False Narratives: How TV Shaped My View on Reality

Certain dates stand out: May 1, October 3, and June 3. These dates, deeply ingrained in the television and memes I grew up with, hold a unique significance. Though they have no real-life importance, they become something special each year.

On May 1 versions of this spam the internet.

October 3 has become Mean Girls Day.

And though no one got married on June 3, I got married on June 4.

Although the wedding date was a coincidence, I can't help but think about the merging expectations of pop culture and my own reality.

The Allure of TV's Perfect Worlds

"Gilmore Girls" holds a special place in my heart. I've watched the series multiple times throughout my life. It consumed me every week before streaming existed. Whenever I was sad, nostalgic, or homesick, I put it on. Watching "Gilmore Girls" is like visiting a world I wish I lived in. I yearned for a mother-daughter relationship like Lorelai and Rory's but had something more like Lane and Mrs. Kim's.

It wasn’t just "Gilmore Girls" that I hoped for. I envisioned a moment where I'd get a makeover and become "the hot girl" like in "She's All That." I imagined going to prom and having a perfect kiss like "Mean Girls." I dreamed of graduating high school and having my childhood crush realize he had feelings for me, like in "Can't Hardly Wait." What I saw on the screen was what I believed existed beyond my own experiences.

Growing up, I had no reference point for what was “Normal” in America. To me, relationships like Lorelai and Rory's were what Americans experienced. Television was my only exposure to American life. My small bubble was limited to my urban surroundings and traditional Vietnamese upbringing. I didn't have my parents reflect on their stories about proms or high school dances. As a first-generation American, my family's American experiences started with my generation. In Vietnam, school wasn't a requirement. My mother started working young to support her family. Concepts like prom and dating were foreign to her. She lived in survival mode until she retired.

The Discrepancy Between Dreams and Reality

Watching television wasn’t more than dreaming and envisioning for me. It was hope for a world beyond my reality. It was a hope I believed I could experience. A world where I didn't feel the pressures of my life, the guilt of my parents, or the cultural divide of not being accepted. I hoped for a reality where I could just have fun and find joy in things.

Milestones like prom, graduation, and getting married, depicted in movies, set high expectations in my mind. I believed my life would have these perfect moments, just like in the movies. But reality was disappointing. I didn't go to prom. I didn't have the cinematic high school experiences I dreamed of. I never had a moment of acceptance like Lane and Mrs. Kim in "Gilmore Girls." The high expectations of these moments left me questioning if I could ever reach that perfect moment.

Behind the Scenes: The Illusion of Perfection

As rewatch podcasts come on air, they give you a backstage pass to the stories behind the stories. Listening to episodes of "Drama Queens" from "One Tree Hill," I realized the experiences that felt normalized to me influenced how I saw the world but weren’t even a reality to them. The perfect moments and storylines I saw and believed weren't even perfect moments for the actors playing them. They were just stories contrived from someone else’s moments that never happened. Britney Spears’ memoir “The Woman in Me” talks about moments I remember but shows what was curated sometimes against what she wanted.

These moments that I idealized growing up didn’t exist. They are stories. They were curated stories, made up by a whole team of people, not existing in my life, but leaving an expectation in my reality that wouldn’t exist in my life.

Finding My Own Perfect Moments

As I think about my wedding anniversary in a couple of days, a milestone day in someone’s life, I think about the father-daughter dance. This dance is an American tradition. There are countless YouTube videos of various father-daughter dances. I always wanted a moment like that with my father. But the reality is, I don’t have a relationship like that with my father. I decided to not have a father daughter dance because it felt disingenuous. My father hated dancing. Why push for something that would have made him feel uncomfortable, a concept he didn’t understand because he wasn’t born in the States?

The more I live my life and get older, the more I realize the expectations of having these moments set up in my mind are a disappointment. Not because life is disappointing, but because it didn’t fit my world and my reality. As I reflect on my life, the perfect moments weren’t the milestones I envisioned in my head but small moments that were truly unique to me: finishing writing my book at a café overlooking Lisbon, Portugal; hiking a glacier in Iceland with my future husband; having a family dinner surrounded by friends on my birthday in Pittsburgh.

Always Wanting More

I may be the only person who thought about these specific examples, but as I see the next generation come up, they may have different experiences that I have never experienced. They may not be glued to the television as I was. But from television screen to phone screen we are all watching something that is curated, filtered by someone else. And this story gets ingrained as reality. Naturally, like me, I always wanted and hoped for something to be my reality, only for it not even to be the character’s reality. No matter what generation we are in do we always want to be more than what we actually are?