Famesick. Worksick. Hustlesick.
What Lena Dunham’s Famesick reveals about women, wellness, ambition, and 'performancing' success.
I listened to Famesick, which took me back into the types of pain women endure. Have you read it?
Lena Dunham’s memoir, Famesick, takes us on a journey through her rise to fame and failing body. From indie film festivals, to writing in her childhood room, to never fully moving out of her parent’s apartment in NYC until she left for London. Famesick’s patterns still haunt me, weeks after I read it.
I can see Lena typing and turning through pages of journals to create the book’s outline. Her memory is like a camera and the editing room, bright and brave, even when Lena claims she has a disassociation disorder.
I nodded my head while driving around or listening while emptying the dishwasher or cutting up snacks for the hangry tweens entering my house. I could NOT get enough in a knowing, painful, way.
The cover is an Alice in Wonderland-esque photo, showing us her downward trip. Having watched a few seasons of Girls, I googled images of Lena in all stages and ages which she explains in her memoir- eating disorders, mediation, post rehab body types. Her rise to writer/director fame could have been a one hit wonder after her many hospital stays throughout writing and starring in GIRLS.
Lena’s story is in part, where similarities brought back memories:
Her Hysterectomy - different prognosis and symptoms but a similar need to have the one organ that defines femininity, hormone balance (or at least it should have balance) removed. Her body, specifically her womb, haunted her painfully, like it was in the wrong body from the start. Every day was a hardship for Lena. For over 2 years, every day was a physical hardship and then a mental one.
Many women have partial or full hysterectomies, rarely given PT scripts or literally ANYTHING after the organ is gone. It’s odd to know you need to get rid of something painful, yet still feel empty when it’s gone. Shouldn’t I have felt relief? I worked with reiki masters to reset that part of my body that was not the same emotionally. Today, I’m at peace with the shift with two girls of our own. She wasn’t as lucky, even with egg retrieval.
Insight: women everywhere suffer physically and it can take 7-8 appointments to get a proper Uro/Gyno diagnosis. Ladies, keep asking for help and ask for the best Docs and eastern wellness practioners
Mantra: my body knows the answers. Breaks don’t mean broken. Rest can be very productive
Book to read: Louise Hay’s You Can Heal Your Life
Loneliness after Friendship Loss. Even in my first real job, I knew those coworkers were not my friends for life. I kept a distant friendship in the name of professionalism. Lena’s work and friendship were tangled like Anna’s braid in Frozen.
It seems over the last 4 years, I’m running out of friendship deposits. The bank is empty.
Maybe, like Lena, the depth to which I shared by physical struggles so soon after leaving my long time career I have peeled back friendships from that time. Famesick has me asking—Are women only able to meet you at THEIR stage not mine? Incessant ailments during Girls’ run, Lena passed out, blacked out, took to bed for days with endometriosis, landed in rehab for pain pills, and never took real vacations. She spoke about all of this often.
I know from personal and witnessed experiences. extreme pain creates a crevasse in your nervous system so deep, pain seeps out overflowing like the sink that’s been plugged. The memoir states her sickness are constantly unmanageable, torturing Lena.
Her best friend quietly left her side after the surgeries and breakdowns from pain never end. Her Hollywood actress and actor friends move around her like a ghost.
Running out of friendship deposits, or perhaps the depth to which I shared my physical struggles so soon after leaving my longtime job, I do not have many of the same friends I had from that era.
Insight: There are the women who likely feared being friends with me would cause their own physical demise the moment they turn 40, 45, 46, 47, 48, staring into mirrors under bathroom lighting that suddenly feels less forgiving, dumping pointless collagen powders and Pilates memberships and tiny acts of optimism instead of being able to help me.
Mantra: Not everyone will love you & that’s hard & OK. Things shift all of the time. There is a new bestie right around the corner.
Book to Read: Brene Brown’s Braving the Wilderness
Using power at work destructive behavior: at my most aggressive work schedule, and likely what I’d call my most powerful, I was playing as hard as I was working. Unlike Lena’s memory bank, I look at photos of me from my California days and the corners feel rounded, almost cinematic, like I was slightly outside my own body the entire time.
My SF apartment was stunning and all mine. I negotiated and paid for a brand new car on my own. I dated so casually that I still think I have a few first names only in old cell phones somewhere, because back then surnames felt unnecessary when nobody was supposed to stay long enough to require one. Drunk on California grape juice and ambition, custom suits lined my Carrie Bradshaw closet, it really did separate my bedroom and bathroom!
Insights: eventually you need to unpack what you want and how you want to get there, not what others say
Mantra: don’t be a mean girl, don’t act like work can save you from yourself, find joy.
My Differences from Lena’s life besides not being famous. I’m not so close to Lena’s story that I can’t see where our stories drift.
I get interested in trends, but I’m not addicted to much of anything …maybe shopping, maybe reinvention, maybe the dangerous little thrill of believing the next version of myself will finally arrive wrapped in 100% clarity and perfect hormonal balance, landing softly..
Only recently I’ve discovered that wanting was never somewhere ahead of me but has been trailing behind, gathering the varied fragments of every identity you have ever worn. For me that is daughter, executive, mother, wife, seeker, exhausted woman in a DR’s waiting room, beautiful woman at a dinner party, sad woman riding the subway carrying them carefully in her arms like broken heirlooms she still cannot bear to throw away.
I am me. I’m here now. The seeking has slowed, the heart lead living is front and foremost.
I ache for Lena and my own younger self who tried to keep up with nothing much keeping up with. Maybe this is the hidden business of wellness no one talks about. It’s never about the red light masks or supplements or peptides, but the endless reconstruction of the female ego after every identity that burns us alive. The marriages, surgeries, careers, betrayals, births, hormonal collapses, reinventions, ambitions, and tiny beautiful delusions we survive long enough to rename wisdom. We applaud women for becoming “well,” without ever asking what had to be buried, medicated, dissolved, forgiven, starved, softened, or left behind in order to appear that way in public.
Memoirs like Famesick linger long after the final page because beneath the celebrity is the familiar ache of women everywhere.
In good energy,
Lynn