Preface: July and August of 2006 were the worst two months of my life, and things only went downhill from there. I am not going to go into detail here, but rest assured that there is exactly one person on the face of this earth other than me who knows the whole story, and only that one other person will EVER know the whole story, so don’t pester me for it, and don’t take it personally that you weren’t the one I told about it. I didn’t tell anyone about it. My best friend Amy knows me so well, she knew how to read between the lines, and figured that I actually have really good reasons for the information I give, and even better reasons for the information I withhold. So without going into details, here’s a true story about how I became a fan of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
/preface
In July, Amy W. gave birth to my Godson, Aidan. I got to be there for most of it, and it was amazing. I couldn’t adore that little guy more.
Also during July, I found out that I would probably need to have surgery. I asked a few people for advice about it, and everyone agreed that the surgery was absolutely necessary.
August 21, I got a call that one of my other friends had given birth to her second daughter. I drove over to Bellevue to see her, and the baby had flaming red hair, which was hilarious as the baby’s father has been a notorious hater of redheads his entire life.
August 22, I went in for surgery. The surgery went badly. I was awake through the whole thing, and had to be sedated 3 separate times. The doctor who did it was clearly a moron, as there was a lot of twisting and pulling and pushing and other stuff that didn’t need to happen. After the surgery, there was so much pain it was ridiculous.
I was on a lot of medication, but not enough that I would be asleep around the clock. I decided I would need a series of DVDs to watch, but DVDs that weren’t important enough for me to get hooked, so I wouldn’t be angry if I fell asleep. My friend Brad had told me again and again that I needed to watch the Buffy the Vampire series. I had been making fun of that show for YEARS, although never actually watching an episode. I found the concept silly, and thought myself above it. After all, I watch French movies without turning on the subtitles…. Needless to say, I was almost instantly hooked.
The pain continued and continued, and by the end of September, it was decided that a second surgery was necessary to determine the cause of the pain. I remember waking up in the hospital room, still in a lot of pain, nauseated from the anesthesia, and shocked by the brightness of the fluorescent lights in the room. Moving any part of my body was painful. Going to the bathroom required paging a nurse, explaining exactly what it was that I had to do, and having the nurse hold me up while I did it. My life was painful, too bright, too loud, and humiliating.
By the time I was released from the hospital, I was able to walk some. Not entirely upright, but some. Lights were still too bright, and I was still completely humiliated all the time. I stayed most of the day and night in a dark room (as dark as I could get it), while on the television, Buffy killed things that were bad. She had friends helping her out, and always made the correct decision. Anything that was bad, she and her friends could kill it. It was a great world to immerse myself into-a world where the evil things had faces and fangs and sometimes tentacles, but they could always, always be killed. Sometimes victory came at a high price, but there they were-staring Buffy and pals in the face, daring them to make a move. There were heavy losses on the side of the Good, but the Good always came out at least a few points ahead.
I had no strength, no energy, and most of the bad things I was fighting didn’t have faces, and the ones that had faces weren’t entirely evil, and by law and moral reasoning, I was not allowed to kill them. Instead, I had to lie to everyone. I had to tell them all the humiliating stuff that was happening in my body. I had taken more than my share of hits for the team in this whole process, but I had to pretend that it wasn’t anyone’s fault but my own that I was going through this, and I had to keep my chin up to keep the people who loved me from worrying. Every day, I sent out e-mails to friends, I made calls to try and follow their lives. I tried to stay active and interested.
I went through the motions. I tried my best to stay within the niche I had carved out for myself in this world. I went to work when I could. When the pain was too much, I stayed home. I stayed home and took my pain medication and did what I could to keep the pain from driving me absolutely crazy. When friends came by to visit or to take me out, I tried to interact with them as much as I could, and I tried to be the person they expected me to be.
I tried really hard to WANT to be alive. I tried as hard as I could to take care of my responsibilities. When responsibilities were taken away from me, I was grateful that there was one less fucking thing that i had to deal with.
