I’ve never been great at expressing myself. In fact, I think it’s safe to say, I’ve always been terrible at expressing myself. I remember this one time, I was having a conversation with a professor of mine in college. I was struggling a little bit, having trouble participating in class and speaking out even though participation was a large percentage of my grade. As I sat in his office, opening up about why I was struggling, he told me how I keep things close to my heart, not easily showing people how I really feel. I remember being so astonished when he said it to me, not because I was upset he said it, but because I couldn’t believe he saw it. That he saw me. I wasn’t used to people seeing me. And instead of taking what he said to heart and learning how to let people see me, I held onto this like a badge of honor. I walked around with my head held high thinking that ‘yeah, I do hold in what I think and that’s okay’ and I stayed like that for a long time.
Looking back, I think what he said to me was really just a nice way of saying that I didn’t always know how to be vulnerable with people. I think that I fear being wrong and I fear looking stupid in front of others, and I think that by keeping my mouth shut, I was able to prevent people from thinking things about me that I didn’t want them to think. And I suppose it helped, but it also did keep people from knowing me. It kept me from really knowing how to express myself and from allowing myself to live and present myself as the person that I know that I am.
Am I still self conscious? Hell yes I am. But I’ve also gotten better at peeling my own layers back and existing in this world as the person I want to be and being that person for other people.
I grew up as someone fully engrossed in the media. I loved (and still love) reading and losing myself in a movie or a tv series, and there have always been some stories that fill me with a type of nostalgia I can’t quite describe, but I’m going to try my best to do it here.
When I find a story like this, I find myself overcome with emotion. It’s like this pressure that builds in my chest, and I sit there, sometimes with tears in my eyes, and for a moment, I really feel seen. The nostalgia and the connectedness I feel with the characters is almost sometimes too much to bear, and I love every moment of it. It feels so special because it’s a feeling I don’t often feel.
It’s like I can see and I can feel these characters so strongly that it pushes me toward this emotional precipice and I just get to sit there and take it in and absorb it and relish in the beauty between the pages or shots. This reaction to a piece of art is what makes art feel beautiful to me.
I think the first time I felt this way was watching Dawson’s Creek. I watched the show for the first time going into high school when I wanted nothing more than to be a writer and to be a filmmaker. I could see pieces of myself in Dawson and I could also see myself in Joey. Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m a Joey and Pacey girl for life, but there’s something about the nostalgia and the innocence in the relationship between Joey and Dawson in the pilot of the series that I’ve never been able to shake. I still get emotional reading the words “See ya, Dawson / See ya, Joey” or watching that scene. There’s something about the series that is forever engrained my heart. The first season, in particular, brings me back to an emotional state of mind very few other things do.
Another one is We Were Liars. I picked this book up after finding out there was an adaptation in the works by two of my favorite writers and it clawed its way into my heart without leaving a path back out. It sounds cliché, but there truly is a Before We Were Liars and an After We Were Liars in my life. There’s no other way to look at it.
These characters are like family to me and the emotions they draw out of me are completely unparalleled. I can’t read the book or watch the show with a dry eye. I was able to attend the premiere of We Were Liars at Tribeca Film Festival last year, and I found that pressure building in my chest and the tears coming to my eyes as the lights went down in the theater and I let myself fully appreciate how lucky I was to not only be at the premiere, but to exist at a time when a story like this exists. What I think is so special about We Were Liars is the way that it encapsulates the feeling of a 90s WB drama the way that series don’t know how to do anymore. Particularly the scenes between Cadence and Gat. I think it’s the first episode, there’s a flashback of when Cadence and Gat first meet and she says, “Are you real?” and there’s nothing particular special about this scene that makes it stand out amongst the rest, but I felt like scene rocked my world. It was like the ground wasn’t beneath my feet anymore and I had to just exist in this moment as long as I could until the world could right itself again. And I felt that way later in the episode when they kiss for the first time. I don’t know if it’s the young, innocent, summer love that made their yearning feel so nostalgic or what exactly it is that made me feel like I did as a young teenager watching Dawson’s Creek for the first time, but something about it brought me back.
The same thing happened with Every Summer After by Carley Fortune. I remember the first time I read the book, I was on a cruise and I was sitting in the library overlooking the ocean on a rainy day at sea and I lost myself in the book. When I finished it, I looked out on the water with tears streaming down my face and I couldn’t believe that a book had made me feel something so deeply, and now suddenly, I had to go to back to real life and leave Sam and Percy behind. I recall laughing at myself for how much I was crying, and the more I laughed, the more I couldn’t keep the tears at bay. I re-read the book again a couple of years later, on a plane of all places (I should’ve known better), and the same thing happened. So what is it about Sam and Percy that hits so close to home?
With the adaptation Every Year After dropping on Prime tomorrow, I figured I should re-read the book again, and I didn’t even get three pages into the book before I was getting teary eyed. I had to put the book down for a little bit before I could pick it up again, and I’m only now in chapter 5 and I have so many little passages I’ve highlighted that have given me that jolt of emotion in my chest and made me stop and really absorb everything for a moment.
Carley Fortune has this ability to create characters that are so real on the page. They are completely three dimensional and there isn’t a single scene in any of her books where you feel like you aren’t in that very moment with the characters. Even the line “You came home.” packs such a punch. Three words, and yet you feel it in your very bones. To risk being completely repetitious, Percy’s narration carries this uncanny nostalgia that very few authors can actually replicate or match, and Percy makes these off-hand comments that don’t scream at you that she’s unhappy, but you know it without question that there’s this feeling of discontent that she feels and has felt since she and Sam parted ways. It’s beautiful, and honestly, Percy feels like a character that understands the way that I sometimes feel deep down inside, even if I don’t know how to express it myself.
It’s reading lines like, “I’ve become skilled at warding off the loneliness that threatened to pull me under in my early twenties” (Kindle, p.49) and “But somehow it also hurts that his life continued without me as planned.” (Kindle, p.58) that make me feel like the characters and their feelings are being injected so deeply into my veins that we’re past the point of no return.
I felt this same way when I watched the trailer for the series as well. I just sat there, watching, tears pooling in my eyes, not able to comprehend how a story could make me feel such deep emotions. If you haven’t seen it yet, I’ll link the trailer here.
Even as I sit here and write this, I still am trying to pull the why out of the emotions. Why is it that Every Summer After makes me feel the way that it does? What is it about this story that makes all the emotions come bubbling to surface? I don’t have a particular attachment to second chance romances and friends-to-lovers honestly is not my favorite trope, but Every Summer After is one of my favorite novels in the world.
So, what is it? Is it that yearning pulls on some heartstrings that don’t get enough attention? Is it seeing myself in characters and feeling like it’s a miracle they know how to express my feelings without ever having met me? I’m not sure. But I don’t take it for granted when I find beautiful stories like these. I find them, I cherish them, and I hold them as close to my heart as possible because it isn’t often we find something that can touch us so deeply. We crave connection in this world, and I feel like the harder we look, the harder it is to find, so when you find something that can hold meaning for you, I encourage you to keep it close and leave space for those stories that touch your heart.
Anchored Musings 