Ritual is a powerful thing—establishing the well-worn grooves of your day, reinforcing muscle memory again and again. It’s a form of communion with yourself, with something greater; a long-held breath finally exhaled, a return to your body. And should we not celebrate the attainment of inner peace, no matter the roads that lead us there? If one were to, say, obsessively watch episodes of HBO’s critically acclaimed Girls, and perhaps contextualize their every daily experience within the greater fabric of creator-star Lena Dunham’s fictional universe, would that not be as worthy a meditation as a daily nature walk, or completing your Morning Pages after a friend convinces you to do The Artist’s Way?
Just kidding. I’m aware that my consistent rewatching of Girls is perhaps one of the most ungodly things about me—mostly because it’s not just the occasional hour-on-the-couch reminiscing about an old show I haven’t seen in a while. Oh, no. What we’re discussing here is maladaptive, bordering on monomaniacal, probably diagnosable. My dedication to the show is steady and consistent: so long as the earth is spinning, I’m rewatching Girls. It’s in my headphones as I clean my apartment; in the background as I enter a craft-related fugue state; playing from tinny iPhone speakers as I shower, the audio rendered unintelligible by the crash of water. This is my truth—though I am admittedly not thrilled about identifying this much with some of the most canonically insufferable television characters ever written.
I’ve always found comfort in repetition; growing up with untreated OCD, this often looked like an onslaught of mantras and tics: jumping up and down, clapping a certain number of times to “divide the air” into correct segments, washing my hands on a loop, retracing past conversations and potential missteps until something inside my mind finally felt soothed. Sometimes, it’s not even the show’s plot-points I’m following, but instead the predictable shape of the dialogue, the rise and fall of arguments and quips I’ve heard a thousand times—a strand of worry beads to pull me out of the murkiness of my own mind.
Years after the show’s release, I’m still here, dragging my feet along a desire path of my own creation, rewatching Girls again and again and again. But there’s something else driving my obsession, too: a doubling of the viewing experience, watching the show both as I am now—twenty-eight years old, nearly seven spent in New York—and as I was back then.
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The second season’s penultimate episode, “On All Fours,” opens with Adam (Adam Driver) returning from a date with Natalia (Shiri Appleby), the more embodied, boundaried, and self-assured foil to Hannah (Lena Dunham). Natalia has clean, shiny hair and tells Adam what she wants in bed with a military-like precision; Hannah, on the other hand, is on a continuing descent into old OCD patterns, spurred on by the mounting stress of writing her first book.
Up until now, Hannah has spent much of the series trying on adulthood like an ill-fitting coat, a child playing dress-up with an unearned self-assurance. With the return of her OCD, we see her dragged back into a part of her actual childhood which we have no visibility into, aside from what she told her old therapist (Bob Balaban) in the previous episode: “I counted stuff [like] every pulse in my vagina; I would force myself to see things on a loop of eight: like sexual things, murder things.” Nonplussed, he replies, “So, it was really a classical presentation.” She is incredulous in turn, angry at the insinuation that these compulsions consuming her life can be tallied up as nothing more than “classical”—the dual gut-punch of being told her debilitating thoughts are actually quite mundane, and the rejection of her belief that she is too nuanced and too unique to fall into these broader categories.
The first time I told a mental health professional the full extent of my OCD thoughts, I was 20 and, having dealt with them for upwards of a decade, was sure that they made me vile and unlovable, unworthy of being alive. Sitting across from my then-psychiatrist, an odd woman who carried herself like a bird and spoke so softly that sometimes I genuinely thought she was messing with me, I was sure my confession was going to be met with outrage and disgust, distant sirens, or at the very least, concern. But she didn’t even look up from her notepad: “Oh yes, that’s really common,” was all she said (nearly inaudibly) to the most significant and terrifying divulgence of my life. My reaction mirrored Hannah’s: something close to betrayal. If this is so normal, then why have I been alone for so long?
The anxieties that prompt Hannah’s flare-up are unfortunately warranted; her editor, David Pressler-Goings (John Cameron Mitchell), says in response to her latest batch of pages: “I have to admit I didn’t finish them—but not because I didn’t have time, but because I didn’t want to…did your hymen grow back?” She confirms that her hymen did not, in fact, grow back, and returns to her room to continue working.
We then find her on her bedroom floor in her underwear, scooting around the hardwood as she adjusts her work setup, making sure everything is just-so before promptly getting a splinter in her ass and rushing to her bathroom to clean the wound with hydrogen peroxide. From there, she turns to cleaning her ears, ripping open a pack of Q-Tips and diving in with a determined fervor.
This is one of the first times in the series where we see Hannah appear small, almost meek, at the mercy of something bigger than her. But that’s the thing: OCD is merciless—a feeling that you just have to do a certain action one more time, that this next cycle will finally be the one to restore your equilibrium. For all its madness though, what OCD does offer is a semblance of control. For Hannah, this professional moment marks the first time her work is out of her hands; a loss of ownership rendered emotionally (rather than legally, which is still to come). Instead of reckoning with this—or with the spectre of failure that looms just near enough to remind her it’s there—Hannah instead goes hyperlocal, transforming her own body into a stage where she can act out being in charge.
