I really hate this, I say, curling up on myself as I listen to people tell their stories of being haunted. The Spirits podcast was playing an episode where people wrote in their stories, and I was growing increasingly creeped out. It occurred to me more than once this was a bad idea. Afterall, my massive anxiety and insomnia love to tangle up with any spooky material I consume to produce bumps in the night to wake me up right as I am going to sleep. I am already mentally calculating whether I have Xanax to take for sleep tonight if my brain decides that my room is haunted (very unlikely, though not entirely without true believers as you will see tomorrow).
You see, I am truly weird about fear.
I am in no way an adrenaline junkie. Roller coasters are made by the devil, I keep telling people who seem not to believe me. I really did try to give them a go, especially as my older brothers are obsessed with coasters and we have been several times to Hershey
Photo of Lightning Racers at Hershey Park from their website. Aka the ride I almost passed out after.
Park (the chocolate themed wonderland with shockingly scary rides). I went on one, that allows children starting at about 8. I was already almost an adult. It was horrible, but I was always the one who wanted to prove herself to her older brothers so I went 4 times. By the end of the final ride with me insisting I was fine, my parents made me take a seat on a nearby bench because I was so pale they thought I was going to pass out (fainting, the occupation of Victorian corsette wearing ladies and me. I’ve passed out a truly astounding number of times for a real person and honestly pushing it even for a fictional character). The Tower of Terror drops? No way in hell. I was thrilled when my brothers had kids and suddenly I could “escort the kiddos to the children’s rides” and let them roller coaster. I get to be an awesome aunt and escape my own nightmares? Score for me.
So, scares that involve my body being moved in any way are not great. I am also deathly afraid of closed spaces and they are in no way fun.
I do love haunted houses as long as I am surrounded by friends. In which case I will begin laughing hysterically (literal use) the entire time like a cat purring when they are scared (cats do this, look it up). I feel a similar way about haunted houses as I do most scary media. I love what I can handle, but I have a hard line. There is scary media I adore, and there is scary media that triggers my anxiety and leaves me a mess for way too long afterward. It is really hard for me to articulate to anyone where that line is and often it comes down to, I can just tell.
For me, it is a careful balancing act. I like to feel that tingling of fear. I like to get chills (or the giggles) from a good scare, but it has to stay shy of the line of true terror. Terror is not fun for me. I live with near constant high anxiety. My baseline for anxious feeling is well above people without a diagnosed mental health disorder. This means that I have a lot of nervous energy. Often it is freefloating, a term which means not attached to a cause. I sometimes feel anxious for no circumstance based reason. Proper scares me can help me burn off that nervous energy and provide a focus for it. So one minute I am feeling anxious, then that anxiety is aimed at this scary movie instead of roaming around inside my head for a long lost deep dark memory to drag up. But, the moment that I tip over the line and get too scared, I feel sick. I get lightheaded and pale. Another episode of insomnia will be pending come night time. The memory of that fear will last. Adrenaline does not feel good inside my body.
So, I love Halloween. I love the whole season because people like me, with a desire for mild scares and a love of the morbid, can dig into the friendlier side of the celebration. It allows me to fill my life up with cob webs and candy corn like a child, and put on spooky (but not overly scary) movies or TV shows. For a woman who loves the creepy, what a time it is to be alive! Join me this month of Blogtober to celebrate the creepy, weird, morbid, and a touch scary stuff that floods our lives in the best way during my favorite month of the year! I will be posting shorter something every day leading up to Halloween. Sometimes it will be briefer blog posts, others it will be top 10 lists, other times it will be something different entirely. Won’t you come along for the ride?
In the words of one of my favorite movies, While You Were Sleeping, “Life doesn’t always turn out the way you plan.” And as she goes on to say, “I just wish I knew he was talking
Movie poster for While You Were Sleepinging
about my life.” In the movie she has a specific idea of what is going to happen, and then life throws her the curve of her father’s illness. She puts her dreams aside to help him through his time of need, but after his death she is left adrift. Then in place of the life she wanted originally, she ends up finding an unexpected and beautiful life she never knew to dream of. In the end, she is thankful that life does not always happen the way we expect.
