Last week we finally got the gas stove (burners etc) in the new apartment fixed and approved for use, and I made the first dinner since the house fire that I was proud of: Chicken breasts rubbed with a little balsamic vinagrette dressing from a local restaurant  (to which I'd added a little more oil and maple sysauteed in the cast iron skillet in a slick of olive oil, with chopped leeks, mushrooms, garlic etc; seasoned lightly with salt, pepper, and then just a dash of balsamic vinagrette dressing from a local restaurant (to which I'd added maple syrup) poured in at the last minute or two. Making it felt like coming home on some small level: this is ME, this is who I am. It felt familiar, and "familiar" has suddenly become very precious to me.

And yes, I do know children are starving around the world and women have to walk ten miles to get water and I've never been raped and I'm not mutilated or dead so stop whining and be grateful. No, I'm not joking, this stuff really goes through my head. Although when my landlord pulled out the "at least you have a roof over your head" line I wanted to tell him to stuff it.

So it's been little things, grasping for the familiar comforts and rhythms, while being aware somehow that the "old normal" doesn't exist anymore and never will; that a new sense of "normal" is establishing itself, while the old patterns elbow their way in.  Or perhaps it's the other way around? Whether that "new normal" is comfortable or desirable is too soon to tell. The old normal was comfortable; but was it actually desirable?

So I can still light a fire in the Weber grill with wood I've gathered myself and grill a steak or burn documents without hesitation. The fire and smoke don't bother me because I've mastered this activity and it's "under control", safe and contained.

But I'm hyper-aware of fire truck sirens in the streets, and I startled at unfamiliar noises in this new apartment, the slight ones coming perhaps from outside on the stairwell, beneath the floor or through the walls; in fact I'm not sure where they come from most times. I freeze and wait for a second until they pass. Sounds, not sights or smells, seems to be the main sense in which my recent "trauma" (let's just call it PTSD, shall we?) expresses itself. It wasn't the mattress in flames that terrified me, or the smoke filling my eyes; it was the awful sound of my sweetheart's high-pitched, hysterical scream as she tried to fight the fire. Running up the stairs I thought for an awful moment I'd find her engulfed in flames, burning to death.

No one should have to hear that sound, although many people do, and worse. I know.

But written words can have an effect as well. I had to stop reading beer_good_foamy's recent post re: Night Vale when I read this quote from the podcasts: "The world is awful. And on fire. And beautiful." A month ago I would have loved the elegant and evocative language. Now I run away from it because I want to cry. And I am not liking this state of affairs one little bit. Not at all. But there it is. (Note to BGF if you're reading it: don't change the title of your journal on my account, ok? That is NOT what I'm saying at all.)

It is always unpredictable and never within my control. Perhaps that's what is really setting me off lately, and not the triggers themselves. That may explain why I have a hard time lately bearing my partner's moods when she arrives home. She might be exhausted, in pain, angry about work, hyper-focused on some obsession or project that must get done, throw herself into a frenzy of activity or barely be able to move. She's no different in fact than she's ever been but now it feels very heightened to me. The fact that she speaks aloud constantly, says everything she's thinking at every moment she's thinking it, or thinks and obsesses in patterns and circles, is nothing new. The fact that she wants me to "respond" to her, but automatically know when she's talking to me and when she's just thinking aloud isn't new either.  We've been together 17 years, she's always been that way.

It used to be irritating, frustrating; now it feels like nails scraping my skin to be in the same room sometimes. And other times, she leans into me and I stroke her soft hair and forget all that for a moment, until the next disagreement and we're off to the races again.

My primary solace, lately, or methods of trying to hold onto "normal" have included being here with my friends on LJ and chatting for hours while ignoring my must-do list and procrastinating like a champ; and carrying a notebook with me everywhere I go so I can write when inspiration strikes - again, always when I'm supposed to be doing something else "more important".

And lately I'm writing Buffyverse fanfic. After announcing a year ago I would NOT write fanfic because 1) my previous efforts in another fandom sucked which 2) made me decide I'm really a non-fiction writer plus 3) there are so many good writers in this fandom that I could never compete or say something really new and therefore, 4) I was going to write meta in this fandom instead of fic.

( I'm writing Buffyverse fanfic. Be very afraid.... )
In other news, my sweetie and I are going to the Cape tomorrow, to Truro, MA just south of Provincetown; she's taking a painting workshop that was planned and paid for back in May. We've been to the Cape just once before on a weekend trip and loved it. ("Off-season" is the way to go on a strip of land that has only one road going in and out.)  I don't know if I'll see the harbor seals this time, but I am taking the laptop along.

And my notebook. Much cheaper than therapy, with none of the nasty side-effects of antidepressants.

Note to self: Try rewatch an episode before writing meta about it.  Because I rewatched "Anne" this morning, and it's even better than I remembered.  In fact, I can say that it and "Bargaining" are my favorite season openers. 

(Note to everyone else: I cannot get the lj cut tag to work, in either rich text or html, even after much effort.  So I apologize for this all showing up on the Friends page. I assume you still love me anyway, gentle reader.)

I mentioned yesterday that "Anne" is an encapsulation of S6's theme of Buffy's depression in a single episode. Watching it again this morning, for the first time since I finished the series, I realized that it's an encapsulation of pretty much the entire seven seasons, (And it captures pretty much everything that makes it my favorite TV show ever: humor and drama in perfect balance, wonderful character work, and a kick-ass fight scene.) 

