Real-life narration doesn’t include fourth wall breaks or church confessionals with Andrew Scott (as much as that would bring me joy). Instead, I believe it is quieter, more covert. It appears when the grade I wanted wasn’t the grade I got, or the clothes I wanted didn’t fit the way I had originally imagined them to, when the friends I wanted went too far or got too close, or the Pilates influencer on my feed got somehow even prettier than she already was. Individually, these moments don’t seem to matter much. Yet, somewhere along the way, you start to sum these up altogether. They become reflections of your self-worth, evidence that you could always do more, and become someone slightly more deserving of the life you imagine. 

For me, with every decision I made and every foreseeable consequence I faced, I began to ask: what does this say about me? 

I did not realise it then, but I had started to confuse this guilt with identity. 

And I’d remember seeing this somewhere: 

“I have a horrible feeling I'm a greedy, perverted, selfish, apathetic, cynical, depraved, mannish looking, morally bankrupt woman who can't even call herself a feminist.” – Fleabag

Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag (2016) stands out as a show that confronts the reality of trying (and failing) to live your life to its fullest potential. Although its protagonist remains unnamed, her anonymity becomes part of the show’s brilliance: she could be anyone. Through knowing glances at the camera and brutally honest monologues, Fleabag reveals how much of our lives are lived according to other people's expectations: their terms, their choices, their definitions of who we should become. The camera becomes more than an audience. It becomes the place where Fleabag can explain herself before anyone else gets the chance to.

Before we make our own judgement, she has already made it for us. Before someone can point out that she has been selfish, she gives us her confession. By turning her pain into a joke firsthand, she takes control of the narrative but does not realise that she can never control its perception. 

Fleabag knows herself fully. Or at least, she thinks she does.

While the universal truth of life is that our choices shape us and those around us, Fleabag turns that lens inward. Long before we decide who we want to become, we learn how to criticise the person we already are. We become fluent in measuring ourselves against impossible ideals, collecting evidence of every perceived failure. We take instances that should have remained moments in the flow of time and turn them into definitions. 

For Fleabag, her mistakes are not simply consequences of poor decisions one after another. Rather, they become the foundation upon which she builds her understanding of herself. This understanding of herself, as viewers come to know, is far from simple. By not identifying as a feminist, she puts a distance between the perfect ideal of a woman she strives to be, or perhaps that her mother was, and the cynical ideal that stands in front of her in the mirror. That is not to say she’s rejecting feminism, but that every decision, every consequence, and every relationship up to this point have become evidence that she has failed not only as a person, but as the woman she believed she was supposed to become. And in today’s world, this is just one of the cruelties that being a woman gets you: how often the standards placed upon us contradict one another but simultaneously remain expectations that we must meet in order to be a socially desirable member of society. Be ambitious but not intimidating. Be independent, but don’t tarnish your character. Be desirable, but not overtly sexual. Be a feminist, but at the end of the day, never fail at being a woman. 

The tragedy is not that there exists no version of ourselves that can satisfy all these contradictions. The tragedy is that when time comes to inevitably fail at one of them, we start to question ourselves. 

When I first watched the show at 17, Fleabag offered me a glimpse into a woman so different. She drank, smoked, sabotaged relationships, had an affair, and carried grief I could barely start to understand. We had almost nothing in common. Yet as the years passed, I found glimpses of myself in her. Not in her mistakes, but in the way she narrated them. 

While my museum of failures was entirely different, the vocabulary I used was not. When we define what a moment means, we give it the power to start defining who we are. That is what Fleabag does constantly. 

Throughout the show, she carries Boo’s death, the relationships she has fucked up, and her moments of selfishness towards others not as experiences she has survived but as evidence she must constantly present against herself. And in doing so, she becomes both the person who is hurting as well as the person responsible for delivering this hurt. Every mistake becomes another reason to keep herself at a distance from the woman she believes she should have been. 

And perhaps that is why, when Fleabag stands at her father’s door in the dead of night, the words she uses to describe herself are not simple criticisms, but a confession rooted in the forgotten memory of a woman who has lost sight of the difference between knowing herself and condemning herself to misery for the rest of her life. By mistaking self-awareness for understanding, she cries out, believing that knowing her flaws encompasses the entirety of her existence. 

But a person cannot be reduced to their worst moments; at least this much grace we must give each other. 

As the screen goes black, it is disheartening to realize that Fleabag was never the disgraced woman she feared she had become. She was a person deserving of compassion while still being imperfect. We all are.