Reply to Bad Art Friend

Forum Index » Entertainment and Pop Culture

Reply to "Bad Art Friend"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous]Some people just become this vessel into which others project all of their issues. It's frustrating and weird. I remember thinking this back when Hillary Clinton was running for president the first time -- I felt she never really stood a chance because even though she had strong supporters and organization, for a lot of people (including lifelong Democrats I knew) she just represented all these negative ideas they had that they didn't like thinking about. Like my mom hated Hillary for not leaving Bill. I'd say "But that's someone else's marriage, who even knows? How is that relevant to whether she'd make a good president?" and my mom would just shrug and say "I don't know, I just don't like her."

Eight years later, my mom was beyond thrilled to cast a vote for Hillary for president, was like captain of the Team Hillary club in my hometown. I asked her what changed and she still couldn't really answer. "I don't know, that was a long time ago," she'd say. But Hillary didn't change. She was still with Bill (who remained problematic at best). Same personality, same person.

You know what changed? My mom. She matured in that time and I think realized that her negative feelings towards Hillary about Bill's behavior weren't really about Hillary. They were about other stuff. About Bill Clinton, sure, but also about feminism and my mom's own experience as a woman and a wife. About my mom's not well-hidden insecurity about being a SAHM in an era when women like Hillary were doing something else. In her sadness about how little a life like the one Hillary had was available to her because of her class and background. But by 2016, my mom had reconciled a lot of that stuff and no longer needed to pour all those negative feelings into Hillary Clinton to avoid having to feel them herself. Instead, she could use Hillary as a vessel for all the good feelings she wanted to feel about herself -- hating Trump, being an older woman and still mattering, eschewing fashion and beauty standards in favor of what works for you, etc.

I think that's what Dawn Dorland became for these people. The reason the rest of us have spent the last few weeks confused is that this whole thing was billed as a referendum on Dawn Dorland, but she was actually incidental to any of it. She was a vessel for a bunch of negative feelings that Sonya Larson and Celeste Ng and some of their friends had floating around. It was easier to pour them into Dawn than to deal with them. I think her kidney donation was a real catalyst for them because they had previously seen Dawn as someone beneath them -- less successful, less important, a hanger-on. And then she did this insanely amazing thing, more amazing even than publishing a best selling novel (at least in some people's eyes), and it shook them. They were thinking existential thoughts -- why am I here, do I matter, will anyone remember me, am I wasting my time, am I any good? That's some deep stuff but it's scary and uncomfortable. I've been there. And they just threw those feelings into a Dawn-shaped jar, screwed the lid on tight, and painted "DFD" on the front. Problem solved! Eff Dawn and her effing kidney.

They are going to have to take those feelings out of the jar eventually. Do you think they know that?[/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics