You've Got Cojones! ☆ Watching Ugly Betty Again

It's 2018, and there are a million new shows to watch, but I decided this week to start watching Ugly Betty again, a show that premiered in 2006 when I was but an innocent child with bad hair and Harley Davidson t-shirts (I still think they're cool). Watching it over a decade later feels quite different. In the 00s I related to Betty mostly as a kid deeply concerned with being ugly, but my favourite characters were Marc and Amanda, the campy-cruel Team Rocket duo of the show.

Now, as an adult, I relate to Betty on a completely different level. Now I realise that her "ugliness" was far from the core of the show as a whole. She seems relatively confident and okay with herself in those terms, but her worries and difficulties are much more focused on money and work challenges. Her character has a lot more depth and nuance than I remember from the first time round, and I find myself liking and sympathising with her a lot more.

I think this reflects my changing attitude to myself and other people really well. I didn't like Betty much as a teenager because I didn't like myself and the surface level traits that I saw of myself in her. Watching now, I have much more appreciation for her, because she's such a conscientious, kindhearted person who tries her best and deeply cares about doing a good job. Now, she's an inspiration in the face of work and the particular complex feelings of incompetency and inadequacy that seem to be pretty much standard when you're a twenty-something. She's doing so well and I love her.

I also distinctly remember finding the nervous romantic exchanges between her and Henry in accounts across the series to be far too much for me. Every time they talked they were so nervous and awkward and tentative that I'd get really anxious watching them. It was borderline painful, and I felt like I could scrunch my entire body into a little compressed loofa of embarrassment. Now though, I just think it's cute, and I love them, and when they're being awkward and stuttering it makes me feel warm and fuzzy. It's a different world. And I think that maybe says the most about how I've grown as a person in all this time, too.

I'm so much of a happier person who is able to let their feelings just happen. I get nervous still, sure, but I don't really feel that deep need to scrunch up my entire being somehow. I just kinda let feelings wash over me like waves. It's not the same. I know how to hold them instead of stabbing them into all of my organs at once. Or something like that. I don't know, I just want to say that time passing is good, and revisiting something like this is a pretty magical experience, because it shows me just how different I am, and I get to enjoy it more than I ever could have as a teenager.

Somehow Ugly Betty is even better in 2018.