terrible fake ‘nice guy’ Gus. One commenter said something along the lines of, “People think Paul Rust is writing this show as his wish fulfillment, trying to convince people he’s a nice guy. But Rust realizes that Gus is just a ‘nice guy,’ not a genuine nice person.” Both Rust’s acting and his writing of Gus require the eye of an actor/writer who understands that the character is a unique brand of terrible.

Similarly, the cast and writers of “Girls” are able to succinctly establish the unique brands of terrible that each character inhabits. This is especially true in the show’s current fifth season. There’s one particularly brilliant, short scene in “Japan,” when Hannah Skypes with Marnie (Allison Williams), who hasn’t been seen since her wedding two episodes ago. Through one simple gesture—Marnie’s guttural, quasi-cultured pronunciation of ‘Ecuador’—Williams instantly reminds the viewer of all of Marnie’s worst qualities. It’s amazing how such a short clip can epitomize Marnie’s pretentious, self-congratulatory nature, while simultaneously doing the same for Desi (Ebon Moss-Bachrach), Marnie’s insufferable husband. Desi showers completely nude in the outdoor shower in the background, and somehow you can just tell how fucking cool he thinks he is. As Amber Dowling from Indiewire said, Marnie and Desi are “two privileged people pretending to be struggling artists,” and this scene is the perfect short, sweet scene to remind us of how hilariously awful they are.

Really, the only wholly self-aware characters on the show are Ray (Alex Karpovsky), Elijah (Andrew Rannells), and, increasingly, Shoshanna (Zosia Mamet). And even those three are fucked up in their own ways. Still, their existence shows that Dunham does have the outside perspective of the other characters’ faults. Just look at Shosh’s hilarious, unbelievably cathartic drunken monologue in “Beach House” as she, one by one, tears Hannah, Marnie, and Jessa (Jemima Kirke) to pieces. Co-written with Jenni Konner and Judd Apatow, that episode should be yet another conclusive reminder that the writers are completely conscious of these characters’ worst qualities and what makes them that way.

That’s not to say that “Girls” is flawless, or that the characters are all perfectly written. Sure, there should probably be more actors of color in the show for its diverse New York City setting (although Hannah and her friends are the types of people who probably would have mostly white friends). Jessa, despite being played by one of the most engaging performers on the show, has been a very inconsistent character, flitting between a stereotypical hippie free spirit and an incredibly cruel, borderline sadistic woman throughout the show’s entirety. Last season in particular, Jessa acted so viciously to Hannah, and there was no real reason to explain it.

This season has sought to rehab Jessa’s character a little, though. We see her actually trying to be a good person by putting Hannah’s desires above her own when she finds herself developing feelings for Hannah’s ex-boyfriend Adam (Adam Driver). This finally reached a head in the latest episode, “Old Loves,” in which Jessa finally gives up trying to be kind and pushes Hannah away so that she won’t feel as bad about sleeping with Adam. Jessa acts cruelly here, bluntly agreeing when Hannah half-jokingly suggests they stop being friends, but at least the motivations behind Jessa’s behavior make sense this time. It’s unclear if these same motivations could partially explain the way Jessa acted last season, when she was first becoming friends with Adam, but regardless, this season is thankfully allowing Jessa to grow up a little.

All the characters are growing up, step by step. Marnie is sure to finally get it through her head how awful Desi is this season, and as joyful as it is to watch their trainwreck of a marriage, you have to feel a little bad for her—she really doesn’t realize how terrible this guy is. Hannah, too, may behave inappropriately by deleting the nudes of Fran’s exes off his phone without asking him (and by confronting him in the middle of school with one of her students watching), but she’s generally sympathetic because her insecurities and issues are relatable and justified. And Shosh’s journey this season is the most pleasantly surprising—her decision to remain in Japan instead of running back to New York (à la Hannah post-Iowa) shows that the writers aren’t afraid to let their characters learn from past mistakes and actually grow into newer, happier, healthier people.

Maybe this new willingness to allow the show’s characters to progress comes as a result of the recent announcement that this will be the second to last season. Much of “Girls” has seemed a little too meandering and unfocused for my tastes, and a big part of that is the 30-minute runtime; the show’s quick pace makes it easy and fun to digest, but it’s difficult to accomplish much character development with those constraints, especially with seven main characters (the girls + Adam, Ray, and Elijah). As each of the characters move into new positions this season, though, it seems like the show is finally building towards a logical endpoint.

Bringing it back to Lena Dunham herself, there’s one more big reason the show sticks with me, one more reason why I find Hannah a relatable character, one more reason why I’m convinced Dunham knows what she’s doing. Many of the criticisms of the show seem to take issue with Dunham’s view of New York City; it’s an overused setting that’s often romanticized by young writers and artists, and people view the characters of “Girls” as those hopelessly romantic young people who think New York will be this life-changing place that will act as a catalyst for their professional and romantic growth.

Those people are right, and once again, it’s intentional. There’s a tendency among us young writers—writers like me, Hannah Horvath, almost all my English major friends, and my fellow writers at the Michigan Daily—to be obsessed with making a narrative out of our lives. We view years like seasons of television, our gradual changes like character development, our new jobs and new romantic relationships like new plotlines. We are desperate to structure our lives like the art we take in, to act like everything taught us something and everyone mattered and everything has its discrete role in influencing the rest of our lives.

Young writers are desperate for that “New York” setting, that magical far-off place where we spend a summer or a year or the rest of our lives in the hopes that it will change us and show us how big the world is and be the real place where we can flourish. You can tell that Lena Dunham has felt this idealism before, this young artistic desire to understand the narrative of her life. It’s there from a time before the pilot episode even took place, when Hannah moved off to New York City. It’s there when she starts working at GQ, and when she moves away to go to Iowa, and when she visits home. Everywhere, you can see Hannah’s mind turning to whatever new thing she thinks will make her happy, will fulfill her. The arc of her life that she conceives is rigid, and when reality disrupts it, the arc molds into a new shape to compensate.

Maybe I’ll go to New York City and be a famous writer and live with all my best friends and have the time of my life, Hannah thinks at the start of the series. Or no—maybe I will move to Iowa and become the Great American Writer I truly imagine myself to be, and when I come back to New York, everyone will be waiting for me. When Hannah makes the choice to stay away from Adam and be with Fran at the end of the fourth season, she’s making a bold new step—not to once again fall into the role that she assumed was required, but to acknowledge what the actual right choice for her is. This season, though, has shown that even that isn’t as easy as it sounds; ‘healthy’ isn’t always what it appears, and it’s not as simple as choosing to embrace the new when the new is so terrifyingly ambiguous.

Hannah, though self-absorbed, isn’t fundamentally a selfish or vain person. She just wants the life she thinks she’s supposed to have. The life all of us writers think we’re supposed to have when we’re 20, with the skyscrapers, the quirky neighbors, the loving romantic partners, and the close-knit group of friends. Lena Dunham knows how attractive that fantasy is. She knows how close we can get to achieving it. But she also knows how dangerous it is to be so enamored with that preconceived notion of success when you place so much weight on it.

I see Hannah Horvath everywhere. I see her around campus, in media, and, most frighteningly, in myself. Maybe that’s what’s so terrifying about how unlikable she is. It’s like seeing a reflection of yourself and laughing, crying, and cringing at it. We can be annoyed by the unrealistic dreams Hannah has and the unorthodox way she has of straining to achieve them. But every once in a while the smile fades and we wonder that same thing: what if this happens to us?