Today has been a ride. A lurching, inconsistent, weirdly-edited ride. Many days over the past few months have been like this. Certainly more than average from my recent memory. I keep returning to the thought:
“Sometimes, the TV show just sucks.”
There were years where I’d just zone out during the bad episodes—when the writing felt phoned in, when I didn’t care about the characters, when the pacing was off or the whole thing veered into absurd prisonous melodrama. I’d mentally leave the room, distract myself with psychic busywork, and concern myself (sometimes pathologically) with story beats that were more compelling than what was happening in front of me. Slowly though, I realized: tuning out the dreadful parts doesn’t actually make the show better. It just flattens everything. Even the good scenes lose their meaning when you’ve been numbing yourself.
Mindfulness teaches us to be present; to feel the emotions your TV show, your life, evokes in you without judgement or pretense. This idea has changed my life, but what an immense burden it can feel like; a spiritual contractual obligation to sit through every single episode, knowing that no matter how horrible it feels, the alternative is worse. You have no remote. No skip button or fast-forward. The best you can do is sit there with your eyes propped open, clockwork orange-style, watching your life unfold.
Because, ultimately, this is the only show you get. There is no second channel. No spinoffs. You can choose this, or you can choose nothingness.
We have understandably evolved to believe that we are controlling the plot of our TV show. Some people who prefer a bit of abstraction have touted the “life is just a video game” mantra – which allows for a certain level of emotional detachment from the destabilizing forces around you. But sometimes, in moments of stillness, you look around and realize that not only are you not this main character you so identify with—there is no controller in your hands. There never was. You’re not in charge. The real essence of “you”, what feels conscious, is just a watcher; akin to someone at the cinema getting so lost in a movie that the boundaries between them and the film’s universe dissolve. Or, maybe, you’re spacing out, not paying attention, living in your own thoughts. Or, perhaps, you’re sitting there, wishing things were different.
If I have one thing for the complaints department, I wish that realizing you’re not steering makes the stakes feel lower. If anything, it just makes them weirder. “Oh great, I still have to feel everything, even if I can’t do anything about it?”
And yet, even if you’re not the one making decisions for your main character—it’s not like nothing changes in life, or that things don’t get better. I don’t feel stuck in some cosmic rerun, doomed to repeat the same storylines. In fact, the main character of my show is really quite good at growing. She’s getting good at learning how to work with herself, reshape her environment, and sit quietly and peacefully. She spends an enormous amount of energy peeling layers back, tending to old wounds, tracing patterns back to their origins, learning sophistication in her feelings and practicing (and simply being) whole. That process makes for pretty compelling television, in its own funny way. The me watching all this unfold in a Google Doc is at least somewhat bemused by this fourth-wall-breaking emotional arc in particular.
I’ve changed more in the past few years than I thought possible. I know myself now in ways I hadn’t since I was a kid. There is momentum, evolution, movement.
But still—here I am. Sitting at my desk. Irritated with my texting apps. Raw from the fact that being emotionally open with the world has made me vulnerable to all sorts of bizarre new pain I didn’t want. Stuck on the treadmill, grateful to be moving, but also, sometimes, tired of running.
BRONZE FROG 
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