Diving in to Save Ourselves

Intro: Pop Culture Therapy

(originally published summer 2019 at conversationswith.net)

Photo property of Cynthia O'Malley

"I'd forgotten not all victories are about saving the universe." 
Rory Williams, Doctor Who: God Complex

 

Okay, here’s the plan. We’re going to talk about Pop Culture (think Doctor Who, The Magicians, Buffy, Supergirl, and more) and how we can use it for personal understanding and growth. I call it “Pop Culture Therapy” but this is not in any way intended to replace actual mental health care with a licensed therapist and/or doctor. I encourage you to have a professional you can turn to, if not on a regular basis, at least during times of high stress or intense personal reflection work. I say “we” because I very much hope others will comment and share their experiences and their personal pop culture therapy moments and allow this to become a conversation. It’s scary to talk about these things publicly, but breaking down that stigma is a very important part of healing ourselves and our society. Our popular stories (whether in books, movies, television shows, comic books, fanfiction, radio dramas, theatre stages, or audio formats) are a reflection of ourselves, and learning from the stories of our time is something people have been doing since storytelling began. Understanding mental illness is vital, and it’s my hope that exploring it through these metaphors from popular stories will help others as it’s helped me.

Anxiety, depression, trauma and its lasting effects, shame messages, negative programming, all these things are seen in so many stories, but especially presented as metaphor in sci-fi and fantasy works. When the paranormal monster elicits the same reaction from a protagonist that I feel in myself when facing my mental health challenges, maybe I can learn from that story? These were the thoughts that led me down the path of Pop Culture Therapy.

I've been in therapy off and on for over 22 years, and I firmly agree with Mr. Platt, the short-lived school counselor in Buffy Season Three. "Any person - grown-up, shrink, pope - any person who claims to be totally sane is either lying or not very bright. I mean, everyone has problems. Everybody has demons, right? ... So the hope I bring you is demons can be fought. People can change. You can change." I see these words to be true in my own life and in the lives of everyone I know. Everyone has problems. Some problems are bigger than others, but comparison gets us nowhere. We can only address our own set of problems to the best of our abilities, which means finding the guidance, the help, the tools needed to fight those personal demons. And if we’re lucky and diligent, we can also find the gifts we’ve built ourselves out of the scraps our traumas left us.

In Doctor Who, Madame de Pompadour talks about this dichotomy as she says "It's the way it's always been. The monsters, and the Doctor. It seems you cannot have one without the other."

Rose: "Tell me about it. The thing is, you weren't supposed to have either. Those creatures are messing with history. None of this was ever supposed to happen to you."

Madame de Pompadour: "Supposed to happen, what does that mean? It happened, child. And I would not have it any other way. One may tolerate a world of demons for the sake of an angel." (“The Girl in the Fireplace”)

When we recognize the positives we've learned and gained through the very process of living with our mental health challenges, and especially when we actively work to heal from past injuries, large and small... we may also see that we can't have those good things without having had the bad ones. Does the Doctor cause the chaos? Not usually, and in fact, he often appears in the midst of it because the TARDIS knows he is needed there. 

As I’ve been embarking on Big New Things lately (more writing stuff, plus moving into an RV to travel full time) I keep looking back over other beginnings in my life, the early, scary, unsure days that mark the start of so many big journeys; romantic/sexual/domestic relationships, becoming a mother, college, grad school, jobs and self-employment adventures, large creative projects, lifestyle changes, personal growth quests, spiritual path work, and more. I’ve thought about this a lot recently, and I’ve realized it’s all about diving in.

Brene’ Brown calls it Daring Greatly and wrote a whole book about it, and at the core daring and diving are so very similar. We have to let ourselves be vulnerable enough (daring) to open up to change (diving). Brown talks about how shame is tied into our self-worth, and vulnerability is how to combat shame. In “The Gifts of Imperfection” she talks about living a wholehearted life through authenticity. As I look back throughout my life, I can see that the most important parts of it, the parts of my life that made me who I am today, they came out of the choices I made most authentically. I haven’t always been confident in my choices, but I’ve done my best to move through them and learn from them. I feel the most authentically me when I reflect back on the changes I’ve made after one of these life journeys, and I suspect it’s because I’m growing and discovering myself the most in those times.