Sometimes I would go on LiveJournal and write a little bit of truth; some, but not all of the things I was thinking and feeling. Friends stopped commenting, and one of the people I had known very well for a few years, Katie, actually filtered me out of her friends list, and stopped answering my e-mails once she realized that I was no longer interested in All Things Amy Sedaris. I tested her on this several times, and every time she failed. Since Amy likes my photography, Katie went and bought a camera like mine, and started copying my style. I gave her a few tutorials, but after I realized that she’d completely filtered me out, and would only talk to me if she wanted some advice about how to make a photo that Amy would like, I went back and deleted all of those tutorials, and deleted her from accessing any of my private online photos or entries. I stopped blogging and deleted my LiveJournal. Things have been much simpler since then. I miss some things about Katie, but fundamentally, she has a lot of things to learn, and I just don’t have the ability or will or strength of mind to help her. The best way I could even start to help her become HER was by removing myself from her life. Give her one less person to copy.
All the while, I was watching DVDs of Buffy. The great thing about loads of pain medicine is that your memory becomes horrible. Creating new memories is really difficult. Therefore, by the time I finish one season’s worth of DVDs, I don’t remember how it started, or anything about any of the episodes I had watched previously. So I can watch the same thing over and over again, and it’s like a completely new experience every time.
Some things, however, leave an impression. There are three Buffy episodes I remember with almost perfect clarity. “The Body,” “Chosen” (which is the series finale), and “Once More With Feeling,” which is the musical episode written and directed by Joss Whedon. The premise is that someone summoned a demon who makes people sing and dance like a Broadway musical, with a couple of catches. One catch is, the lyrics to their songs reveal truths people had been hiding. The other catch is, people end up dancing so hard, they catch fire and burn to death.
“Once More With Feeling” takes place during season 6. The season 5 finale ended with Buffy sacrificing her life to save the world from being overtaken by a hell dimension. In the beginning of season 6, Buffy’s friends, who believe Buffy is trapped in some unknown and terrible dimension of Hell, cast a magical spell to bring her back to life. What her friends fail to realize, though, is that Buffy wasn’t trapped in hell. She was happy and safe; in Heaven. Buffy knows, however, that if her friends knew what they had done, it would hurt them, so she keeps it to herself, sharing it with her unlikely ally, Spike (Spike is a vampire, who has had a chip implanted in his head rendering him harmless, and who has fallen in love with Buffy, who at this point in the series sees him as an enemy, but the only being on the planet who can make her feel anything at all).
Througout “Once More With Feeling,” there are mini-revelations, like the engaged couple Anya and Xander revealing some of the things they don’t like about each other, and the various anxieties they have about spending their entire lives together, and Tara realizing that she has to lay the smack down on Willow for being a magic junkie, and Giles realizing that Buffy is too reliant on him, so he has to leave so she can learn to grow up.
The bomb falls near the end, in one of the most powerful scenes I have ever seen on television. The reason I think it works so well is that it is so contrived, so expected, and so overtly corny. The guise of a Broadway musical easily lends itself to cliche, and really boring humor that is used over and over again to the point that it is not funny to anyone who has ever left his or her home.
It is precisely Joss Whedon’s ability to add the maybe the most important message of the show to that backdrop. To say the contrast really packs a punch is an understatment.
The scene takes place in The Bronze, which is a nightclub-like place in the fictional town of Sunnydale. The dancing demon is threatening to take Buffy’s little sister to hell with him as his bride, and Buffy and her friends all show up for the rescue, despite the growing rifts between all the characters that have been growing through the season, and culminating in cheesy song and dance confrontations throughout the episode.
Then, Buffy starts singing. It’s a jaunty little number, in rhyming couplets. She sings about how her life has become routine while killing demons that look like puppets with pool cues. It paints a picture of someone who’s sort of reached the point in her life where things have become to routine-nothing interests her, but she still carries out her duties, goes through her daily routines, and then POW! right in the face.
The music fades to a minor note, and Buffy, not facing her friends, delivers the goods. She flat-out states, in several very discordant lines, that she lives in hell because her friends, the people she trusts and loves more than anything, forced her out of heaven. She finally turns to face them and sings:
There was no pain.
No fear, no doubt
’till they pulled me out
of heaven
So that’s my refrain.
I live in hell
’cause I’ve been expelled
from Heaven.
I think I was in Heaven.