I love this movie because of its witty dialog and hilarious comedy of errors plot. It is the movie that cemented Sandra Bullock in my brain as one of the best actors and made me assume everyone found Bill Pullman sexy (imagine my confusion when he was the forgettable castoff guy in Sleepless in Seattle). This is one of the movies that wound its way into the culture of my family. We can (and do) quote any and all scenes. It is part of our shared language and gives me the warm whiff of home whenever I see it. It also speaks to my experience of life.
I am the kind of person who likes to have a plan. When I know I am going somewhere, my brain immediately starts to figure out parking, where to get lunch, and how many bathrooms are in reach. I begin crafting my comic con costumes a year in advance. I like to know how things will go down. It takes conscious effort for me to be as spontaneous as I am (read: not very spontaneous). I made a pact with myself to reach outside my comfort zone rather than retreat to the safety of my room and miss the rest of life. Anxiety is like that for me. Sometimes the days struggle is getting out of bed and leaving the house. So, if I can accomplish that by having a plan, it seems a fair trade off.
My tendency to have a plan applies not only to the daily minutia, but to the grand scheme of things. I remember the exact moment I knew what I wanted to do with my life. I was 15, sitting across the counter from my mother and telling her about the painful and traumatic lives of my close friends. I told her I needed to help. I told her I wanted to be a therapist. I realized soon after I wanted to be a professor too.
I started the plan that day.
My life became laser focused on psychology. I read everything I could get my hands on, went to the library weekly to get more material, and scoured the internet for resources. I contacted local therapists and interviewed them to figure out the steps I needed to take. The day I signed up for classes at my community college, I put “psychology” on the major line. I knew how many years it would take to get my bachelor’s. I knew which college I was
Venn Diagram of my life so far
going to. I knew already I wanted to be a psychologist with a Ph.D. in my field. Yes, I really knew a lot of things when I was 18. Of course, the Venn diagram of things I was certain of and things that happened are perfectly separate circles.
My timeline got quickly screwed up. I spent 2 1/2 years in community college and 2 1/2 years in undergrad, doing both slower than I intended. The college I picked out for undergrad? The perfect fit I told everyone I was going to ended up accepting me, but being far too expensive. I found myself instead going to a college I never heard of until that moment. My grand idea of skipping over a master’s and going straight to a Ph.D. program? Nope. Rejection spree part one happened then. Instead, I ended up at a master’s program, but that was alright. I would finish quickly and go to Ph.D. right? No. I slowed my pace down to work on a thesis. Then when I got to the point of applying, I was certain that this was the moment my plan would work out. Long time readers may already be chuckling at the deep poetic irony of my life.
Rejection spree number 2 hit like a whirlwind.
I was not exactly Sandra Bullock’s character, Lucy, feeling stuck at her Metro station job when she wanted to be traveling the world, but I was
Screen cap: While You Were Sleeping
definitely feeling the weight of being a statistic: one more master’s degree having underemployed millennial living at home with her parents. I thought about all my professors pouring time and energy into me, saying they believed in me, and I wondered if they were wrong. Instead a tiny conversation, lost in the recesses of my brain suddenly reoccurred to me with the force of an intrusive thought over and over. Me, sitting across from a man, a friend I would have considered him once, who listened to my dreams and said, “So, what if you can’t do it?” Of all the voices telling me who I could be and how far I could go, this one moment and this one voice suddenly rang the truest. What if the thing I wanted all my life never actually happened. Have I wasted the 11 years since my 15-year-old revelation chasing clouds? Depression hit me like a wrecking ball. My anxiety spiked. The very core of my identity was shaking. I remember one momentary crisis when I realized I could no longer say I was a “grad student” on my twitter bio. I was not. So, who even was I?
I fully believe things happen for a reason, but this idea definitely felt tested. I relate to Lucy in While You were Sleeping again in the altering of life plans to take care of a parent. My dad’s sickness definitely took my focus. I realized that it was probably a good thing I had not gone to get my Ph.D.,
Book cover: Present Over Perfect by Shauna Niequist
so I could be here for him in his time of need, but this provided little comfort. After all, it meant believing an awful thing happened to me so I could be there for someone through their more awful thing. Maybe it was true, but creating an awful situation sandwich did nothing more than make me feel, well, awful.
