Television as a minefield
dispatch 17
Hey friends,
I’ll keep this short today to make some space for the essay. I wrote about the particular awkwardness that is watching television as your marriage is ending. I have no idea if this is something other folks have felt (let me know!) but wow is it strange to reflect from this life on how much I avoided in my last one(s). There are so many ways that I have walked along a pre-determined life path at varying points like I was on one of those moving sidewalks, headed to a destination I choose but didn’t even think to question. Picking apart the why of that will probably take the rest of my life.
As a note, all proceeds from the newsletter this month are going to Sunserve, a South Florida organization that provides services for LGBTQIA+ youth and adults which is incredibly close to my heart. Florida is a hellscape for marginalized folks on its best day, and we are certainly not among its best days. If you want to check out Sunserve or donate directly you can here.
Television as a minefield
When your marriage is unhappy, watching television becomes a minefield. The screen has a habit of saying so many things that you are carefully leaving unsaid. This is a surface-level enjoyment. There is no way to relax when you don’t know what is next, and what was once a reprieve is now an enemy. There’s the television couple that’s getting a divorce, having the same exact fight that you had last Thursday, the same fight you’ve been having for years. Or worse, a couple on screen that hasn’t had sex in a long time and is finding their way back to each other or finding their way to someone else, or arguing, or crying and there you are, on your brown leather couch, your very first adult piece of furniture, pretending to be an indifferent observer.
This is not my life, this is entertainment. There are no parallels, we are not the same. Maybe if we ignore this, there won’t be consequences. But, your body knows. Inside you are tense, coiled tight, barely breathing. This is not recognition; it is exposure, a fault line in the carefully-crafted illusion that you’ve been dedicated to for longer than it took to create it. In times like these, any movement may be seen as an acknowledgment. Twitch the smallest muscle and you will have to face the truth of it, and neither of you is ready for that yet. Fight, flight, freeze.
It wasn’t always this way. For a long time, the television was a refuge, a way to do something together without speaking. A way of spending time in proximity that was loud enough to cover the silences. A way to laugh together when you no longer know or care what the other finds funny. A way to feel something amidst all that nothing. A placeholder for closeness.
But then you start to notice things. The way that even the most simple of stories start to hold so much weight when you can’t agree on anything. We both lived braced for impact in those years, the fighting years that would give way to the silent ones that would pronounce this dead and gone. Like the time we argued for three days about a child in California who was ill and dressed up as Batman. Him, wishing I could just enjoy the spectacle of it. Me, bone-deep sad that needing medical care needs to become a spectacle at all. He couldn’t understand my kind of sad, just as I never could understand how nothing broke his heart on a daily basis. I don’t think either of us tried to understand, not really, it would have gotten in the way of our mutual love of feeling superior. The only thing we had in common: a drive to hurt before we were hurt. We shared a self-protective drive that crowded out everything else, a fundamental drive. It may have looked much different in practice, but on paper, we were the same in that.
At some point, as I was coming back online from the booze and so much pretending, our realities split apart. They got farther and farther away from each other until we couldn’t even see them in the distance. And so we lived like the past was the present, ignoring the future. Ignoring things is a common form of coping that isn’t actually coping at all. It’s evasion, the kind that is most often covering for a lie. We were a lie with a shelf life.
In those last years, even the television, that once passive thing, started to turn on us and that couch stretched the distance between us into its own continent. Two people sitting in silence, a large screen on the wall, a small screen in our hands, and worlds in between us. A common tableau, the American living room as a quiet, final act. There was no fighting anymore. On the day that I admitted to my therapist, in that dull gray room with the ambient sound machine, that my wedding day was the worst day of my life, we watched a romantic comedy. We laughed at the jokes, at Ryan Gosling’s generically-handsome face, and within four months I had moved out.
I guess what I am trying to say was, there are signs. I wish that someone had told me that I didn’t have to feel that way. That I didn’t need to make someone else feel that way. That leaving is better than staying when you are not really there at all. That I had known the obvious truth that television and avoidance couldn’t save anything. Do not seek silences such as these, do not breathe sighs of relief when the moment passes and you have made it through without saying the truth for the millionth time. There is a difference between a reprieve and freedom.
Assorted, rad things:
The Dropout on Hulu: I find scammers absolutely fascinating and while I have a really hard time caring about the funders Elisabeth Holmes tricked, learning about how she endangered patient lives for the sake of a company, money, and her own reputation is brutal. I recognized so much of that mindset from my time in Start-Up Land. It’s also the first “period piece” of the early-2000s I’ve seen and it is taking me for a ride. (In other scammer news: We also recently watched The Tinder Swindler which I keep calling the Tilda Swintoner and truly, wouldn’t Tilda be great in a live-action remake?)
The French Dispatch: Speaking of Tilda, I finally watched Wes Anderson’s latest and it was exactly the determined whimsy I needed right now. Jeffrey Wright is transcendent, Tilda is bonkers, Frances McDormand makes it human, Léa Seydoux brings that mean, French, femme energy.
Why Don't the Poor Rise Up? Organizing the Twenty-First Century Resistance edited by Ajamu Nangwaya + Michael Truscello: I shared this in last week’s dispatch but had to add it here as well. This book of essays, answering an OpEd piece by the same name, from the perspective of organizers and activists in both the global north and south. While they’re all wonderful, Jordy Cummings’ essay on the rise of Alt-Right and Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi’s entry on tech-induced isolation as a tool of capitalism were paradigm-shifting for me.
That’s all for March somehow! If you feel moved by today’s essay, hitting the like button or leaving a comment really lets me know. Thank you for being here. See you next month friends.
lisa
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