Moments like these rang true for me: the paranoia that nothing was quite right, and that under no circumstance could I move forward until that off-kilter feeling was assuaged. At 16, I was enthralled by a sickening affinity, watching Hannah push the Q-Tip harder and harder, never satisfied, until a crack and a scream and a punctured eardrum.
“I was just trying to clean myself out,” she tells the ER doctor, her word choice revealing the driving force behind every OCD tic: to excavate the bad, by any means possible. And though they certainly don’t feel this way in the moment, those means are often absurd enough to teeter into comedy. “Do you think maybe you could clean the other one out,” Hannah asks the doctor, “just because it’s feeling a little uneven?” When spoken aloud, the delusion of the request becomes so clear that it morphs into a punchline.
Though the half-life of the fundamental unfunny-ness surrounding these moments is a long one, the scales of shame eventually fall away and you’re left to reflect on what they really were: ridiculous and, at times, endearing moments of performance. In middle school, for instance, every time I had a “bad” thought, I had to hop up, clap once, and recite a nonsensical mantra, all before I hit the ground. The joke is that the mantra (entirely authored by me and enforced by no one) was so long that it was physically impossible for me to stay in the air long enough, resulting in essentially a pogo-stick pantomime. All of it reflected an earnestness to be good that exists outside of logic and reality. In the moment, it’s deathly serious; in memory, it’s slapstick.
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As Hannah hemorrhages self-confidence and is chastised, braless and foal-like on an ER bed, Marnie (Allison Williams) is gaining perhaps a too developed sense of self, delving into her music with a painful earnestness. I want to give Williams her flowers for the most cataclysmically cringeworthy three minutes of television to ever air: set against the shiny, millennial corporate fantasy of Charlie’s tech startup (“Your office is like stupidly grown up,” Shoshanna (Zosia Mamet) says upon arrival), Marnie commandeers the microphone (one of five or six instances she does this throughout the series’ run) and proceeds to perform a deeply misguided cover of Kanye West’s “Stronger.” “You can be my white Kate Moss tonight,” she sings to a crowd of unconsenting yuppies. Williams’ every movement is painful to watch, yet the viewer cannot look away: It’s a slow motion car crash in a Rag & Bone leather dress.
First responder on the scene is Charlie, who pulls Marnie into his office to reprimand her, before losing his resolve and fucking her, reminding the viewer of what the app they’re meant to be celebrating is meant to do in the first place. “It prevents you from calling people you shouldn’t call,” Charlie explains. “The app is free, but breaking your word to yourself isn’t.”
There is a reason this scene is one of the most iconic of the entire series. It’s peak cringe comedy: Marnie performing with the affectless precision and pantomimed moves of a college a capella group with utter sincerity at a professional event for an ex she hasn’t seen in months. There is such a stunning lack of self-awareness that, frankly, it seems liberating. In that moment, there was no one freer than Marnie Michaels. And since we could not be her, we did the next best thing, which was simply to sit back and laugh.
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There is a grainy iPhone photo from 2013 or 2014 that has since been lost to the annals of time: my mom stands in my childhood bedroom, thinner than she should be, an effect of the cancer treatment she underwent that fall. Her irregular wisps of hair, which she had spent the year wrapping in stylish gauzy scarfs, are entirely obstructed by an ill-proportioned, cartoonish sticker of the donut-hairstyle made infamous by Shoshanna in the aforementioned episode.
My camera roll during this era was a flood of Pinterest screenshots: Sofia Coppola film stills, Cara Delevigne’s eyebrows, Effie from Skins demurely sucking on a cigarette. It was during this time that I first heard of Girls, and when I watched the first episode soon thereafter, I didn’t see it as a searing satire of a self-aggrandizing generation, but instead as a blueprint. It was a promise, rather than a caricature: the myopic world of an Obama-era, gentrified Brooklyn where you argued in coffeeshops and went to shitty warehouse shows and fell asleep spooning your best friend.
Meanwhile, my adolescence unfolded thousands of miles away in the swampy sprawl of Houston, Texas. I was not a relaxed kid, a wide array of OCD typologies jangling around my head like loose change (moral scrupulosity! contamination! religious! the kind that convinced me I was a sex criminal!). In my journal, I wrote about how I didn’t think my parents were taking my “academic shortcomings” seriously enough (there weren’t any), and waffled between wanting to have sex in a romantic making-love way or an empowering just-here-to-fuck way (I hadn’t done either).