So give me something to sing about.
I need something –
Willow is crying and looking tormented, Xander is confused and looks ashamed, and even the former demon, Anya, looks horrified and guilty.
The demon shakes his head at Buffy, indicating that no, he wasn’t going to give her anything to sing about. The music starts blaring again, in a frantic rock rhythm. She starts dancing like crazy, throwing her hair all over the place, and to the delight of the demon, she is just about to burn up. Then Spike, of all people, catches her mid-death-spin, and sings in the same discordant key:
Life’s not a song.
Life isn’t bliss.
Life is just this:
It’s living.
You have to go on living.
You’ll get along.
The pain that you feel,
you only can heal
by living.
You have to go on living
so one of us is living.
And then the loud, furious music fades completely out in a minor key, and out of the silence we hear Buffy’s own words she spoke to Dawn just before throwing herself into hell to save the world:
The hardest thing in this world is living in it.
More silence. Really uncomfortable silence. Then a commercial break before the final scene, which is also a big surprise that I won’t ruin for you if you haven’t seen it.
Every time I even think of that song, it actually tugs at my emotions so I can feel them physically, and pushes me around, like a dancer leading his partner around the floor.
Even now, about a year and a half since the original surgery that started all this stuff, I go through the sadness and rage of feeling that when I woke up from that surgery, I was thrown into a hideous world, full of pain, apathy, anger, humiliation, unpredictability, and too-bright-and-green fluorescent lights. I don’t know where one’s spirit goes under anesthesia, and I don’t exactly care. All I know is that it’s easier and safer, and not as bright and painful and humiliating as it is living in the world.
I STILL feel the anger of being torn away from someplace safe; being thrown back into a niche that doesn’t fit me any more, but without the physical, financial, and emotional means to dig another niche somewhere less painful. To be honest, it isn’t anger. It’s absolute, white-hot rage, and it burns throughout every inch of my body, which is still a painful, crusty shell of what it used to be. My body isn’t a tool any more. It’s a prison, and I am furious beyond reproach that I am stuck in it.
I go through phases where that anger is unjustly focused on my friends and family-the people who care about me, and the ones who want me around them. I admit with great shame that I actually sometimes resent them for being the tethers that keep me stuck inside my body. I do my best to not take it out on them, but I regret to say that I have hurt quite a few people I adore with my bile. I never meant to hurt them. There were words that came out of me in a string of such violent self-hatred that the person hearing them could only interpret them as an attack on them. I’d then have to stuff it all back inside, and backpedal, convincing my loved ones that they were, in fact, loved ones, and all that rage wasn’t directed at them.
I have known enough people who have taken their own lives to know that there would be NO circumstances under which that would be an okay thing for me to do. Not because of any religious convictions, but because I don’t want to put anyone who loves me through that sort of pain and guilt.
Even if it’s unjust and unfair to my friends and family, I sometimes get angry at them and try to beat them back with every ounce of strength I can. I fire whatever bile I can in their directions and try to make them go away. I try to annoy them so they won’t talk to me any more. I am very, very ashamed to admit these things, but I have tried to make people stop liking me just to relieve myself of obligation to them.
I don’t ever tell anyone how or why I feel this way, and I know it isn’t fair to them. It’s just that you couldn’t possibly understand, or have the slightest idea what it’s like unless you have been in this sort of position; that you have been incredibly sick, you have stared death in the face several times, and you have decided that really, it wouldn’t be that bad, but you have also physically fought death with the strength of 10 people in the past and therefore understand that your will to survive is just as strong as any other force in your body. After several bouts through that cycle, you finally realize that you actually have the power to let that will to survive just sort of float away. But you can’t do that.
You have to go on living. The pain can only be healed by living.
And if you’re going to go on living, wouldn’t it be better to go on living WITH your friends and your family? So they forgot your birthday, even though you reminded everyone every day for two weeks on LiveJournal (yet another test Katie failed. She even left a comment on something the day BEFORE my birthday, stating that the next day was my birthday, but didn’t e-mail me ever to SAY happy birthday). Some people tried to get hold of me the next day, but that wasn’t good enough. The damage was done. I’d already done the fiery-rage two-step about the whole thing, and while it’s hard to put out a flame, a full-on fire is impossible extinguish without some serious fucking work. It spreads, and does a lot of damage before it even calms down to a smoldering heap of coals.