In the TV series Supergirl, Kara expresses her trepidation about all the big things changing and all the potential in front of her. Cat says “Dive.”

Kara: “What do you mean, like… Like, into a lake?”

Cat: “You’re standing on the shore, afraid to dive into the new waters, and you’re afraid because you don’t want to say goodbye to the mild-mannered, lovelorn Kara Danvers, the sweet and dutiful assistant to Cat Grant. You are standing there looking out at your options; the icy blue water, the fast-flowing river, and the choppy sea. And they all look very appealing to you because you’re dying to go for a swim, but you know that water is going to be cold, and the journey is going to be hard, and when you reach the other side, you will have become a new person. And you are scared to meet that new version of yourself. Now, we all get used to our own personas, and we’re used to our own comfort zones, but, trust me, in order to live, we must keep daring. Keep diving.” (Season 2, Episode 1)

That right there, meeting that new version of ourselves, that’s what it’s all about. We’ve all had times in our lives when we dove into some new phase, some new activity or interest, some new relationship, some new version of ourselves. We dive into it, we get lost in it for a while, and then we resurface, make our way to the shore again, and start figuring out who we became during that swim.

I could write (and to some extent will, over this series of essays) so many stories about things I’ve begun, parts of my life that were new beginnings and brought with them all the fear and trepidation that comes with the unknown, but I would (and will) also have to acknowledge the hindsight with which I view them. The lens of time and experience and growth and change that tints those memories of the past can shade out the anxious feelings we once had, make them seem less than they are in the moment. In this moment, as I embark on sharing with the world this idea of Pop Culture Therapy that I’ve been working on in various forms for over a decade, I’m feeling all the fear and trepidation without the distance of time or the foreknowledge of how it will have been received years from now. But because of the changes in my own psyche during that decade of work, I’m now able to push through those fears and nerves and take these big steps in my new beginning. I have no idea who I’ll be on the other side, but I look forward to meeting her.

Maybe that’s the point? It’s not about what we’re beginning. It’s about the fact that we Are beginning. It’s about beginning things again and again. Finding new beginnings, new things to try, new places, new understandings of ourselves, new stories, new people. The beginnings are childhood. We talk, and it’s not “right” but we don’t care – we keep talking and expect people to find a way to understand us. We keep talking and make little adjustments as we go, and we don’t even know we’re “learning to talk” as we do this. We walk, and we fall down but we keep getting up and keep walking and then one day we can run. And we still fall down, but we still run. These are the days when we’re learning the basics, and starting to learn what we don’t yet know.

I create art, write stories, make things. I've been told that my art, my stories, my crafts have touched others, moved them, helped them in some way. In almost every case, I couldn't have created that particular thing without experiencing some kind of pain or loss or struggle. When learning creative writing, we're taught that a good story has ups and downs, that character development means they have to make mistakes and learn from them to become better versions of themselves, that a plot without conflict is incomplete. That's because the best stories mirror life. We learn and grow by overcoming obstacles we face, by recognizing and acknowledging our mistakes so we can learn from those too. This is not to say that everyone must face tragedy or trauma to grow or be interesting, but everyone does have their own ups and downs, and their own obstacles to overcome. Personal development, like character development, is about facing those struggles and finding the hidden strengths within. 

Ram Dass said “Who you think you are will always be frightened of change. But it doesn’t make any difference to who you truly are.” I think what he means by that is that when we’re frightened of the change, it’s because we don’t know that part of ourselves. Like Cat Grant said, “you’re afraid to meet that new version of yourself.” Maybe it’s not the circumstances changing that scares us, but the way those circumstances will change us? But once we’ve taken the dive and gone through those changes, it’s just “who you truly are” and those fears are no longer relevant to this new version of us. It doesn’t mean all our fears go away, of course. There will be new challenges, new obstacles to face, new journeys to take, which means new changes in our lives to trigger new fears. But do we let that fear stop us from facing that change?

That's the "monsters and the Doctor" too: the monsters are the fears we face, the obstacles we overcome, the challenges we battle, and the "Doctor" is the strengths we find within because of those fights. Every protagonist learns that they are stronger in some way after the scary conflicts, so why shouldn't we? Are you willing to dive?

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