In, Present Over Perfect, author Shauna Niequist talks about different seasons in our lives. We do not really live one unbroken life, but rather we experience waves. At different seasons we need different things. Looking back, I could see the benefit of my plans changing and how they fed my soul what I needed at the time. I stayed longer in undergrad because I needed the nurturing it provided. I failed to get into Ph.D. programs the first time because I needed time to mature before that step and the master’s was the perfect place to grow. I made friends at my undergrad I never would have met if I went to my first choice, and those relationships are some of the most important in my life even still. There had to be something in this season I could learn. So, like Nieguist, I slowed down. I began to call this my unexpected sabbatical. Books I put off because they were too big of commitments became my friends (finally giving me time to read Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell!). I started learning the ukulele. Then, I started a book club. I left the house and explored my community, making friends and seeing sides of my little country area I did not expect. Part of my extra time became focused on working on me. I started therapy again, and began digging deep into the painful things I put off while I was in the constant state of crisis that grad school represents. The depression receded as I pulled beauty out of this painful period of my life.
Some days, all of this was enough. Other days, the stillness fed my anxiety. Money was becoming a real issue. After all, I could no longer defer my student loans because I was no longer a student. Debts were due. The job hunt was agony. I wanted to find something that would a) pay my bills and b) help me get into a Ph.D. program next time around. Sending out applications felt like peeling off parts of myself. It was a weirdly vulnerable thing to write cover letters saying why people should hire me. The silence was almost getting worse than the rejections as I kept not hearing back from anyone. Suddenly, I
Screen cap: Ant Man
found myself watching Ant Man and feeling personally attacked when the main character confidentially says he has a Master’s so of course he will be fine. Cut to Paul Rudd in a Baskin Robbins uniform. Maybe, I told my mom, holding out for a job that actually provides experience was overreaching. After all, what was 8 years of college? When my diploma came in the mail, for weeks I did not even bother to open it. I left it in the tube so it would not mock me.
Then I got an email that made my heart pound. The head of the department at my master’s university wanted to know if I was interested in a potential job. My eyes darted across the email, barely daring to believe it. A major university in the area had just lost a psychology professor. Generally, any university job in psychology requires a Ph.D. It is an incredibly hard field to break into, but for someone who only had a master’s? Impossible. I had applied to community colleges, but never heard back. Teaching, it seemed, was a long way out of reach for me. So how was this possible? They needed someone who was able, if not technically “qualified” degree wise. They needed someone in a hurry. They needed someone available.
I have never in my life been more available.
I found about on the weekend and applied, had the interview before a full week was up, and got the call just three days later.
I am going to be a professor. At a major, prestigious university.
It took every ounce of willpower not to shriek at the Dean when she called me with the offer. The moment I hung up, I danced around my room. Writing this now, my eyes are filling with tears. I cannot believe it. I really, truly cannot. I wrote every professor who ever invested in me immediately to tell them the news. Finally, finally, I had something I could proudly tell them. Finally, finally, it felt like some of that investment was paying off. One of the things I have always wanted to do, a job that was locked behind a degree wall, suddenly opened up for me. I am going to be Professor Chris, teaching psychology to, as Russel Crowe’s character in Beautiful Mind would say, “eager young minds” who were here to learn. From me. Me. I am happy beyond my dreams. This is a beautiful job, a wonderful opportunity, and a chance to set apart my Ph.D. application when I try again. Maybe, just maybe, this was the experience I needed to finally get in. If I was going to Ph.D. in the fall, I would not have spent this summer trying to grow. I would not have went out of my way to make new friends and met the people who have become some of the best parts of my life. I would not have given myself the space to grow and slow down. I would never have even dreamed of applying to be an adjunct faculty anywhere, nevertheless in the amazing place I am ending up.
Thankfully my life did not turn out the way I planned
Enjoy this jaunty little exploration of my brain and life with interspersed pop culture? Tune back into the unfolding journey of Existential Wednesdays.
Wanting to learn more about mindfulness and meditation, check out calm.com
Finally, check out Jenny Lawson’s foray into adult coloring books with You Are Here. It allows you to use coloring to be mindful, while providing powerful and hilarious conversations on mental health. I colored this while listening to many of the aforementioned books (as audiobooks) during this season of slowing my life down.