I was going to a quasi-evangelical youth group every Wednesday night and spending the rest of my time on my laptop, watching the wide array of prestige television available to me. The dangling carrot of eternal salvation competed directly with the vision of a post-recession New York overrun by the classic “girl boss” associated with the one-dimensional, deeply white feminism known to that era. Glossier had just released Boy Brow; Audrey Gelman (the inspiration behind high-strung and earnest Marnie) was launching The Wing.
The expansive landscape of my future was one of competing promises pulled from disparate texts: eternal salvation, blackout drinking, venture capital, the infinite and untapped potential of the internet. Despite the varying sources, they all connected back to one thing: there was solace to be found in the escape route.
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In a different part of the borough, Adam inches towards the precipice of a relapse after a decade of not drinking, the train firmly switching tracks after he runs into Hannah outside of Natalia’s friend’s engagement party. “You have a girlfriend…the kind of girlfriend whose friends get engaged, so she must be… [Natalia] is a cool girl name,” Hannah trails off, dejected but falsely polite.
“You should get some rest, you look pretty tired,” Adam says on his way back into the bar. “Put some pants on,” he suggests, his voice cracking, betraying a depth of emotion. It’s an example of what the show does so well: highlighting the messiness and chaos of these characters—Hannah, unshowered and barely dressed, carrying a bloody Qtip in a Ziploc like a souvenir goldfish from a carnival—while still firmly establishing them as worthy subjects of love and lust, obsession and grief.
Immediately upon getting inside, he tells the bartender, “I’ll have a Jack-and-ginger, actually.” When Natalia asks if he’s sure, he replies, “I should be able to show you a nice time.” What follows is a chaotic montage set to Fiona Apple’s “Valentine”: I stand no chance of growing up / I’ve made my peace, I’m dead, I’m done.
Adam continues his arc towards implosion, taking Natalia back to his apartment for the first time and having the kind of seedy, dark sex we’ve watched him have with Hannah time and time again. And while Hannah found it thrilling, soaking up Adam’s attention like a sponge, regardless of what form it came in, Natalia decidedly does not.
It’s a tough watch in an episode full of tough watches—but unlike earlier scenes, we aren’t granted the anesthetic of absurdity. “I really didn’t like that,” she says, prompting Adam to ask: “Is this it? Are you done with me?”, the veil wearing thin on his attempted sabotage. Natalia just stares into empty space.
In the subsequent and final shot of the episode, we find Hannah on the edge of her tub, again falling into her tics, a wad of cotton in her bad ear. She considers for a moment, and then raises a fresh Q-tip up to the other side. In this parallel moment, Hannah and Adam have regressed to the most self-destructive versions of themselves, insistent on pushing further and further, grasping at something that, in the dim of night, looks a lot like control.
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When I mention Girls to people, a common response is: I can’t watch it, the characters are so unlikeable. It’s a silly argument, though; television’s purpose is not to present morally infallible characters. Yes, the titular girls are myopic and sorely privileged, but I can’t pretend to not see myself in them. Perhaps it is a self-fulfilling prophecy, but the fact is: I am a Brooklyn-based writer with OCD and a comically tragic dating history; I am a musician who has performed at Pete’s Candy Store and posted a deeply earnest music video on YouTube; I am an alcoholic in recovery who has had to go to women’s meetings to avoid making poor romantic decisions.
In recounting this to my therapist, she posited the question of whether this interferes with the escapism—whether these parallels undermine the relaxed detachment one might hope to achieve when watching television. My answer was that there is still some form of comfort to be found, though to her point, not because Girls offers an alternative to reality, but instead in the knowledge that none of my experiences are ever singular. I am not an island; I am not even that interesting—and isn’t that such an incredible relief? A similar throughline can be found across recovery spaces: you are not “terminally unique.”
There was, and continues to be, something deeply calming about watching a show about shitty people: a world in which sex is quotidian; where you hurt your best friend and find a way to make it right; where addicts are lovable and rent is too high and self-mythologizing is an itch you can’t stop scratching.
Even my use of the word “shitty” is some form of self-protection, the creation of a cushion between me and them, but ultimately, I don’t think these characters are shitty people. I think they’re people who behave badly, and then behave better, and then, despite best (or maybe just mild) efforts, go back to behaving badly.
For all of the hijinks I’ve gotten up to—and all the texts from close friends saying “That sounds like a Girls episode”—there is a rich current of emotion that underpins my relationship to the show. I’ve pointed my own family and friends towards scenes, trying to explain: this is how it feels inside my head. I’ve found genuine solace, received actionable advice, and found the comedy in what once felt so dire. This show has gifted me the needle in the haystack.
Girls is a show about people whose lives often mirror my own—or perhaps, whose lives I’ve modeled my own after—and rewatching it, I still feel the thrum of resonance deep in my gut. It’s the story of a girl growing up and doing it badly; a girl reaching for things to soothe the ache until those things begin to kill her; a girl believing her own adolescence is a global concern.
For better or worse, I—along with the younger versions of myself at sixteen, at twenty, and now at twenty-eight—am a Girls girl.