Lights out Alice!
It is always the ones that you never see coming, the ones that you do not expect would be anything more than just an outlet to waste time upon, end up becoming the ones that inflict the maximum (damage) sea-change in your psyche.
After Life, on Netflix, by Ricky Gervais, was exactly this for me. Given the nature of this extended, carefree, work-less and responsibility-less post MBA holiday, I have regularly been on Netflix mindlessly scrolling for semi-decent while also not being too relatable content to wile away time.
Whenever I am in a dark headspace I turn to dark humor to give me perspective on how I should feel or how my pain pales in comparison to the shit that is out there in the world. Who am I kidding though, I just like brooding and introspecting through serious stories that talk about real people, real pain and how it affects them. As I have also mentioned previously, I have learnt more from TV series and Netflix dramas than I have through talking to real people and having real life experiences.
However, there is a funny yet serious caveat that has occurred due to my habit of trying to derive wisdom from TV series. I have a habit of watching everything at 1.5x or 2x or skipping the parts where the pain is too visceral and is affecting me. This is just another way of saying that even though the person in the TV series is going through a difficult time or pain, it is too much for me to bear and I am relating to it too much. I cannot disassociate and think of their actions or reactions as something that is my responsibility to some extent.
What this also points towards is my bad habit of transference. I am treating the pain the protagonist or whoever I decide to follow closely in the TV series as my pain. Their actions as a reflection of what I should or shouldn't do. Hence, it has even gotten to the point where I am unable to continue watching a series because I feel too overwhelmed because the people I am following keep making poor decisions and playing with their morals, which is too much for me to bear.
I don't think this is a good way of dealing with life, if I take something as impersonal as TV series, made for millions of people, and start taking it so personally that the actions of the protagonist becomes a reflection of my behaviour and hence if they are happy or sad, do good things or bad, affects my head and my mental state. Dude, seriously...the one thing that I have always been told (of the many wrong things pointed out in me) is the fact that I take everything too personally and I should not take everything to heart. Sadly, I do. Sadly, things affect me. They affect me to the core and if I see people I care about having a bad day, I get affected by it too. I know it limits me too. But seeing people I care about in pain is too painful for me.
Which is sad, because life is bad and I cannot affect anything.
I need to get better Alice!
"If you love somebody, let them go, for if they return, they were always yours. If they don't, they never were." - Khalil Gibran
No comments:
Post a Comment