Here is my Existential Wednesday post a day late because in existential philosophy time only has the meaning we give it…or potentially because I accidentally planned poorly and got behind. One or the other.
There are two things that my unexpected academic sabbatical has given me: time to catch up on the shows I missed and time for a proper shame spiral. What do I feel shame over? Sometimes it is over feeling useless, which is really just code in my head for less busy than when I was in grad school. Sometimes it is because I feel I could be doing more for the world that seem daily to be on fire. Sometimes I feel like I could be kinder. Sometimes the shame is about not getting into the Ph.D. program or still living at home. It depends on the moment, but it is always under the surface for me to tap into. And it is shame, not guilt. As shame researcher Brene Brown expresses, guilt is something that serves to motivate action. It is a response to behaviors we do. Shame is a threat to our identity. It is a belief that something is wrong inside ourselves. Shame is deeply personal. Shame is destructive.
The other half of my having more time than normal equation is catching up on the Flash, the superhero show about the scarlet speedster and his many friendship and found family woes (also he fights villains). It is a show I love to sink into like a warm bath, letting it into my pores to fill me up and refresh my soul. I cannot get enough of constant Dad Joe West loving his super sons. I adore the sweet friendship of the STAR labs team. And most of all, I love the warm beating heart of the show, the titular speedster: Flash aka Barry Allen.
Screen Cap of Barry Allen from the Flash
In a world full of toxic masculinity, Barry represents the rare intersection of a character shown to be deeply emotional and yet not portrayed as weak. Not a billionaire playboy by day, instead Barry is the same good person in and out of his mask. As Joe tells him when explaining the difference between Barry and Wally (Joe’s other son), Barry is always able to express what he is feeling. Even when he is keeping secrets (sometimes Earth shattering ones), he cannot actually hide his feelings. Barry and the show writers’ both have a willingness to explore feelings and drive toward emotional maturity. With this in mind, season 3 leans in on a gorgeous arc about a topic that does not get enough attention:
Self-compassion.
At the end of season 2, Barry loses his father and in a moment of grief and bad decision
Screen cap Flash. Time rupture explained and my memories triggered
making (seriously, could anything be worse than having powers when emotionally impaired?) he time travels and launches a whole new timeline. Realizing his mistake, Flash resets things as they were but learns a lesson best explained using a coffee cup. Once the cup is broken, fixing it does not completely erase the cracks. (Side bar, this is exactly how virginity was explained to me in a truly horrifying youth group sex lecture. I am scarred and this episode launched a full flash back. You thought the flower metaphor in Jane the Virgin was an exaggeration? It was my life, but I digress.) Barry returns to the present to find things almost entirely as he left them except for a few major changes. The rest of the season deals with the repercussions of time travel and trying to fix mistakes by erasing them. There could be and likely are thousands of words written on the ideas about time travel this season explores, but for me, the infinitely more interesting dimension was the one happening inside Barry’s head.
As primary self-compassion researcher, Dr. Kristin Neff, explains, “With self-compassion we give ourselves the same kindness and care we’d give to a good friend.” Having self-compassion means being able to step out of the noise inside your head and see yourself with love and acceptance. It is a skill that can be increased with practice and there are brilliant meditations structured around seeking it out. An essential part of the Flash’s character is his taking too much personal responsibility and feeling shame over everything that occurs in this and any other world (thanks to the multiverse). So, I was duly surprised when the season took a turn. Instead of wallowing in Barry’s shame, the show lets him interact with the mentors and motivators in his life and have some of the most beautiful discussions of self-compassion I have ever seen. The narrative weaves itself directly around the elements of self-compassion throughout the season.
Element of Self-compassion 1) Harry Wells and Common Humanity
Screen cap Flash. Harry and Barry.
Harry Wells serves as a mostly reluctant mentor to young Barry Allen. In season 3, they relate in their feelings of shame, with Wells saying “I know what that feels like…I make mistakes and I want to make up for my mistakes, then I just make more mistakes.” He then adds, “you did once tell me that you have to trust in the long run that the decisions you make are the right ones.” Finally, he comes to the true heart of the moment, “I was always too good at forgiving myself, Allen, and you were never good enough.” Harry Wells struggled with taking responsibility, Barry struggles with taking too much. The moment not only reflects the need for self-compassion, but points to a core element of it. We can become self-compassionate when we learn to see our common humanity, aka when we recognize that others fail too. By sharing in Barry’s pain, Harry opens up a path for the Flash to recognize he is not the only one to fall short.
