Why I Hate Lena Dunham

One of the biggest decisions I made in college was to declare my major as Creative Writing. My parents wanted me to stay an Education Major so I would have a secure job when I left the University, my sorority sisters didn't understand why I didn't have any friends from my major and I always had this constant cloud over my head, wondering, judging me, and asking "So... what are you going to do when you graduate?" And now, "What do you want to do eventually?"

The only thing that really kept me going (besides my poetry classes) was the sick camaraderie between all the other students in my major. Even though we hated each other (or everyone hated me, I'm not sure) we all had this common problem. We had art in our eardrums, and we were all trying to find a way to make money off of it. None of us wanted to be the MFA Students that worked at Barnes and Noble part-time, even though studies have shown that 1 out of 2 Creative Writing Majors assume that terrible fate.

 I'm sure you all have heard the name Lena Dunham in the past year. If you haven't you've either been living under a rock, you don't have HBO, you don't follow the right people on Twitter or you actually have a normal life where you make breakfast in the morning and maybe have a garden or something. The internet is buzzing around her at the current moment. Not only did she write and produce a movie in 2010 that won all sorts of awards, she's also coming off a TV season where she had a hit TV series, 4 Emmy Nominations and almost half a million Twitter followers. Oh, and did I forget to mention her book proposal is fetching upwards of 3.6 million dollars? Right. And she's 26. 


I hate her.

Okay, okay. I don't hate her. Hate is a very strong word. But I'm 23. Working my ass off at an average job, writing while I can on the side and trying to stay involved in the local poetry scene, trying to figure out this thing called LIFE and wondering and wishing what it would be like to make things for a living. And I was okay with that, until Lena came along. I had my sad Liberal Arts Graduates to keep me company. Now she's just making us all look bad. There's a few things about her:

She's normal. I feel like she could have been someone in one of my classes. We might have even sat next to each other. Maybe, I would give her a quarter to have enough money to buy a Vitamin Water from the vending machines down the hall. Maybe we made fun of someone's shitty writing together. Maybe we went out for drinks and talked about how to make our art our living. I'm so used to seeing spectacular shiny people get all of the spectacular shiny recognition. Maybe we bitched about being penniless servers who write on the side and then went about our lives. But that will never happen. Sorry Lena, you're famous and now you'll never need to borrow money from me to buy a Vitamin Water.

She's a good writer. Like, really good. So good that I watched all 10 episodes of Girls on a Saturday night via StreamAllThis.com (Ha!) while I ignored all of my friends when they asked me to go out. So good that I wonder how it's that easy. That I wonder if I could have done something like that, if given the opportunity. Can I still do that?

She's my age. I'm 23. Will I ever accomplish anything as great as she has? Will I ever write something that so many people like and that so many people will have an opinion about? Will I ever meet and stumble over my words when I'm interviewed by Jimmy Fallon? She makes me feel inadequate. I can see myself in her place. I wonder what it would be like to switch lives for a day.

I guess you can see by this post that I really don't hate Lena Dunham to the core. But I am jealous, envious, and disgusted by her lifestyle. So I'm going to hit publish, go downstairs, eat a brownie, fall asleep, and continue to patiently wait for Season 2 of Girls. Night y'all.

Mal xoxo