Culture. Eat it
24 January 2018
Let’s take a diary at random: Bridget Jones’s diary.
>Now let’s talk about the protagonist: let’s tell the truth, women, Bridget is nice because she seems to be worse than us. Perhaps, and I say perhaps, there are no Spanx knickers in our closet and we still don’t have her weight problems.
So it can happen to get in tune with others more for relief than for empathy.
I like Bridget because she uses the writing to make order in her life choices.
Rereading sometimes is just fine: see how far it has come, how many people we let in and then let it out to get better. In 2000 I also started to keep a diary much less charming than Bridget’s one but it turned out to be a therapeutic exercise like few others. It brought lucidity when it was not there, it helped me to release unnecessary tensions and made me see things in the right perspective, that is, resized.
Bridget Jones’s diary is a book full of unfulfilled good intentions just as it would happen in real life: because the failure of goals such as quit smoking, not to spend more than what you earn, eat and drink less makes Bridget human, real.
Things to do
Stop smoking
Do not drink more than 14 spirits a week
Reduce by 8 cm the circumference of the thighs
Feel more confident
Learn how to program the video recorder
Things to avoid
To smoke
Drink more than 14 spirits a week
Spend more than I earn
To lose patience with mum
Get depress because I’m not engaged
Like many of us, Bridget struggles to accept but the author, Helen Fielding, chooses to show this struggle with herself with irony. In this we should try to be more like her: let’s stop taking ourselves too seriously, let’s get away from people who make us feel inadequate.
Let’s give us a chance to accept us as we are.
To start we could recognize weaknesses and strengths of our body. You can not imagine the state of bliss that this acceptance leads to.
It will happen that you will wear what you like, enhancing yourself as you are, without knikers ready to contain you. You will eat to take pleasure in conviviality without thinking about the diet of tomorrow, that maybe you’ll start the same but at least you’ll enjoy the moment.
To continue we could avoid people and situations that are not good for our esteem. Trust in the only free gratitude of our talents is utopian.
Today, Bridget is no longer in a strict sense the portrait of the woman of today. But she is a woman who tries to survive herself and the expectations that others place on her and this, from 1995 to 2018, has not changed.
And even if the parameters of beauty, expectations and certainties are changing, the fact remains that with Bridget Jones’s diary the author has made exceptional the life of a woman like many other … except Colin Firth.
Reading time
a bit of Bridget for seven days
Ph. Sara Cartelli
© The Eat Culture
Author
Bio:
She is an art historian, optimistic and empathic by nature. She imagines a world where sow kindness enjoying the little things. She's in love with stories since she was a child, for the Eat Culture she eats books and arts. Per aspera ad astra says the only tattoo on her skin. It reminds her that the road that leads to her dreams is not always easy but that she never gives up.
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