My dearest Anne...

I hate change.

I'm sure that this is not surprising to you. Heavens, the focus of this blog has become my snail-like pace of healing over my divorce-in fact, I don't write on the blog all that much precisely because I feel like it's nothing new to read about the most small little steps that I have managed.

Anyway, I hate change and therefore most of the things that I most adore are from my childhood. If I lived in a perfect world, I would go home to late 1980s/early 1990s music, television, movies, clothes, you name it. I know in my head that it has been 20 years since I graduated from high school, and in those 20 years the world has changed in amazing and most wonderful ways. I can remember reading a review for The Net when it came out and the reviewer saying, "You can't actually order a pizza online." And I think about how basically my entire world is online now, and it has made shopping so easy, and I can connect with people that I actually know in real life and people that I have never met but now love beyond recognition, like Jamie Golden, who is just perhaps the funniest person ever in the world.

But in my heart, which is, as we know, an entirely different beast, I long for my Wilson Phillips tapes and my pegged jeans and for TV movies about proms that aren't in any way ironic. Thus, I am none too jazzed about this remix of Anne of Green Gables on Netflix. I love my Anne in giant puff sleeves, I love my Gilbert mooning over Anne in an obsessed manner but not so sissy that I can't see his appeal, and there is only one Marilla Cuthbert, and that is Colleen Dewhurst.

I don't want Anne to be gritty. I don't want Anne to be someone that I, as a middle American white girl with two living parents, cannot relate to. My Anne is, was, and always shall be Megan Follows.

I watched the CBC Anne of Green Gables well before I read the book. This book, I might add, is what I will answer if you ask my favorite book ever of all time. And yet-I love the miniseries more. That is how hard I fell for this magical production that would turn up on PBS every pledge season like clockwork.

I read Anne (all eight books) to Betsy a few years ago and I was struck at the time by how much I truly love the miniseries considering all of the liberties Kevin Sullivan took with things that I genuinely love in the book. I forgive Anne of Avonlea (Anne of Green Gables Part II, if you are in Canada) its many missteps because I love the character of Emmaline, who I do realize I resemble far more than Anne, and I love Morgan Harris, and I love that Anne utters my most favorite line of all human time, which sadly is not in the actual book, "I discovered that it's not what the world holds for you, it's what you bring to it."

Anne came into my life at the most precious time, when I was forming who I am and what I bring to the world. And she encouraged me to create-to think that what I had to say has merit.

And I have been writing ever since. There are many times that my writing, especially on this blog, just seems like the same drum beat again and again. I long for a day to be able to write a blog post about a change in my life, about a new person and a new love and everything that goes with it. But I just can't quite get there. I try-I have been asked out, I have even been on dates, I attempt to flirt with people, which is frankly just a lot of me being awkward, but my practice person at least seems somewhat okay with it.

For now though-for now I am learning what it is to be myself, which is a kind of wicked cool thing to do as a grown adult. And my touchpoint for who the heck it is that I am, that's Anne Shirley. She never loses hope, she never looks at life as a struggle but as an adventure.

She is my true north. And she's in a 1980s puff sleeve concoction that may seem dated and silly in this gritty, real 2017. She is who I long to be.