( Are you seated comfortably? )

First off, there's a lot going on in this episode, such as economic class issues, personified later in the season by Faith; and Xander and Cordy's difficult relationship, characterized by avoidance, dislike, insults and sex that masks genuine affection (shades of Buffy and Spike, anyone?) I'll talk about those in other meta posts, but for this one I want to focus on Buffy's depression arc as reflected in "Anne" and portrayed over the entire series. We tend to think of S6 (and late S5) as the "depression arc" but the show has been very careful to build that aspect of Buffy's character from the beginning of S2.

"Anne":
(Buffy) "This isn't hell." 
(Ken) "What is Hell?  The total absence of hope."

After Life:
"Where ever I was, I think I was happy....I was finished. Complete....I think I was in Heaven. And now I'm not. I was torn out of there, pulled out by my friends....Everything here is hard, and bright, and violen. Everything I feel, everything I touch - this is hell. Just getting through the next moment, and the one after that, knowing what I've lost. They [the Scoobies] can never know.  Never."

Buffy's monologue in AL, poignant as it may be (all praise to SMG's delivery), is summed in the single shot in "Anne" at the top of this post: despair, depression, PTSD, the sense of having lost everything: family, friends, lover, childhood innocence; exiling herself to an urban setting (L.A.) that is "hard...and violent." Even the reference to her friends' actions in Bargaining, and "They can never know [where I've been, what I've gone through]" is relevant to Becoming/Anne: Buffy never mentions Xander's lie  ("Willow said 'Kick his ass' ") and her perception that her friends abandoned her until S7's "Selfless". 

The dark, fiery setting of the underground factory is a place she returns to both physically and emotionally throughout the series.
She descends to that hell, the utter absence of hope in S5: TWOTW and The Gift; most of S6 up to Normal Again; EP and Touched in S7, finally vanquishing it physically and emotionally in Chosen.



In each instance Buffy must fight to break through her depressive state by renewing connections to her Slayer instincts and to her friends and family on her own terms. The personal (Buffy) becomes the political (the Slayer). In both "The Gift" and "Chosen" her solutions to saving the world are also motivated by a desire to protect loved ones (Dawn in The Gift) or banishing her own fears (of dying alone, in "Chosen".) It's not coincidental that in most instances, with the exception of "Touched", this is facilitated primarily by other women, especially friends and family: Lily and Joyce in "Anne", Willow in TWOTW, Dawn in "Grave", Joyce again in "Normal Again". One of BtVS's strength is that it continually affirms and values relationships between women in a way that was (and is) still relatively uncommon in US movies and tv shows. (See gabrielleabelle's meta "Women, Connecting".)  

"Touched" twists the pattern around a bit: Spike, arguably the most "androgynous" of the male characters (he and Buffy have shifted male/female role expectations fluidly, if not easily, throughout their relationship) reestablishes the emotional connection that allows her to break through and reclaim her identity and purpose. That can be interpreted positively: the male and female halves of Buffy (as well as Spike), the anima and animus, joined together in strength rather than weakness; or negatively: women will ultimately betray one another, and a woman's most important connections are with men. I'm not wanting to engage in a "Spuffy-centric" conversation here, btw; I'm just trying to parse out the writers' intended and unintended messages in the gender twist to the pattern.

Buffy then reconnects with Willow and Faith ("Good thing we're such hot chicks" / "Takes the edge off") to create the Slayer spell and connect through and with them with all the Potentials all over the world. That the spell has a some very unpleasant implications - violation of personal agency, the creation of a master race, etc - is something that has been thoroughly discussed and I'm going to put aside in-depth consideration of it for the moment - again, I'm trying to look at it only in the context of Buffy's depression arc. In this regard, however, I think local_max made an excellent point the other day that in the context of Chosen Buffy is less trangressive than Willow, and I'd argue that Buffy's affirmation of the WC's mission, spreading it outward, continuing the "war" rather than questioning, subverting or rejecting it entirely, supports his observation. In "Anne" the positive negative implications of the Slayer spell are foreshadowed in Buffy's command to a scared and reluctant Lily (a sort of proto-Potential, if you will) that she lead the other workers out of the factory: "You can handle this - because I say so". She acts as "General Buffy", commanding the troops, delegating tasks, and empowering another girl, or more precisely permission (via a verbal kick in the ass) to claim her own power; but she has also makes an assumption about the other girl's ability or willingness to do the task out of immediate practical need without prior proof that Lily can step up to the plate, and is proven only by happenstance.  (What if Lily hadn't pushed Ken off the scaffold?)

That her depressive episodes reoccur over the run of the series (and I am purposefully excluding the comics as I do not consider them head-canon, at least) indicate that simply "getting over herself" is not sufficient to solve her underlying issues.  The show's attitude towards professional therapeutic help ("Beauty and the Beasts", and "Normal Again") is a bit of a mixed bag, and I want to on more in-depth on the subject in another meta.  Suffice it to say, Buffy never receives real help, except of the bootstrap variety; no therapy - or rest - for the Slayer.

(I've got a lot more to say about "Anne": about Joyce's anger toward Giles and the WC, about Xander and Cordy's relationship, class issues, etc. To be continued....)