Young and inspiring

Lena Dunham, is a writer, director, producer of the HBO "Girls".  

She also is the star of the series and has written a book called "Not that kind of Girl. A young woman tells you what she's "learned"". So I am not going to summerize her biography, you can look that up on wiki or google her or whatever. I want to talk about how she has inspired me and how I think she is inspiring young girls/women or how she can inspire us but maybe won't.

I read her book a few weeks ago and it is a memoir but written as essays. And what I find incredible is how honest she is about her everything: her life, sex, her childhood and teenage years and her problems with herself. When I was reading her book I often was thinking "oh my god I felt exactly the same way" or "I would have never admitted to that, ever". You read it and you recognise yourself in it and you remember thoughts or actions that were similar to your own but you would have never, ever talked about them, not to your mother, best friend and definitely not the whole world.

She talks about her sleep issues as a child and how she suffered/suffers from OCD. Most people especially celebrities like to hide personal problems from the world. Of course they do because everyone will be talking about it but I believe that if they did talk about it they would open a dialogue for "normal" people to talk about mental health issues or uncomfortable topics. Let me give you an example from my life: I was anorexic for a 5 years and thank god I am not now but in those years I lost all my friends. People stayed away from me because they could not handle it. They could not handle me being depressed, they could not handle watching me starving myself and basically saying to the world "I don't want to live". My friends could not bear it and did not how to deal with it so they ignored me and I was alone. I had my family without them I would not be here. And even to this day nobody ever talked to me about it, even the people I became friends with again. Nobody asked me one question about it. They never apologized, they never wanted to talk about it. I never forgave them for it. I know we were young but still?!

After reading the book you feel a little less alone with everything you have done, felt when you were a child, teenager and young woman. She tells you everyone goes through shit, everyone has bad experience with men and friends. Nobody is perfect, nobody had the perfect childhood, everyone has bad memories of being a teenager it's just that most people do not talk about it but not Lena Dunham. I think she will talk about almost everything. 

"13 Things I've learned are not okay to say to friends

1. She's chubby in a different way than we are

2. Don't worry, no one will remember this when you're dead

3. No, please don't apologize. If I had your mother I'd be a nightmare, too"

10 more to go but you will have to read them in her book. 

"When someone shows you how little you mean to them and you keep coming back for more, before you know it you start to mean less to yourself. You are not made up of compartments! You are one whole person! What gets said to you gets said to all of you, ditto what gets done. Being treated like shit is not an amusing game or a transgressive intellectual experiment. It's something you accept, condone, and learn to believe you deserve. This is so simple. But I tried so hard to make it complicated" (Lena Dunham In "Not that kind of Girl. A young woman tells you what she's "learned"")

I could now talk about her series and about the characters but I won't- you should just watch the series and you will see that Lena Dunham tries to show a real version of how girls in their 20s struggle to figure out how to live. I can try to explain what Lena tried to do with the series but really she could do it so much better. So I am going to let her do it. Isn't amazing that we have youtube. :)