Angel, before and after having a soul.
Deriving meaning from suffering? Or nah.
I have a number of people I follow online who are big into stoicism. It’s always seemed a little cult-y to me. Or perhaps just religious. Particularly because it’s often used as a way to decide that everything happens for a reason, including the super bad stuff. That you can’t control external factors (I can concede that), so you can only control your reactions to those factors. That rather than complain about something that happened to you, you should figure out how it really happened for you.
I get why this framing is appealing. After all, I am the girl who wrote a paper in college, entitled, “Eden. It’s a nice place to visit, but I wouldn’t want to live there” to make the very point that one cannot appreciate the good if there is never any bad.
Plus, humans are storytelling creatures. The best stories have an arc. We want to be able to place events into a known narrative arc, and when they don’t fall into one? Well, ambiguity and uncertainty = anxiety and uncomfortableness.
Nevertheless, I resist. I resist because having lived a bit more life since college, I have landed more on the side of realizing that so many things that happen to you weren’t even really about you.
Maybe that sounds like splitting hairs. To me the difference is that if you’re constantly looking to derive meaning from the bad and the ugly, you‘re constantly centering yourself as the meaning-maker of other people’s actions. I don’t really see how that’s a healthier impulse than allowing yourself to feel the emotions of disappointment and disillusionment that come with feeling someone has wronged you. I’m more on the impact over intention train…which allows it to matter that something happened to you, regardless of intention, or meaning, or whether there’s a “lesson” to be learned.
In a world where empathy seems to be on the decline, I’m also afraid that “for you” framing allows us to numb ourselves to the bad and the ugly when it happens to someone else…because it’s not to us and therefore not for us.
In this past week’s Buffy re-watch a critical part of Buffy lore was revealed. We learned why Angel, a vampire, has a soul…unlike all the other vampires. The soul was a curse put on him as punishment for past horrific misdeeds. The soul causes him a lifetime of suffering, because it gives him a conscience and empathy. Once acquiring his soul, Angel spends more than a century trying to atone. And he doesn’t feel close to done. It’s like the 12-step “amends” concept on steroids. It doesn’t matter that he was made a vampire originally against his will. It doesn’t matter that his evil was perpetrated by a demon version of him. The impact of what he did to others weighs on him in a way that his noble intentions, once ensouled, cannot alleviate.
But wait, there’s more. In this case, more to this soul deal because the curse would be considered a failure should he experience true bliss, so when he does, the soul is torn from him, returning him to his prior state of evil.
The idea that having a soul = suffering is not unique to the Buffyverse. Certainly the suffering artist trope (and in fact the idea that great art only comes from suffering) is a common one. And when I think of some of the science fiction I enjoy, notably Star Trek, I realize that in each Star Trek show, my favorite character often turns out to be the non-human who desperately wants to understand and then be a part of humanity. (e.g. Data, Odo, Seven of Nine, the Doctor.) Grasping for humanity guarantees experiencing pain, as each of those characters do in their quest to be more human, and yet they continue to want it because that pain is part of a richer, deeper existence. They want a soul, even if it means there is pain in store.
I have a thing I say. I say it when I hear someone say that everything they have suffered thus far makes them who they are today, so they can’t be mad about it. I say, “You know, I think I’d still be pretty awesome without the shittiest things that happened to me. I’d certainly be willing to test the theory.”
Because I can’t help feeling: So much that happens is not personal. It happened to me, so maybe I just get to feel some kind of way about it without twisting myself into knots to make meaning from it. The human experience. The soul. It cannot all be parsed and diagrammed and turned into an equation. This bad experience = that valuable outcome.
Bad things do happen to good people. Not everything happens for a reason. And finding the meaning isn’t a prerequisite for deciding how to deal with what’s facing you. And then dealing.
Enyos: "The curse ... Angel was meant to suffer. Not to live as a human. One moment of true happiness, of contentment... one moment where his soul that we restored does not plague his thoughts - and that soul is taken from him."
Where are you on the everything-happens-for-a-reason to the shit-happen-there’s-no-reason spectrum?
My daily tarot card:
Today I drew the Four of Chalices. (Chalices=Cups in a typical non-Buffy tarot deck.) Cups are the suit of feelings, emotion, relationships, the heart,and intuition. The liquid that a Cup contains is meant to convey that emotions and feelings are fluid. And to respect that. The Four of Chalices respects that you might be feeling a sense of disappointment, disillusionment, and disengagement. Given the episodes of Buffy I watched this week it seems almost too on the nose…The episode Innocence is almost entirely about how Buffy has been let down to a debilitating degree. But this card also warns against just brooding indefinitely about it. It’s not saying you can’t hold a grudge. It’s not saying “forgive and forget,” it’s saying to err on the side of action and forward momentum. As a brooder myself, I feel both seen and attacked!
