One summer during college, three of my my girlfriends discovered the legally ambiguous streaming capabilities of Sidereel, and consequentially discovered Sex and the City. Regardless of your feelings on the series, I defy any female watching to refrain from three distinctive behaviors – roasting the outfits (typically Carrie and Miranda’s), rolling your eyes every time Carrie begins writing one of her blog posts, and perhaps most indulgently – analyzing which character you most identify with.
As a group of four, it was only natural for one of us to assume each role. The disciplined and direct one of the group was our natural Miranda. The confident, uninhibited one, Samantha. The sweet, optimistic friend fell into the role of Charlotte. Leaving me to assume the role of Carrie.
With as much ease as I’d been able to characterize the other four women, I struggled to identify which characteristics could be attributed to Carrie. Then I realized I could think of them, they were just largely negative. Impetuous, cheeky, and immature at best. Reckless, annoying, and emotionally stunted at worst? Surely, that couldn’t be me – this designation was by default only, and not due to any actual parallels.
As time went on, however, it became harder to ignore certain similarities. Around the same time that I received my Carrie classification, I transformed my childhood hobby of journaling into a (now-defunct) blog. As graduation approached, I became increasingly tempted to accept a role drafting content for a teen magazine (though in my defense, I eventually took a more stable, and decidedly more fulfilling role within Teach for America). In years to come, I would begrudgingly note that Carrie was one of my Myers Briggs celebrity counterparts, and recently received another harsh dose of reality when the Open Source Psychometrics Project released a fictional character quiz that ranked Carrie in my top 10 matches – out of EIGHT HUNDRED possible results. But perhaps the most damning evidence was my intermittent ten-year relationship with a guy who I repeatedly (and naively) convinced myself I could be “just friends” with, despite an array of past experiences debunking this assertion.
So maybe I was in fact a Carrie Bradshaw. I may not have had the Vivienne Westwood, or Vera Wang, or Christian Louboutin/Dior that fit the persona, but at least I had my own Miranda Hobbes, Samantha Jones, and Charlotte York/Goldenblatt.
