Lala’s Thoughts: Instyle July 2017 “Funny Girl”

I used to read magazines articles often when I was younger. When I was in college and even the first few years after college, I had subscriptions of beauty and fashion focused magazines because those are the kind of things that I’m interested in reading about. Light reading, new releases of current season’s best beauty products, and what to pack for your next getaway… sometimes the mind needs to read about casual things like the aforementioned. And of course, as a girl I’m always drawn to pretty colors and pictures anyway.

I picked up the June issue of InStyle this weekend, quite honestly because I wanted something to read while I spend my morning on the elliptical. I thought the $5.99 price tag for a magazine was quite pricey but I came across the article “Funny Girl”. “Funny Girl” is about actress Ari Graynor who detailed her journey into acting and how she eventually found herself after years of being labeled “funny” and her quiet tendencies ignored.

A few of my favorite quotes:

“my whole being hurt, so I put on a personality bandage made up of jokes, self-deprecation, and faux confidence…

‘the pretty girls’- the ones who didn’t have to work so hard to get through the day, who didn’t have to make a joke to be acknowledged.

…my biggest fear had been all along: that I would never fit in anywhere if I were completely myself.

It was never about ‘pretty’ or ‘funny’, it was just about wanting to be all of me, fre to roam the aisles…”

This doesn’t sound like a new or unique story to me. Too often, we think we know someone and we think that’s way it is, when in fact we really don’t know much beyond what they let us know. What we know is what has been shown to the world, and this does not apply only to social media. How many times have I told a story or acted a certain way just because it fits “my image”? How many times have I joked about myself because it’s what’s going to make people laugh? How many times have I sit quietly letting others make statements about me that aren’t anywhere near reality?

Perhaps too many times.

As I get older I definitely know what it means to “come into my own”. I didn’t leave everything behind and went soul searching in Europe like Graynor did but I think I’ve found a good part of me over the years. I’m more and more ok with being myself and not having a single person like me completely. It’s one big perk of getting old, I guess?