What drives you to love a TV series, movie or book?
What about music or dance?
Is it the story, the characters, the melody, the lyrics, the performance? What makes your favorites your favorite? Shared trauma is probably why I joined TikTok, listen to Taylor Swift, and re-watch The Big Bang Theory… over and over and over again.
Is it because misery loves company or the feeling of not feeling alone that throws us back into the cycle of repetition and wallowing?
I’ve been on an emotional roller coaster trying to re-define my world. Impending job loss, new state of residence, an increase in morally slanderous emails that I am alarmed any reasonable person would believe, much less feel inspired by, have left me with a sense of isolation and false hope that change is a good thing. Then I dove head first into a bucket of cheese and Halloween candy and pie… OK, not the pie yet, but I don’t believe for a second that I’ll skip it.
Earlier today, I was thinking of a scene in Boy Meets World where the Eric Mathews character says a line to the effect of, “Lose one friend, lose all friends, lose yourself.”
That may be an incomplete quote, my snowflake millennial ass is more about the feeling it invoked than the actual line so I did not look it up. But as I sat with that feeling of trying to parse out what defines a person, what makes people your friend or your foe, I wondered what about that scene made it powerful.
Was it the actors or the words? The performance or the story?
When you watch a film, professionals are performing the words someone pulled from within them to tell a story. Did I like the show Gilmore Girls because Alexis Bledel and Lauren Graham were iconic, or was it the fierce writing and story being told by Amy Sherman Palladino? Casting choices aside, would the show have had that same punch without those actors? Could the words and story evoke the same feeling on their own?
Backing out even further, are actions or words more impactful on your life? Could you live with genuine words in a world with disingenuous actions or a world of fake words and real actions?
Does it hurt more to be lied to or punched in the gut? Does it hurt more if you thought the person cared about you? What if the person lying to you didn’t matter? What if the person punching you in the gut was your best friend?
I was tasked with posting my own job for backfilling when it’s time for me to go. I know there is nothing that can be done, I moved to Idaho, but it hurt more than it should have. It was bad enough they asked for my letter of resignation to get the ball rolling, but then I needed to take my name off the organization chart and mark it as vacant before writing up the Request Authorization form and say why my job is so important, someone else should do it.
Needless to say, I’ve been very confused by my urge to both cry and hit something.
So like any person who can’t wear her pants after stress eating her feelings since August, I decided to do fitness.
I have a Peloton subscription, it’s one of my few recurring monthly expenses that brings me guilt when I don’t actually use it. Last week, I did a strength workout, the week before stretching and strength, but I haven’ used the spin bike since I moved.
Not the Peloton bike, mind you, I have the knock off Costco version.
My husband mounted our old TV on the room in one of the bedrooms and got me a Firestick so I can have my own quasi gym, but I can talk myself out of anything but eating something filled with cheese or chocolate.
So, I started small, but today… today I told myself I would do the thing.
The big, scary, stressful thing because it wasn’t supposed to be any of those things.
Believe it or not, the mythical “they” claim exercise is supposed to be fun.
With the goal of mental clarity and defeat of fake demons in mind, I found a Mental Health Month compilation. A twenty-minute stretching class with my favorite American instructor, Rebecca Kennedy, was all about opening up and leaning into your body. It was effective and peaceful, making me feel all rainbows and positivity.
So, I pulled up one of the Spin classes from that grouping.
And now I’m literally broken.
Kendall Toole, a usually upbeat instructor, cultivated a playlist that reminded me of all the darkness lurking just on the edges. Of how hard it is to carry a heavy weight and try and keep up with everyone else. Pushing resistance and cadence while vocalizing so many internal struggles and thoughts that so many of us fight on a daily basis.
I couldn’t keep up.
I dropped the resistance long before she asked me to.
I slowed down before instructed.
In short, I lost the fight. It was too hard, but I didn’t stop.
Her words, her shared fight, it knocked me on my ass.
When I went into this ride, my goal was to feel powerful and like I could take on the world. Instead, I’m crying and letting go of the weight I couldn’t carry anymore.
Her words were more powerful than her riding and the 60+ resistance didn’t force me to stop as much as her sharing about how hard it is to fight against the weights we carry to do more. My boss asking me to enter my own job was not balanced by his single statement that he didn’t “want” me to leave. Taylor Swift giving us all the freedom to say, “It’s me, hi, I’m the problem,” didn’t give me the power to solve the problem. Having the words to tell someone you love them doesn’t mean you know how to show it to them.
As a writer, I want to believe that I can write the words to make it all wonderful.
As a mentally ill person, I feel like an actor trying to perform the reality someone else put in a script.
As a person, more often than not, I’m certain I’ve failed to be what the world wants me to be.
There is often a great deal of grief in loss, but we are taught that some losses are more impactful than others. A death is a much greater loss than the loss of a candy bar. But as a kid, you don’t really understand what it means that a person is “gone”. You do understand that your Skittles were run over by a truck.
We are told not to cry over spilled milk, or smushed Skittles, but that’s a bunch of malarkey. Grieve what hurts you. Change, loss, it’s all freaking hard and you should grieve and hug your beasties and flip off anyone who tells you they disagree with your feelings.
Loss, however small, can have a lasting effect. No one can tell you what that means to you except you.
Well, you and your dogs because they insist on being there for you no matter what and who wants to put their pets through that if it’s not a big deal?
