RIP Cool Girl
Saying goodbye to my inner Cool Girl. Thank you for your service.
I want to start off by saying that I know it is inherently not cool to say that you are cool. The title of this essay RIP Cool Girl is not to backdoor brag about how cool I have been up until this point, and only now am I really ready to shed my it-girl status and join the Lord of the Rings-loving nerds. No, I have been living in Nerdtown, USA for some time. My favorite LOTR movie is the first one because I love the Shire, but don’t go so much for the lengthy battle scenes.
What I am hoping to do with this essay, and the coming full moon, is let go of the remaining part of myself that has held steadfast to the idea that I need to be cool to be accepted. What does cool even look like in 2023? I don’t know, proving that continuing to care whether or not I am cool is a failed enterprise.
As artists, much as in life, the allure of coolness and being accepted by whatever tastemakers you might want approval from is deadly to creativity. It shuts down your inner spirit and any hope that what you will make is authentic and created from a place of love.
As I write, Neko Case’s Teenage Feeling plays. Coolness is one of those teenage feelings. It’s fleeting and fickle. One minute you’re in and the next you’re out - but the best part is it’s mostly in your head. No one but you spends as much time clocking your various social slings and arrows as you do.
This is why I am deciding to throw a little send-off for my inner cool girl. She has served me well in the early days of art school, and backstage at a concert or two. She was a protective force able to deflect and defend. Was she able to be herself? It was hard to tell who I was when I was playing full-time at Cool Girl, but I want to say definitely not. Cool Girl always had an audience in mind. And when you’re playing to a crowd, you need a script, a character, a joke, a look to make you digestible, consumable.
Whatever she was, she is for certain no longer serving me. As a recently relocated 40-something who is trying to clear some karma, adjust to Los Angeles and feel like I belong somewhere in this mad world- damn is it awkward. It is like going through a new kind of adolescence, just in time for my mid-life Uranus opposes Uranus crisis. I am questioning everything including why I care so much what other people think.
It was Pride in San Francisco last weekend and I spoke to a couple of random people at the parade on Market Street who both said the same thing: Pride means giving yourself the freedom to be you. Why do we make it more complicated?
As I release Cool Girl, I will be letting go of the niche desire to please that she inhabited. On the list of people or archetypes, she felt a subconscious drive to please or appease are as follows: the other Cool Girls, the tastemakers, the Instagram-likers, the well-dressed at the bar, men in bands, women who own vintage stores, the Joneses, the people who seem to have it together, friends- old and new, strangers on Zoom in my writing group, shoppers at Bi-Rite, people I have just met, acquaintances I have known forever, hikers in Griffith Park, people walking around various urban lakes, men I have gone on failed dates with that I only see again when I least expect it, baristas at that coffee shop in DTLA, and so on.
I’m going to come up with a release ritual of some kind for the full moon (a good time to release things) and will post about it in notes in case it might serve you too.
Do you have an inner cool girl or guy? Who are they trying to impress and have you given them the boot?
Never cool. Always a dork. Much less stress involved with being uncool. Welcome (back?) to LA! xo