The Summer I Turned Pretty: an anthem to chaos wrapped AS a girl's emancipation
I don't know about you but I have been the classic kid who was pretty as a child, and then went through acne, metal braces, and glasses, at a time in which contact lenses where not even an option yet. I have been bullied in school and then I suddenly bloomed and became one of the prettiest girls in the region. Can you believe it? Sounds like quite a story but it's true. However, this is how I am telling the story right now. When that happened to me I did not realize how pretty I had become, how incredible my blooming had been. I only realized it decades later. I was very humble and I was ultimately a nerd, as indeed I became a scientist, so, definitely not a mean girl who wants to take revenge on her bullies.
Despite I haven't really gained any pleasure from what many may consider a "revenge" against all the bullies who had marked my school years, nor I hated them at all really, when I read the title of this new TV show on Amazon Prime it did grab my attention. Initially I just saw it everywhere, but then one billboard crossed my eyes and it appeared to be perfectly designed, as much as the title itself, to make you stare at it as long you could, and until the traffic light would turn green.
So, I started watching it and I got to watch the first 4 episodes. It felt compelling, interesting, and surely designed to lead you to keep watching all of it. All of the revenges that a girl of that kind may want to take were concentrated in those short but perfectly packaged episodes. Despite I am not revengeful, and so I did not gain any pleasant feeling out of it, the movie was genius.
But something was not sitting well with me. I did not feel good after watching it.
As a medium, I often passively channel everything that I see on the screen, so, the protagonist's character would stuck with me all day, but it didn't feel pleasant, it didn't feel aligned with my way of being. I had to come to realize through experience - and by overcoming decades of self-doubt, one narcissistic relationship after the other, one gaslighting strategy at a time - that my way of being is actually very pure, genuine, authentic, and so, if something doesn't feel aligned with me, now I know that there must be something wrong with it. But I am in good faith and, as a habit and a mindset, I avoid making up my mind before having the certainty of having found something wrong. So, I kept watching it, not expecting what I was going to find at all, and as a matter of fact I watched all of it. But it's at episode 5 that something clicked in me: I had a major spiritual awakening, another one, but this time it's meant to stay.
