Save the cat
As you perhaps may have noticed, my newsletters have dropped in frequency as of late, for Smarch is already upon us. This is not because I have given up, however, but because I am working on taking this whole project in a slightly new direction. Don’t worry, it’s still going to be about horror movies and recovery, but I’m essentially refining and clarifying what Back from the Dead really is and what I want to say.
This stems from a few conversations I’ve had over the past year with people who were in a crisis, either addiction-related, mental health-related, or a combo of both. These friends opened up to me about it because they know that I have gone through something similar so I would understand and not judge. More than once I heard a friend express the sentiment along the lines of, “Thinking about the future is so overwhelming it makes me have a panic attack, but also I have no hope for a future.” This statement is kind of illogical, but if you’ve felt this way before you know exactly what they mean.
Being in this state is fucking horrible, and it’s so hard to get out of. Almost anything anyone says to you will be useless and in some cases, make you feel worse. You know that if you could just do X, Y, and Z, maybe you’d get better, but what’s even the point? It’s like feeling so far away from where you want to be, you’re on another planet.
So I knew saying “go to therapy” wasn’t going to work (most of these people were already in therapy) and telling them to live, laugh, love, wasn’t going to fly either, so I took a different approach.
I said, “Right now, you’re Ripley in Alien. You’re on the Nostromo, the entire crew has been killed, and the alien is after you. It’s a bad situation.”
My one friend replied, “I appreciate you framing it in a way I can understand.”
I explained that the crisis these friends were facing was the alien. And you can’t fuck around with the alien. Ignoring it or minimizing it isn’t going to make it any less deadly. Ripley needs to save the cat, get to the escape pod, and kill the alien. She doesn’t need to worry about what she’s going to do when she gets back to Earth, how she’s going to explain this situation in her next job interview, or if her hair is frizzy, or whether or not her crew-mates thought she was a bitch. She just needs to get the fuck out.
It can be helpful to think of a mental health crisis the same way.
In 2013, I was suicidally depressed and I had tried being sober for a few months but I went back to drinking. I was unemployed, had recently been dumped, and I felt like I was watching my peers all go on to bigger and better things. Yep, so, crisis. There were times when my thoughts would race with all the “shoulds”: you should get a job, you should write more, you should do open mics, you should move out of this neighborhood, you should do yoga, you should you should you should. And before long I’d be paralyzed by anxiety. And then I’d be drinking. And then I’d be hungover again, wanting to die.
Save the cat, kill the alien.
I realized that I couldn’t think about my uncertain future. So I just thought about that day and focused on not drinking for 24 hours. I talked a lot with my grandfather (who had 40+ years sober at that point). Then I had another full day. I started eating full meals at regular intervals. I called sober people I knew. I started to think a few weeks ahead, but not farther than that. After a couple weeks I felt ok enough to take the subway again, and I went back to therapy and adhered to a treatment plan we agreed to. I hung out with my friends again. Within a couple months I had a new job. I started thinking about longer-term goals. And so on, and so forth, and that’s how I was able to fly away in the escape pod.
All mental health crises are unique, of course, but they all have an alien—the thing that is actively fucking up your life at the moment and causing you pain. Everyone’s escape plan will be different, too, but they all point to a way out.
My friends liked my Alien metaphor and found it hopeful. So it got me thinkin’. What if I created an organized plan for incorporating horror movies/books into your recovery?'
And so, I will be authoring a new series called The Healing Power of Horror (working title…but I kinda like it…) that takes evidence-based practices and frames them in a way nerds can appreciate. As this is going to take a lot of time and research, most of this content is going to be behind a paywall since it’s going to be more like the articles I write for work and less of a stream-of-conscious rambling. My plan is for it to also have an accompanying podcast. Exciting!
But my Back from the Dead newsletter will continue with book recommendations and dumb stories and be 100% free! I was recently warned away from reading about skinwalkers because “they are real”, so obviously I will be learning a lot about them and hope to share that with you.
Thanks for sticking with me on this journey as I define and refine this project. I know I have been talking about Alien, like a lot, so I’m very excited to dive in to other movies and books.
Tabitha
