I haven’t written a new post since reading this article on Medium (A Leslie Knope In a World Full of Liz Lemons, subhead: Liz Lemon is who the world wants you to be. Leslie Knope is who you should aim to be).
It’s a great piece and I won’t try to summarize it here, but there are a few parts that really resonated with me. One example:
Identifying with Liz means not only embracing our flaws, but investing in them, highlighting them, and touting them as our most memorable, interesting qualities.
Check. Done that.
I have been thinking about this article since reading it (at least a week ago) and have decided that, as much as I love Liz Lemon, I don’t really want to be her. And I don’t want to feel like I have to apologize for myself, or focus on the things that I’m not good at, or never talk about the things that are going well.
And as funny as it is to write about all of the struggles, and to see the humor in them, it seems like it might be too easy to fall into a pattern of emphasizing what is bad and what is wrong, what I’m not good at, what’s messed up, what about life isn’t what I expected (etc).
So I’m thinking about channeling my inner Leslie Knope. It’s hard to write that because who in her right mind wants to be Leslie — right? But I kind of think I used to want to be Leslie and then I found out that people find her annoying and abrasive and so I learned how to be more of a Liz. And maybe a lot of us did. So I’m thinking about that.
Thinking about maybe celebrating what’s good. When I do good. Looking for solutions to problems. Kicking ass.
It’s just a thought…
(Disclaimer: If you have no idea what I’m talking about, you should probably set aside a week or so to binge-watch all 13 or so seasons of Parks and Recreation and 30 Rock. Then come back and read this post.)