In season two, one of the main characters, a precocious teenage girl named Jessi, is held hostage by a monster, the Depression Kitty, who initially goads her into a room without exits and in a somnambulant purr, asks, “Jessi, have you ever laid on your side, facing away from the television, listening to a Friends marathon?”. According to the National Institute of Mental Health, bipolar disorder tends to develop when a person is in their late teen to early adult years. On this Sunday's episode of HBO's Euphoria, Rue, in a send-up of noir films, imagines herself as a hardboiled detective trying to crack a case that doesn't quite add up. On this Sunday's episode of HBO's Euphoria, Rue, in a send-up of noir films, imagines herself as a hardboiled detective trying to crack a case that doesn't quite add up. Being alive is hard. Shut Up, Brain is a column by Jill Gutowitz in which she looks at everything from pop culture phenomena to the quirks of interpersonal relationships through the lens of someone who lives with anxiety. In my own experience, this can manifest in going to bed at 5 AM, waking up at 3 in the afternoon, getting mad at myself for sleeping the whole day away, and then continuing the routine on a self-hating loop. But it's easy to see this at first as just an amusing pop culture homage, as media has trained audiences to see Rue's actions in a comedic light (similar to the popular Pepe Silvia meme from It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia.) It takes BoJack a myriad of major screw-ups until, with the help of his patient friend Diane, he seeks treatment in the finale of the latest season. Depressive episodes are very similar to depression, so spotting manic periods is key to a bipolar diagnosis. It’s just that the path forward sometimes leads backward. When you're deep in it, sometimes you can't drag yourself out of bed to pee. The two latest episodes cover the first time Rue is experiencing living “clean.” In “Trials and Tribulations,” the plot centers on Rue’s alternating states of mania and depression. Accepting that and continuing to trudge forward, like Rue does, despite and because of her experience while watching Love Island, is a mental salve. Kitty, as a personification of depression’s crushing burden, is a good visual for something that is metaphysical, but the tight turnaround from trapped to exalted isn't what depression is actually like: As soon as Jessi recognizes she’s in a bad place, she looks for a way out. Most days, this world is too much for me, and like a Bizarro Ariel, I don't want to be where the people are; I want to be alone and warm, where I don't have to worry about health care premiums and my inevitable march toward death. Her bipolar disorder is always a part of her, but with the support of her friends, she learns to manage it, and even find love and a fulfilling career. That passage and the first couple episodes of this show have fucked me up, which is why I wanted to share it, because the profundity with which it fucked me up means something; Euphoria struck a chord in me that didn't want to be struck, but that needed to be.
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