Welcome to the promised very special incredibly spoilery edition of Existential Wednesday. Fair warning, the musings go where they go, and today that is into some deeply spoiler filled places. If you haven’t seen Avengers: Infinity War, beware!
Continue at your own risk:
Infinity War simultaneously shattered my heart and unwound the knots in my anxiety. It was a bad week. Faithful readers know about my doc program woes, and I was still trying to unravel what was happening with my future. I was finally ready to talk about failing to get into programs, but the prospect of telling everyone who helped me so far about failing left me shaken. At home, prep was beginning for my Dad’s cancer treatment and then he had a stroke. There was no warning. Other than the (unrelated) cancer, my Dad was healthy. One moment he was working his two jobs, the next I was heading to a hospital to see him. The stroke affected the speech area of his brain. I am no neurologist, but I know enough from my psychology training to recognize based on the MRI how fortunate my father was, and how much worse things may have gone. I split my time between work, the hospital, and being there for my mom for a week. My anxiety level was maxing out.
Before the awful week began I made plans to see the newest Avengers endeavor with one of my closest friends. We were prepping by watching through the Marvel movies I missed while in grad school, and planning to go opening night.
By opening night, my Dad was out of the hospital. During his week there, I channeled my anxiety into managing everything that happened, but when he got home and life settled, the anxious energy remained at a high tilt. With nowhere to go, the constant strum of anxiety was turning into irritability and sometimes outright anger. I was frustrated at my Dad for being a notoriously difficult patient and with my life for continuing to send terrible surprises my way. It became clear that my mental health was deteriorating and I was one notch from yelling at my parents to just stay healthy as if their recent tendency to take turns visiting the ER was an active attack on my fraying nerves.
So, I decided to keep my appointment with the Avengers.
Infinity War ended up an interesting chicken soup for my stress fractured soul. If you watched the movie, you know that it began with the death of my beloved Loki and ended with half the population of the universe vanishing into dust. I cried when Loki died, but the ending took it a step further. It has been a long time since a movie shocked me as much as Infinity War. Seeing it in a crowded theater, I felt the tension rolling around me. It was horrifying to watch the scenes where everyone vanished. Then in the midst of so many emotional deaths there was that moment.
Catching up on the Marvel movies I missed meant I saw Age of Ultron, Civil War, and Homecoming back to back days before seeing Infinity War. So I watched Tony Stark transform from egocentric Iron man into the beating heart that is Iron Dad in quick succession. I am weak for found family stories, where people who are not related craft together a community. Watching Tony create his android son,Vision (in Infinity War, Bruce even refers to Vision as having part of Tony in his personality) and then adopt Peter Parker (referred to by Dr. Strange as Tony’s ward) triggered all the most warm feelings inside me. So, in the end, to see Tony watch Peter fade out as he holds him pulled every emotional cord in my body. I cannot think about that moment without getting misty eyed. I was shaky when I left the theater, and for the first time in recent memory, I did not turn on a podcast and instead drove home in silence.
I also came home no longer angry.
Infinity War was a good movie in many respects. It was well crafted and intelligently executed. The acting was superlative. The deaths were haunting. The movie was also good for me. Every emotion that rose up in me over the turns my life was taking, emotions that I buried and tried to muscle past, the movie brushed up against and released. I felt shocked about my father’s unforeseen stroke, and I felt shocked by the carnage at the movie’s end. I was grieving the loss (if temporary) of a doctorate dream, of a 5 year plan, of a life where I felt assured my parents were healthy. I grieved characters along with the loved ones they left behind. I felt the hopeless desperation at the moment when Thanos snaps his fingers reflecting back to me the moment when I stood in the hospital outside my father’s room whispering over and over to myself “this is not how my story is supposed to go.”
It was not that in any way the emotions stirred up by this movie were as real or important as the ones I felt for the people who actually exist in my life. In fact, the movie helped me experience those emotions because it was fiction. The narrative allowed me to feel intensely in a place that was harmless. I know that Black Panter and Spider-man both have sequels pending. I know that in comics, death is a temporary state. Comics use death to achieve narrative goals like resetting a situation to tell new stories or allowing characters to deepen their relationships. Nothing quite brings a family together like one of those family members briefly crossing over to the other side. I can reason my way out of even Loki being truly dead as much as the next person. But I was able to enter fully into the emotions in that moment, knowing that a year from now when the sequel comes out, things will be made right. I may not know where I will be in a year, but I know the the MCU will keep on movie-ing as long as there are tickets to be bought.
In psychology, there is a concept known as catharsis, whereby a person triggers their emotions and experiences them fully, allowing the person to release them. Similarly, in mindfulness therapies, the client learns to sit with emotions in the moment. The idea behind both is that by experiencing, the strength of emotions wane. An emotion that is surpressed grows stronger, while an emotion fully embraced loses its bite.
I saw the movie again today and each emotional beat still packed the same weight, but I also felt a warmness. This movie, like so many before it, is now forever woven into my story. This movie will be linked in my mind to the pain of that impossibly long week, but it will also remind me of the release. As the emotions rose and then faded out like…ash in the wind (too soon?).
That week was hard, this year has been long, and life continues to provide moments of both beauty and pain. But, for me and for the lost Avengers it is as Loki said, “The sun will shine on us again.”
Enjoy my existential crisis masked as a thought piece on Avengers? Come back next Wednesday for a special Mental Health Awareness Month post, and check out Friday’s bonus post for comic recommendations!
Existential Wednesday 