A Love Letter to Nuance

Thoughts on nostalgia, self-identification, and being a citizen of the gray area

All of the good stuff lives in the gray area. Black and white, hard-line notions are comfortable, fathomable, and require little to no miserably intimate self-examination. I’m currently watching Sex and the City for the first time (I promise, I’m going somewhere with this). My sweet friend Molly is a longtime watcher. I think that, on some level, I started watching it to chase the feeling of sitting in Molly’s house on Livingston while Carrie drones on about the impossibility of choosing between Big and the obviously superior Aidan. While Carrie mused, we would laugh, fight over the heated blanket, and feel an unspoken but crushing nostalgia for a moment that we knew was like a ticking time bomb. When would we ever be sitting in a college house, surrounded by friends (and sometimes Mary’s dog) feeling like today is the most hilarious day ever to happen?

SATC provided a soundtrack to a feeling, a feeling that Molly and I are chasing an ocean apart through rewatches and wondering which of these frustrating New Yorkers we most identify with. We decided that Molly is a total Miranda-Charlotte and I am obviously a Charlotte-Samantha. We also decided that nuance is the only thing that can protect our complex senses of self from the existential crisis of being forced into a box. When we decide that we are a…whatever, we reduce ourselves to whatever we imagine our “one big trait” is (or, realistically, what we wish it was) and we are left feeling like a partial person, incomplete and most suitable for HBO. When we reject nuance, we reject our humanity and all of that gray area good stuff that makes us better than AI.

A generation that has come of age alongside social media has been taught that they are a brand, a carefully curated brand that stretches across platforms that should be cohesive but not predictable, politically aware but not a downer, flawless but never airbrushed. You must be real and raw, uncalculated and hilariously laid back. Make Instagram casual again with a flash photo taken on a digital camera, skin aglow, but you’re making a silly face, winking at the viewer to make them feel as though they are in on the joke of you being unhinged enough to post a candid photo with a double chin. The infographic echo chamber rings with sharp words: “Your silence is deafening.” The way to ensure none of your acquaintances think you’re complicit in genocide is to post a powerful two-sentence quip that clumsily attempts to encapsulate a centuries-long conflict. As a brand, it is your responsibility to use your platform to speak out (be careful bringing it up in person though, unless you want your brand to become that of an activist who takes it all far too seriously).

There is nothing wrong with posting about human rights on social media, but when did a story post become necessary and exhaustive advocacy? If you care about devastation in the Middle East and bombs dropped in open-air prisons, you are such a Miranda. If you are a Jew who has never felt Jewish enough and believes in Palestinian liberation, you are scared, you are sad, and you are in-between. Jewish friends call you self-hating for not echoing the Zionism that floods your feed and Arab friends and leftist activists who you usually agree with call you a bootlicker for being shattered by what is becoming of your people. You are all alone in the gray area. For what it’s worth, I’m here too.