Me reading the IPCC reports
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BRIDGET JONES, CLIMATE HERO
Here is a non-exhaustive list of things Bridget Jones and Winston Churchill have in common:
Thoughtful but fairly eccentric moms
Bosses who at least seemed to loathe them
Famous underwear
Boldly sharing their commitments with the world
Publicly failing at many of those commitments
Drinking
Sequels not quite as good as the original
Coming through when it fucking counted
In this essay, I will argue that Bridget Jones is the perfect climate-era hero, because she is all of us.
On the one hand, Bridget Jones narrates her life out loud as the perfect 2024 Millennial doomer — hyper-aware, full of self-loathing, unfounded confidence and brutal cynicism, drowning in ice cream and doomscrolling.
She is resolutely dedicated to self-improvement, and breaks every commitment she makes to herself.
She loves her job.
She fucking hates her job.
She also fucking hates her boss, who 1) is awful and 2) wants to sleep with her, which she is 3) not adverse to, despite a slalom course of red flags.
Bridget Jones once diarized, “It is a truth universally acknowledged that when one part of your life starts going okay, another falls spectacularly to pieces.”
And she’s not wrong! If there’s a better metaphor for the climate transition, I’d like to hear it.
But on the other hand, when it counts, when everything is on the line, in the horrific moments after a SMOLDERING Darcy reads her diary and leaves, Bridget Jones embodies hope in a way we could all learn something from.
Not hope in a feely-feely kind of way, but in a “I have exactly one chance to chase Darcy down, right now, and it’s going to be in my jumper and underwear” kind of hope.
Hope in the very practical way “Men Explain Things To Me” and “Hope in the Dark” author Rebecca Solnit and, yes, Winston Churchill agree is the only way through life’s challenges, through sea level rise, or The Blitz:
By realizing in that last moment that it’s “not too late” — and then fucking doing something about it.
“Hope is not a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch, feeling lucky. It is an axe you break down doors with in an emergency.
To hope is to give yourself to the future - and that commitment to the future is what makes the present inhabitable.”
What Bridget and Winston realized in that pivotal moment is that the only way out is through.