I wanted to make a couple comments. I can’t help it, or at least I choose not to. The words and thoughts flow automatically, and they hurt me less if I put them down somewhere.
If you boil this show down, as it exists at the end of Episode 3, you have a kidnapped kid, and a severely traumatized kid. If we deduct the magic and the monsters, what you have is a pedophile ring, and, in the case of the missing friend, a rapist/serial killer.
The timing of this show is significant. I was very roughly the age of the main kids in the early 1980’s. Back then, we didn’t know about child kidnappings. Parents were not terrified the moment their kid was late for dinner. We didn’t know about serial killers. It was a much more innocent time.
And in this show, you can kind of feel the shadow falling on this idyllic, middle American town, which we can easily enough see as a stand-in for the nation as a whole, which we might say lost its virginity in the 1970’s, and was in the 1980’s trying to come to grips with it, and failing. I don’t think I can say our confidence was shattered, but I think we both realized that monsters lurked among us, causing everyone, but particularly parents, to feel unsafe; and I think the seeds were being planted for the wholesale revulsion with regard to America and its ideals that we see on the streets, in the colleges, and even among senior, powerful politicians today. It was very small then.
And whatever this growth is in the secret lab, I expect it, too, to grow. A bit was found in the shed where Will disappeared. I suspect that will grow too. The cancer escaped. It walked in middle America and it bred.
There is a lot of reason to look backwards, to the 60’s, the 80’s, the 50’s. To the Wild West and its clear and inexorable laws of survival.
I see this traumatized girl and I feel that pain. Deduct her magic powers, and she was abused beyond her capacity for endurance. That is why she can’t talk. There exist people in this world capable of such evil, capable not just of doing it, but enjoying it. That is why they do it. Sadism is the act of planting your pain in others, watching it grow, then killing it. And the physical murder of the “host” for your pain is not necessary: enough that the light disappear from their eyes.
I feel this voice in my head (not literally!!! My reality testing is dismally good) saying I need therapy. What I need is love. This is what we all need. And therapists are, more or less, trained NOT to give love. It is an abuse of transference. Our mental health profession considers it a matter of the utmost importance that therapists not give patients what they most desperately need. It is a part of their ethical code. And so elaborate games evolve, dribs and drabs of something mostly like love escape anyway, with good therapists, who cannot help but feel compassion and genuine concern.
And so I look at my crushed self, and I look at this world, and I cannot find a place where I can safely rest.
But it has always been so, in some ways. What is new in me?
And I feel that deep within us is an instinct which says that you have to give in order to get. If you need love, give love. This is good strategy. If you need safety, give safety. Worry about the world. Fix the world. Create a safe world, then you will be given safety.
But the evil out there is so deep, and so dark, who can feel sanguine about such a project? All that is possible is to lie to oneself, and/or make a list of the long number of good things in the world, and the days where everything was fine. Most days are fine for most of us. No evil visits us. No monster is lurking in the dark.
But for those who NEED TO KNOW the world is safe, for the traumatized who more than anything want to avoid that horror again, it is very difficult to escape remembering the evil out there.
This is the root of bringing it in. This is the root of horror movies. It can’t get to you if it is already there. It is an adaptive strategy, in some ways, which works to reduce some anxiety. But it also darkens everything, and permanently limits how high you can rise.
Today I was cleaning my kitchen, vacuuming my floor. I am trying to cook more, to improve my diet, to eat more vegetables, to better control the exact ingredients I put in my body, and some part of me feels it is useless to do such things, with evil in the world. The evil always wins, it seems. There is no point fighting it.
But this logic makes self care an act of rebellion, of self assertion, of self evolution. All the little things are not little things. I feel this now.
Many of my days feel like waves are sweeping over me. I cannot control them, and I do feel much of what I feel truly is outside of me, in the air, in the water, in the light, and in the darkness. We all exist in fields, and some of us are much more sensitive to them than others.
Do what you can, though, and forget the rest, remains good advice. I cannot fight all the battles of the world. It is battles all the way to the horizon and beyond. Better to keep a clean home, sip tea sometimes, perhaps tend a wounded bird from time to time, and do my best to smile at strangers.
That is the state of my mind today, March 3, 2018, a day which is flowing as I type, and which will never come again. I will never see it again, and neither will you. There is something important in this thought.