I still vascillate between wanting to live and not wanting to live, but that struggle is not relevant any more. It happens, but there’s nothing to be done about it. Like the physical pain in my body, it’s just another thing I’ll just have to buck up; I’ll have to accept it and live with it. Whether I want to live or die-that desire is completely reliant on how my body is feeling at any particular moment. Ultimately, Spike was right-the only way it’s ever going to heal is if I’m alive.
I’m just still not happy with the small degree my circumstances allow me to live my life. Just when I was getting really, really good at photography (the only thing I’ve actually ever been REALLY good at other than making stuff blow up under the hood in Chem lab, and accidentally lighting myself on fire in Bio), my body made it impossible again for me to do anything other than stupid little shoots around my house. I learn a lot of good technical lessons during those little shoots, but being an unintentional shut-in sort of precludes the ability to get out and put those skills into practice.
I can’t work because I can’t drive, and the bus to work is too jarring-it jiggles my insides until I have to either A) scream my head off on the bus or B)ring the bell, hold my breath till the next stop, stumble down the stairs, crawl into a fetal position on the ground, and scream my head off THERE, then crawl across the street to catch a bus that will bring me home. And if I DO make it to work, by the time I turn the key to my office, either my abdominal pain starts up, or my headache closes my left eye again. At least with the oxygen, I have the vision in my right eye back! My boss is a fantastic person and has been more than patient and accommodating through this whole thing. With the uncertainty of when the pain will bring me to my knees, it just isn’t fair to commit myself to a project only to have to back out at the last minute and find someone to cover for me.
Yep, the hardest thing in this world IS living in it.
But sometimes, you just have to bow your head, and explain what you’re going through to the people who care. That’s what this post is about: finally just laying my cards on the table-an attempt at explaining for the people who couldn’t read between the lines, and the people who didn’t have the opportunity to read between the lines. If you don’t know me personally, I apologize for wasting your time. There’s a link to a nifty video at the bottom. You have my permission and encouragement to skip the rest of this post and just watch Buffy dance.
If you do know me, please know that I understand that you all had no control over what other people did on my birthday. Please also understand that it wasn’t just about YOU. It was every single person I knew. On my birthday, I felt completely abandoned by the only things that have tethered me to this world; my only reasons for staying alive.
The night before my birthday, I got a happy pre-Birthday call from Amy W, and a couple members of my family. Amy W. is the only one to figure out everything that happened to me the summer of 2006 (we’ve been friends since we were 11), and who went with me to the surgery, and who took me home after the first surgery. She’s the only non-familiy member (although I consider her family) who does things like take me to the store when I need something, or if I’m not up to leaving the house, she will run errands for me. The actual day of my birthday, she knew she was going to be busy with her husband’s family, so she called ahead. The day of my birthday, I received exactly one e-mail. Oddly enough, from Amy Sedaris (who I had to remind about Katie’s birthday every year), wishing me a happy birthday.
Everyone else forgot. When you’re stuck in your house alone ALL the time for more than a year, you feel pretty forgotten most of the time. You get used to it. Then, on your birthday, you think, “Hey! Maybe the phone will ring, and I’ll get to talk to someone about something other than the state of my body! This could be a great day!” So you put in some DVDs, you pick up a book, you do whatever it is that you have to do to keep your mind from atrophy, and then finally, you cry yourself to sleep because your worst fear has come true:
Most of the world has completely forgotten you. The people you have been choosing to live for; the people who are the only reason you haven’t taken your life, which would make things so much better for you, actually might NOT care what happens to you. So what now?
You’ll get along.
The pain that you feel,
only can heal
by living.
You have to go on living.
So one of us is living
To see the scene/hear the song I wrote about…. Well, the location of the video changes often, but if you hurry, you can watch just the scene I wrote about here. If it isn’t there any more, just do a You-Tube search for “Buffy something to sing about.” Or if you come over to my house, you can see it, but be warned, I will make you watch the entire episode. It will probably be easier on you if you just stay home!
