The Almost-Right Thing

Discoverying Dawson's Creek | Part 1

A couple of months ago, I learned James Van Der Beek passed away from a social media reel by Tee Sanders Comedy. In her own comedic way, she shared how Van Der Beek , through his character Dawson from Dawson's Creek, was woven into a memorable season of her life. The news made me think of a high school friend of mine who had loved Dawson's Creek the same way, so I reached out. She was grieving too. And something about the weight of everyone's response made me want to finally see what the 1998 drama series was about.

I spent the next two months frequently binge watching all six seasons. I texted my friend throughout the show to tell her about the experience, but much of my critique was focused on how much the character Joey Potter had frustrated me. When it was over, she asked me what I thought and I didn't have an answer yet. I needed more time to process the variety of things that had come up for me. So I decided to write through it.

I was a little surprised that Dawson's Creek wasn't really about the main character Dawson. Six seasons in and the story that actually held everything together was Joey Potter's — her search for herself, her relationships, her inability to just settle somewhere and stay. In hindsight, I'm also surprised I didn't identify with her immediately because we had a lot in common. We both came from homes where love was complicated and inconsistent. We both grew up in small towns with big ambitions and a quiet persistent feeling that we were meant for something more. We were both smart enough to see the world clearly but still had to figure out most of it on our own. And neither of us was particularly good at asking for help.

And yet watching her, I found myself getting frustrated in a way I didn't fully understand at the time. She kept leaving relationships that looked meaningful from the outside. She would get in, feel something deeply, and then something would shift just slightly and she would be gone. Back and forth, circling the same people, the same feelings, never quite landing. While my friend had always identified with Joey, I labeled her as wishy washy and just didn't like the way she kept finding reasons to leave. I kept thinking — if you love him, why do you keep finding reasons for it not to be enough?

But the longer I sat with that question after the show ended, the more I wondered if it was even the right question, and the more I realized my frustration said more about me than it did about her. Because maybe she wasn't finding reasons to leave. Maybe she was just paying attention to something that took me a long time to identify in myself.

I didn't always have language for what I was moving toward. I just knew that where I was wasn't it. But it took a long time to trust that feeling. I had spent a long time believing that love should feel cleaner than that. That if something was real it would be obvious and lasting. I could trace that belief back to a few things that shaped me before I was old enough to question them — a complicated childhood where I spent more time imagining what love looked like and felt like than actually experiencing it, years of television and film that framed romantic love as the ultimate destination, and messages from the church that my young mind absorbed and simplified into something far more rigid than they were ever meant to be.

None of those things announced themselves as a belief system at the time. They just quietly became the way I saw things. And for a long time, that belief kept me in situations longer than I needed to be.

What I eventually reckoned with, watching this show as a middle-aged woman who had lived through enough to know, was that Joey was doing something in her youth that I hadn't given myself permission to do until adulthood. She kept refusing to pretend that almost right was right enough. And I think that's what actually frustrated me about her — not the indecision, but that she kept honoring a feeling I had spent a long time trying to override with logic and intention and just wanting things to work.

Somewhere in watching her do that, I realized I hadn't made peace with the fact that things are not as clean cut as I needed them to be. And in realizing that, I had to examine the grace I hadn't been giving myself for not always getting things right the first time. Joey gave herself permission to honor what she knew, even when she couldn't fully explain it. Watching her do that reminded me to make a more conscious decision to do the same with the decisions I have ahead of me. And acknowledging when something is almost right but not quite enough makes that evolution possible, because that knowing is the first step toward the clarity I had been waiting for before I felt I could move.

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