Stranger than fiction

A good friend of mine posted and article today about how a writer's aspirational figure, Carrie Bradshaw, in time turned out to be a massive disappointment to her and how she is now living the life she was meant to lead free from the inspiration of the character SJP animated. The title of this jolly piece is "How I learned Carrie Bradshaw was full of shit" see the complete article here:
http://www.elle.com/news/lifestyle/the-carrie-bradshaw-myth

As enlightening as this article is, I have to wonder. How much of ourselves is just a bad imitation of something we've seen on TV? Are we just regurgitating other people's experiences in a bid to seem to be living authentically? Surely if someone else is already doing everything you want to be doing in the clothes you want to be doing it it, how much room is out there for you?  It's been done, babes.

Shouldn't we want to carve out our own paths? This woman is so obsessed with this fictional character that she nearly holds her responsible for her failure to become her. FICTIONAL. Of course I get inspired by people on TV. Shit, I'm even guilty of watching Girls and stealing Jessa's hairstyles, but that's as far as it goes. Placing all my faith in a person who isn't real only leads to not being real either. It's OK for me to find Hannah insufferably annoying because she's not really my friend. It's OK for me to buy Marc Jacobs from the charity shop because I don't fucking care that it's second hand and neither does anyone else. No one can see me and no one is trying to.

There is no one hiding in the bushes, secretly documenting your life and secretly screening it on HBO. Fact. I think this is a hard thing to digest for a lot of people. The dreaded online quiz is back telling people what Game of Thrones or Big Bang Theory character they are. How about none of them. As awesome as it would be to be the hybrid of Khaleesi and Amy Farrah-Fowler, neither of those people actually exist. We spend a lot of time focusing on the media influences around us and often forget to just be who we are. To like what we like and want what we want and not what our favorite character on TV likes or wants. 

I don't think this woman fell out of love with Carrie Bradshaw because Carrie changed. She is the one dimensional imagining of someone. I think this woman just grew up and figured out who she was meant to be, despite spending a regrettably long time molding her life after someone else's, and thank god for that. We should all look to take from the world things we love and enjoy. But to Single White Female someone else's life, even a fictional character makes you unoriginal and probably a sociopath. Let's start getting real, ladies and gents and stop playing pretend.