A card pull or full reading can help make a specific decision. Or can set the tone for your week. Either way, my Buffy deck and I are at your service! Check the options: https://calendly.com/elisacp
Signposting and sharing
📺 Next week’s recapping will cover Buffy Season 2, episodes 15 and 16. We get a bit of a breather from the high drama and high stakes of last week’s viewing, and frankly I could use the break!
🛠️ Tool of the week: EatYourBooks.com and their app, CookShelf. One of the tools I’ve been building for myself in Claude is a meal planning tool, but there’s a great tool I use right now that sometimes helps me figure out what to cook. With Eat Your Books, you create a library shelf of all the cookbooks you own. Eat Your Books has indexed all but a few of the dozens of books I own. Search by ingredient or recipe name, and the site/app will tell you what recipes exist in your personal library that match and will tell you the primary ingredients required. It’s not going to give you the recipe. It tells you which page in which book the recipe is on, so you can go find it. And that’s how they avoid violating all those cookbook authors’ copyrights. It has really helped me make better use of all my beautiful books over the years. And it’s super affordable, one low annual charge to build a shelf with an unlimited number of books. If you like to cook, but find leafing through cookbooks to be a bore, this is the tool for you!
📚 This week’s book recommendation is from a beloved novelist: Ann Pachett is beloved by many I know, not just for her novels, but for her outspoken authenticity on social media. I have been a bit less rhapsodic. I love love loved her 2021 release, The Dutch House, but wasn’t blown away by her short story collection, These Precious Days, not her last novel, Tom Lake, (Meryl Streep narration of the audiobook aside). But her new novel, Whistler? Firmly back in the love love loved camp. Much like Elizabeth Strout, Patchett tells stories of regular people and family dynamics and small things that can feel profound and big things that can feel universal. She also writes characters that you root for, even when they’re flawed. This, as it turns out, is harder than it seems (at least given my recent reading). The audiobook is narrated by the author herself, which is not her usual m.o., and I always appreciate hearing the author read their own work. Whistler is a must read. You can borrow it on Libby or get it here at Bookshop.org.
🙋🏻♀️ Question of the Week: Do you hold a grudge? Forgive and/or forget?
Oz (upon learning vampires abound in Sunnydale): "Actually, this explains a lot”
Out in the world this week: Meta meta-commentary
Meta announced some news last week. About a program designed to help people become tradespeople in order to build their data centers in four states. Some folks were super excited about it. I’ll be honest, I took a more skeptical view in this mini-rant on LinkedIn. Key excerpt:
“…we should not get starry-eyed when these mega-companies, these companies raising and/or raking in billions of dollars, spend (in Meta's case) .006% (yes, that's point zero zero six percent) of their revenue to put a tiny bandaid on very real problems they are also creating.
Let this be ***only the beginning*** of these companies taking ownership and creating innovation that solves the problems they themselves cause.”
So, what Buffy episodes did I watch these past two weeks week?
I watched Season 2, episodes 13 (Surprise recap) and 14 (Innocence recap)…which aired on two nights consecutively January 19 and 20, 1998.
The core #BuffyLifeLesson in Season 2 Episode 13 is that people contain multitudes, and you cannot always know what will happen: Secrets are revealed and inexplicable barriers are built, and as upset as we can be with how people treat us, sometimes we are most upset that we didn’t see it, predict it, prevent it. Even when it’s irrational to think we could have.
The core #BuffyLifeLesson in Season 2 Episode 14 is yes, the obvious, the universal…I thought we were good, but now they’re acting all weird, and sometimes you will just never know why someone changed on you. But the underlying foundation of Buffy is the strength of her squad, the power of having a Scooby Gang of your very own. People will keep secrets from you. People will hurt you. People will inexplicably change. That’s the time to turn to the people who love and support you no matter what.
I’m here every week, using pop culture (like Buffy the Vampire Slayer) as a jumping off point for everything I’m thinking about professional leadership, personal development, political philosophy, and pop culture. I would love you to join me by subscribing. And I would love you to share the link with other nerds like us!
FINAL WORDS
Giles: "Do you want me to wag my finger at you and tell you, you acted rashly? You did, and I can. But I know you loved him, and he has proven more than once that he loved you. You couldn't have known what would happen."
-From Innocence, Season 2, Episode 14
