Back in the day, a million years ago, I did a law degree, and was taught by a professor who inspires me still. He was tremendously charismatic: this brilliant mind able to both race in front of you but look back to make sure you were at least still running to catch up with him. He was one of the most well and widely read people I had ever met, and still know.
We all adored him. And distrusted any other student who didn’t get him.
I had never watched a single episode of ‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer’ until I took one of his classes – because obviously this is where you expected the story to go.
He argued that Buffy was the post-modern Antigone, and this way of thinking completely opened my eyes. I’d never properly realized that you could pull all these different sorts of cultures together and unpack them. Outside of obvious remakes, I’d never looked at something so modern and pulled the narratives across to something both so much older and seemingly so different. Reading Sophocles felt like reading another world, whereas I wore similar clothes to Buffy. Well – similar-ish. It was amazing.
So, while I have never practiced law, yay my law degree for giving me Buffy and a whole world of textual analysis.
So, this afternoon, snuggled up with my small cat and lots of cups of tea, I indulged in way-back-when first season Buffy and the ‘Out of Mind, Out of Sight, episode struck me. In this episode, the ‘bad guy’ isn’t a vampire but a girl who’s become invisible as a reaction to never being seen at school. It’s more than being labeled an outcast – you have to be noticed to be other-ed. It’s less active in a way. You are simply never seen, never noticed; conversations happen around you but never with you. You may be there but you don’t figure in anyone else’s world.
And so, because she is never in anyone else’s thoughts, she is overtaken by invisibility. Here, a name as signifier isn’t enough – the girl has a name – rather the argument here is we don’t see what we don’t remember exists.
And I wondered, in the aftermath of WSPD and RUOK (a sea of acronyms), how many people are never seen, how many people we don’t remember exist. Study after study demonstrates how important connection and belonging are to not only living well, but staying alive. We need to be seen in order to live, in order to remain visible. We need to have conversations with people and interactions with them that are real and whole. Not that every conversation with every person has to change the world, or that we have to interact with everyone. But that we really look at every person we interact with, look in their eyes, and connect with them – even when it’s just smiling and saying thank you to the person at the check out.
I wonder sometimes when so much effort is put into grand gestures, that we’ve forgotten just how important the small, everyday ones are. That words aren’t always necessary; sometimes just being able to sit in the quiet is all that is needed. But we need to be able to follow through with what is needed, and not be frightened about more words or about silence (whichever it is that frightens us the most at that particular moment).
It’s a brave thing, a vulnerable thing, to see people and allow ourselves to be seen. To talk to people and smile at them, make real eye contact. And it’s an easy thing to not do now. I’m hopeless at it sometimes – I’m reading blogs and catching up on emails on my phone the second I hop on a bus now, while I do my grocery shopping, while I’m waiting in a queue, wherever. But I wave and say hello to fellow runners on my morning run; a camaraderie there that feels old-school and special.
Huffing and puffing though I may be, and wishing desperately to lie down on the grass because running is hard, this is still a space in which I see people, and am seen. And there’s a preciousness in that.
So have a I deeply over-thought Buffy?
thesecondplanb 