Like any musical worth its jazz hands, "Once More, With Feeling" episode ends with a kiss, but before that, a confrontation. It's the structure of a good spooky story -- you acknowledge, you confront, you dispel, and then, the kisses abound. When Buffy confronts the musical demon, though, she almost doesn't make it out alive. She's been holding on to a major secret, one that she's told no one except the vampire who inspired Billy Idol's famous bleached coiffe. Her friends are beyond clueless and she thinks that she can hold on to this secret without any repercussions. And then, there's the singing and the dancing and the almost-combusting, and finally, her friends know what's really going on. Of course, that doesn't end it. It's just the beginning of the secrets that follow her throughout the season.
As I've been comparing notes, I see now that I'm getting older, too, and that secrets are much easier to keep now than they were when I was in high school and college. There's not the thrill of allowing certain people access to my own self-knowledge or a glimpse into my mirror, darkly. I think secret telling-and-keeping is a way of making friends, keeping friends, and figuring out who you can trust and not trust. It's like Survivor, just in hallways and dorm rooms. But secrets can become a way of life, something you don't even realize you're doing until it's three months later and you start to see a pattern of singing a certain soundtrack in your car every Thursday night after work.
I didn't see, for the longest time, that listening to O.M.W.F. had more to do with my state of mind than my love of a TV series. And even once I did realize that I was turning it on every weekend, and not just singing, but really feeling the idea of "going through the motions/walking through the part/nothing seems to penetrate my heart," I kept it a secret. I didn't tell anyone. I didn't know how to explain it. And in a way, I didn't want to. There was something delicious about having a secret and keeping it all to myself.
I worked at a summer camp in the mountains one summer in college. It was one of the most difficult jobs I've ever had and emotionally strenuous, too. I didn't feel like I fit in well with many of my fellow staffers and I started to suffer from not being understood nor able to talk well. I lived the weeks, especially the first two months, just trying to get to Saturday morning, when I could take off for the weekend and hang with my pals. It was one of the most lonely times in my whole life and even at the end, when I made a few friends, I never felt part of that environment. And what made it worse was that the work didn't suit me well, either.
But something valuable came out of that experience. In the late summer, I sat down with my boss, who was giving us evaluations. I'd never been evaluated, as an employee before, so this was all very nerve-wracking and twitchy for me. She started out by saying that I was dependable, respectable, that the campers loved me, and none of my fellow employees had conflict with me. "You're pretty much perfect," she said, "except that you're not very good at multi-tasking." I thought about it and I must have had a what-the-hell look on my face, because she proceeded to explain that though I was good at a number of different tasks, I was not very good at doing them all at the same time.
How does it relate, you may ask. Well. My multi-tasking problems extend to my emotional life, too. Changes in life make it easy to keep secrets. I'm working my first "adult" job and that change rocked me hard, unexpectedly hard. It made me feel unsure of and often, disappointed in, myself, and that is what I've been focused on for the last few months. And it became a secret, all those feelings. Once you have secrets, it's easy to focus on them instead of clawing your way out, the honest way. If you're mono-task, like me, it gets even worse because you focus so hard on the feelings surrounding the secret and not on changing your life. I really think it's why I've been so no-show with my creative writing lately; it's not that I couldn't carve out the time to do it, it's that I couldn't focus on anything except my own special Sarah stew. I've been fixating on what makes me feel the whole going-through-the-motions feeling.
Unlike my teenage self, I'm not getting any kind of pleasure from all this secret-releasing. It's difficult. I'm embarassed that I've been so un-self-aware, so unable to voice this to anyone. But it is a way of transformation, a way of re-circling my square stake back into the kind of device that can penetrate. And I think even more change has to be the way to go in this case. Confrontation, in a sense.
In this vein, I went out and found myself a few writing buddies. One in particular is helping me get excited about writing again by letting me co-compose a writing manifesto with her and meet-up every week with our writings. It makes me un-mono myself once in a while and besides, it's a load of fun. Also, as odd as it might sound to say, I've volunteered for the session of my church, the twelve elected members that make decisions and keep the congregation from burning the mother down. My thought here is if I find a way to get ouside myself more often, a way to exorcise the whole me-centric stewing on a more regular basis, it will help get me back to sustaining a creative trickle at least.
So the musical here doesn't end with a kiss, just some messy realizations and a few good intentions. We'll see what the next act brings.
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