I listened to Fame Sick (Lena Dunham) and it stayed with me.
I’m a Girls fan to my core, I watch it every year, maybe twice. I’ve always been drawn to the way she captures women. Not the polished version, the real one, the uncomfortable one, the problematic one.
However this felt different.
There’s a moment in life where everything gets stripped back. Sometimes dramatically, sometimes not, until what you thought was solid… isn’t. I felt it listening to Fame Sick, not because of the story itself, but because of what it revealed underneath it.
The dynamics between women have always fascinated me & if I'm honest scare me. I love women, the closeness we can achieve, the shorthand, & the way we can feel completely known by each other. A deep connection that can fizz and overflow… something unspoken, but instinctively understood between us.
And yet… in my experience there’s something fragile there too. Shadow sides meeting. Something that can shift without warning, often when you’re oblivious to the signs. Sometimes not loudly, but in what’s left unsaid. Other times more directly, in what’s said and can’t be taken back…a distance appearing where there used to be ease.
My instinct has often been to slip away quietly, choosing peace over being fully understood, or what I’ve come to realise isn’t always peace, but a way of avoiding what’s harder to face.
We don’t speak about that part enough.
I used to think I was good at friendship, until it unravelled in a way I did not expect and left me more unsettled than I cared to admit. But the clarity that followed was necessary, a quiet undoing of the performance I had learned to maintain to keep those relationships in place. I read somewhere ‘The moment vulnerability becomes curated it becomes performance’ and I felt it.
For Lena, Illness had a way of revealing everything. In my experience so does change. The big moments in life, whether they’re beautiful or brutal, don't create something new. They expose what was already there. Who softens, who holds, who steps back. Who can meet you where you are…and who can’t. There’s no performance left in those moments & no version of yourself you can maintain.
Just truth.
I think that’s why it stayed with me, because underneath it all, it wasn’t about illness, or fame, or even relationships. It was about exposure…of self, of others, & of the quiet realities we don’t always want to look at. And what do I do with that, once I’ve seen it?
Experience has taught me to ask myself first…’Am I seeing things as they are, or as I wish them to be?’
I think of friendship like something that fizzes at the beginning... alive, effortless, expanding. Then it settles. Finds its level. Becomes more even. Sometimes it settles clean. And sometimes… leaves an aftertaste hard to shift. I’ve also realised how porous I used to be, how easily other, louder voices blurred my own... I’ve learned how vital it is to my soul to trust my instinct. And more than anything, I’ve been forced to recognise that a stable nervous system is worth more than any intensity I once mistook for connection.
Those moments have changed what I keep close, not just people, but the things I return to when I need to find my footing again, especially once that initial fizz has settled and everything feels quieter. The comfort I trust now isn’t loud or performative, it doesn’t try to fix anything, it simply holds when I loosen my grip, steady and familiar, with nothing to figure out. Maybe that’s what I’m interested in now, not avoiding the moments that reveal everything, but knowing what holds you when they come, what doesn’t change, and what meets you exactly where you are.
And still, sometimes there’s something that lingers, like the aftertaste once the glass has gone still, not enough to hold onto, but not something you can fully let go of either.
That’s why I design the way I do now… thinking about what stays, what holds, what doesn’t ask anything from you, and what becomes more familiar the longer you live with it, until it feels less like something you wear and more like something you return to.
- Paula
‘They amaze me. They amuse me. They shake me to my core.’ - Lena Dunham
