How Gossip Girl Ruined my life… and why I’ll definitely watch it again.

Gazing up at the two of them, lounging on the MET steps, laughing in slow motion as their hair blew in a gust of wind. Their long legs and perfectly dressed bodies outlined by some illuminating force… could it be? Were they… angels?

That’s what I remember of my extensive relationship with Blair Waldorf and Serena van der Woodsen (via Gossip Girl), anyway.

I dreamt of moving to New York for most of my life. I vividly remember sitting in the bathroom at high school (why it usually hit me in the bathroom, I’m not sure) and waves of energy and excitement rolling over me… “I am so ready to live in New York”, I’d think to myself.

I anticipated the rush: of easily strutting through crowded streets (as if somehow, no one was ever in my way); of arriving at my 100-story-brightly-painted-interior-office-building… an editorial magazine HQ, to be exact; of my Upper West Side apartment with a doorman who knew my name. Gossip Girl’s “ever-so-realistic” depiction of life in New York lured me into the opportunities, potential and mesmerising life I would find there.

Gossip Girl glorified and glamorized the New York life I had always hoped to live.

It, and countless other shows, made twenty-something life in New York City seem incomparable to any other life ever existed.

But to those of you who know anything about New York, this fantasy (and all those told to us through chick-flick television and film) is actually nothing what living in New York is like. So when I moved to New York on August 25th, 2017 with a car full of clothes and a few Target storage bins, I was in for a rude awakening.

First mistake: thinking no one would ever be in my way as I walked through the streets… that’s just entirely untrue. But my bigger mistake: expecting to immediately love my new life.

I tried and I tried and I tried to love it, because I really wanted to. For one, it would have made me a lot happier. If it weren’t for the constant worry and stomach aches full of anxiety I could start to live my life peacefully again. But beyond that, I also just didn’t want to lose. For years leading up to it I wouldn’t shut up about mine and New York’s meant-to-be relationship (I’m really sorry). I felt as if I had to make it come true, or else I’d lost in the competition I had forever created for myself.

But suddenly it was three months and about a thousand phone calls home later (again, really sorry), and I was still miserable.

Instead of being intellectually stimulated and inspired by the infamous New York ~energy~, my body was eroding and my mind was drained. My whole being was succumbing to the most unexpected feelings of anxiety and stress. I had never felt so lost. I had never been so overwhelmingly upset. I was trapped in my own worries of why life wasn’t going exactly as planned. I had yet to confidently strut through the streets, land my dream job or even make a genuine friend that was anything like me.

I became skeptical of New York’s “wonder”, weary of New York’s “opportunities”, and I was over. it. I planned to leave the city of my dreams. It was settled, I was giving up.

Then I remembered Gossip Girl. I remembered Blair and Serena with their perfectly dramatic lives and their signature spot on the grandiose MET Stairs. I remembered that Gossip Girl, of all things, had created these expectations for me. For so long I wondered what I was doing wrong, but nothing was wrong. It just wasn’t like Gossip Girl!

Once I finally acknowledged my unrealistic expectations I was slowly able to overlook them. Though there will always be a part of me that compares my life to the stories I’ve been told and watched, there is a new part of me that appreciates my story… which by the way is much different than that of Serena van der Woodsen. I mean honestly, who can compete with a name like that anyway?

So with a new perspective, one that loves my tiny apartment without a doorman, my smelly and overcrowded commute and the fact that the MET stairs are about forty minutes from my school and thus an entirely impractical expectation of where I’ll hang out, I will watch Gossip Girl again.

This time I won’t hate Gossip Girl for creating false expectations and empty promises about what life in New York might be like. I’ll THANK it! For pushing me and encouraging me to take on life in the city of unimaginable drama and opportunity of unbelievable measure. Because that infamous energy does exist… sometimes in the form of stress and anxiety (okay, mostly in this form)… but other times, and these are the times worth living for, in the form of complete gratitude and fulfilment.

So thank you Gossip Girl for ruining the first year and a half of my life in New York. But thanks even more for getting me there in the first place. I, Alex, vow to make you proud!

Xoxo, Alex.

P.s. I’ll definitely be watching the reboot… maybe I’ll even see myself in the back of a shot!