We Love Our Wednesday Addams on TV But Never in Real Life
Let's be honest about how we treat people who are different
Perhaps I’ve watched Wednesday over a dozen times since it premiered on Netflix? What’s not to love about murder, mayhem, monsters, and existential teenage angst. It reminded me of growing up as a teenager in the 90s minus the intrusion of digital technology and the performance it demanded of children. While there’s much to reviled about the 80s-90s (rampant misogyny, racism, sexism, homophobia, and the rise of the Christian right), there was a simplicity that is archaic, quaint, and downright unfathomable.
In 1993, I was a seventeen-year-old freshman in college navigating freedom, adulthood, sex, drinking, and voice mails. Who could possibly have time for the internet back then? Our technology consisted of J. Crew catalogs and compact discs, which slowly overshadowed the mixtape because we could skip! rewind! advance the lyrical plot! with the press of a button.
We’ll never return to that from which we’ve come. And only Gen-X, the forgotten generation, will truly understand this. Perhaps this is the only thing we have clutched to our chests—a march into adulthood without the taint of technology. Even in 1997, my senior year in college, people eschewed the cellular phone and the computer. There was a deep desire, still, for connection. For touch. For humanity.
But humanity under the guise of masks because it was imperative that we fit in, to quote Patrick Bateman. Friends of mine secreted away their gayness only to come out in the 2000s when it was socially acceptable. I’ve been in therapy since I was seventeen but no one ever knew this because it wasn’t fashionable to be mentally ill. This was a time when people said, that’s gay, you’re crazy, that’s mental.
I watch the years cycle past and the sleek phones that replaced the brick ones and the social media sites that usurped blogs and AOL instant messenger. I watched the age of political correctness become mainstream, and while I’m thrilled we’re in a place where we acknowledge the hurt we’ve caused towards people who are not straight, white Christians, I can’t help but think we’re nowhere near recognizing our individual humanity.
Millennials, for all their supposed wokeness, still bear the weight of the generations that preceded them. Still reared with the old norms in the rear view, no matter how much they deny them. It’s only the kids coming up, who collectively shout, what the fuck is this, that gives me hope. But let me not reduce this to a battle of the generations because that would be me 100% missing the point.
I didn’t think I’d like Wednesday. I had no interest in the Addams family when I saw the old reruns on television and the movies in the 90s. Though I adored Christina Ricci to the point of obsession for her performances in Buffalo 66 and The Opposite of Sex. But when I binged the series on Netflix, I felt…delight. Here was a magical school of weirdos, a safe place where people could be their unadulterated selves, and when the real world and hate intervened, it was battled successfully and swiftly.
What a beautiful, terrific fiction.
Because while folks replicate dances on TikTok and don all black, I can’t help but think we’re no further in the acceptance of people who are different from when I was a college freshman and my friend Lauren became goth, dropped out of Fordham, worked at a record store, and blasted Siouxsie and the Banshees. The eye roll was collective. What was she doing? Who drops out of college? Who throws their future away? Who paints their face bleach white and dyes their hair jet black?
We love to romanticize the other, but we’re still othering them.
I read comments about people’s views on the homeless issue in New York (my home, which is currently riddled with long-term tourists who never grew up there and saw the city for what it used to be before its ruin—sorry, not sorry) and repeatedly see the words “those people.” The “we are not them” when a confluence of events could so easily turn you into them. How people conflate violence with mental illness and the desire to erase them, put them in “some place” far from view.
I remember my woke friends, who love to post messages in support of mental health, abandon me because someone who has depression and doesn’t snap out of it is too much to bear. I see people bullied for being different, even still, and I wonder how far we’ve actually come. We have words for wokeness, we’re more educated, but are we better? Are we more patient, compassionate, and kind?
I don’t think so.
We love to support the mentally ill only if we don’t have to deal with it. We only support difference when it goes viral or it’s at a safe remove. We love to watch fantasy on television, our laptops, and phones, but when met with reality it suddenly becomes too much to bear. We crawl back to that which is familiar and safe. We cleave to our peer groups, which have similar social, economic, and political views because humans are predominately tribal even if we don’t want to admit it.
How can we say we celebrate difference when we live in a country, in a reality, divided by hate?
And I’m not exempt. I haven’t spoken to friends who supported (and continue to support) Trump and the Republican party because I wholly don’t agree with the world they want to bring to bear. I myself struggle to meet them halfway even though I know their humanity exists.
As I grow older, I’m supposed to be more conservative but I’ve become a weirdo evangelist. I’m only comfortable around people who want to be around difference. With my new therapist, I’m discovering that I’m on the spectrum (translation: autistic) and while this relieves me because it explains oh-so-much, it makes me feel that I will always be different. I will always walk through the world using a different lens no matter how much I’ve learned how to mimic “normal.” My mimicry has gotten so good over the years, it’s sometimes difficult to decipher what is normal and real for me versus society.
Sometimes, I feel so lost in my difference even if the world is populated by so many people like me. Why? Because we live in a world that still undermines and demeans difference. It’s actually worse that the 90s because we were ignorant. We didn’t have the vocabulary for wokeness. But now we do and what have we done with it? Has the plight of weirdos gotten better? I don’t know. I’m not sure.
All I know is I’m not sure how far we’ve actually come, and when we’ll get to a place where weirdos and normies will live in harmony. Or, if that want is a fantasy best recreated on TV.
Felix is okay. I don’t want to get into it, so please don’t ask. He’s not 100% but he’s fine for now. I’m dealing with this offline.
I’m reading Kate Atkinson’s Emotionally Weird and I love it.
Lately, I’ve been focused on my resale business, which has taken me away from the marketing stuff because I hate new business, hate pitching, hate people, etc. Though, I know I have to get out there and pitch again. But, for now, I love selling clothes to people. Shop my shop, if you’re so inclined.
Instagram is about performance, but how are the other social networks different, IMHO? Also, welcome to geriatric social media, whatever that means. And, apparently, social media is ending. Natch.
I’ve no idea where I plan on living after I’m done housesitting in April. I’m open to specific ideas. Namely, cheap and not around a lot of people.
Can I be a weirdo that goes out in public looking like a normie? 😁
Good stuff Fee! Glad to hear Felix is coming round.