Element of Self-compassion 2) Oliver Queen and Self-kindness
Screen Cap Flash. Barry and Ollie having a heart to heart
The Flash’s shame reaches a point of near no return in the massive show crossover episodes when Flash collides with Supergirl, Arrow, and Legends of Tomorrow to tackle an actual alien invasion. When the majority of the super powered (or super skilled vigilante) cohort find out about Barry’s time meddling, they are furious, but Oliver sticks with his fleet-footed friend. In true teach what you cannot do fashion, Ollie has a heart-to-heart with Barry about showing himself kindness.
Oliver: You need to stop beating yourself up over this.
Barry: I’m sorry, but how can you say that? I’m responsible for all of this.
Oliver: Maybe. Maybe not. Barry, you made a choice. You wanted to see your parents alive again. Do you honestly know anyone that if they were in your shoes wouldn’t do the exact same thing? I would do the exact same thing.
He goes on to explain about the traumas he experienced in life and how he would change them if he could, then he says the key point.
Oliver: Barry, the world isn’t different because you changed the timeline. Change happens. Tragedy happens. People make choices and those choices affect everyone else. You’re not a god, Barry.
The lesson does not immediately sink in because when it turns out the aliens are there to capture Barry, he reverts back to his shame spiral. Barry decides to offer himself as a sacrifice to the aliens, but Ollie and the other super friends step in to let him know he is loved. Barry is forced to accept their kindness and forgiveness. With self-kindness we learn to see that we are not gods. We are imperfect and we do not know how our actions will affect the world. With self-kindness, we begin to recognize our limits in the same way we do not expect our friends to be perfect.
Element of Self-compassion 3) The Speed Force and Mindful Acceptance
Screen Cap Flash. Barry and Jay inside the Speedforce
Self-compassion also means being able to sit with our feelings. It means that we, and Barry, cannot run away from the unpleasant emotions we experience. It does not mean we wallow, but we do let ourselves feel. For Barry, this comes in the form of the speedforce the difficult to explain science-magic dimension speedsters can access. For Barry it is a place of re-experiencing memories. In season 3, he goes in and talks to three people from his past that spark his feelings of shame. Barry is forced to face the emotions, and the personification of the speedforce does not let up. It reminds him continuously that his emotions, not his logic, are fueling his choices, but that he is refusing to acknowledge it. Until he recognizes what he is really feeling, which of course is once again a desire to sacrifice himself, he cannot be free of the force of his memories.
Together, between Harry relating to Barry, Oliver sharing his own recognition that it is okay to be imperfect, and the actual spirit of the speedforce making him think about his emotions, Barry has all the elements of self-compassion laid before him. Does he learn from it? Of course not. Barry would probably offer to sacrifice himself to help someone get over a cold if he could, but as viewers, we can learn the lessons he does not.
So, we learn to talk to ourselves with kindness. We learn to recognize that others fail too. We learn to stop running from our emotions like a speedster into danger.
Screen cap Flash. A signature Joe West hug
Maybe, when that gets too hard, we can imagine talking to ourselves like Joe West would talk to his adopted son, Barry. What would ultimate father figure Joe do in those moments of failure and self-doubt? Well, he would put his arm around us and let us know we are loved, no matter what. He would remind us that not everything is our fault. He would cry with us, feel with us, and on the other side remind us to get up. He would give us a safe place to be human. May we all treat ourselves like Joe West treats his kids.
Want more deep dives into pop cultural and existential psychology? Tune in every Wednesday for another walk on the overthinking side.
Recommends:
Want to learn more about the fascinating work of Brene Brown on shame, vulnerability, and living a wholehearted life? Check out her website here.
Interested in learning about self-compassion, including how to do self-kindness meditations? Check out the work of Kristin Neff.
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.
Marvel’s Infinity War poster
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.
Screen Cap of Tony Stark in the emotional climax
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.”
Screen cap of Thanos
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?).
Screen cap of Loki moments before his death
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 