Can You Hear Me Now

If you do not change direction, you may end up where you are heading.

Lao Tzu

I have always been a stumbler. I create lofty plans regarding where I want to be and what I need to do to get there only to see my journey become a series of accidents, pitfalls, switchbacks, and wrong turns. This holds true for everything from my college education to my career to my marriage to being a father. Most of my stumbling worked out well enough, but there were times when I found myself in deep holes with no easy way out.

A few weeks ago, I was listening to NPR’s Wait, Wait Don’t Tell Me when I heard the stars of Somebody Somewhere, Bridget Everett and Jeff Hiller, in the celebrity question/answer segment. I had no idea who they were and had never heard of the show, but their witty banter intrigued me. Unlike the likes of Ted Lasso or The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, Somebody Somewhere wasn’t on anyone’s lips as the show to see.

Thankfully, I took a chance and tuned into episode one. I came in with zero expectations and was ecstatic to find one of the best written and acted comedy dramas about stumbling I’ve come across in a long time. As tempted as I was to binge the show, I took things slowly and allowed each episode (sometimes two) to sink in before moving to the next.

The basic story is simple. Sam, which I assume is short for Samantha, moved back to the small town of Manhattan, Kansas to be with her sister, Holly, as she dies from cancer. The first episode begins shortly after Holly’s death.

It would be an understatement to say that Sam’s life is a mess. She is wallowing in grief over Holly’s passing. She hates her job. She lives in a town she never wanted to return to. Her mom is a self-centered alcoholic. Her father isn’t willing to face his wife’s addiction. Her sister, Tricia, is an overachiever with a sloth of a husband.

Sam is friendless, lonely, and lost, and you learn all this in the first 15 minutes of the first episode. Like me, she is a stumbler and isn’t above face planting into each new challenge.

And then there is Joel. Joel works with Sam and remembers her from high school where they both sang in the choir — Sam was the shining star and Joel was a shadow in the background. While Sam struggles to find her footing, Joel is joyful, playful, and overflowing with hope. Despite appearing to be complete opposites, it soon becomes apparent that their paths are actually closely aligned and they become inseparable.

Despite my lead-in, this is not a review of Somebody Somewhere and its cast of misfits. I am not going to dig into the storyline so don’t worry about spoilers. Neither am I going to write about how this is the best gender expansive show I’ve ever seen. Instead, I want to address the main points of the show — awkwardness, awakening, change, acceptance, and redemption.

Broken is as Broken Does

I do not have any tattoos, but if I ever decide to have something inked into my body, the words “We are all broken people” would be a great choice. For better or worse, it’s an appropriate expression for what I’ve been through. I came into this world a clean slate, but it didn’t take long before life whittled away at my childhood innocence. Whether is was Dad’s temper or Mom’s inability to protect her children from his madness, I entered adulthood with gaping emotional wounds that refused to scar over.

Everyone in Somebody Somewhere is broken. While some are better than others at hiding their demons, it’s like rain on a leaky roof. Water, and demons, always find a way to get through.

We humans have a long list of things we do to mask our brokenness. We use sex, chemicals, gambling, religion, isolation, food, denial, and countless other numbing techniques. Even Joel’s joy and optimism can become a mask. We are also quite good at mixing and matching until we come up with the right combination of behaviors that protect us from having to feel.

Like her mother, Sam drinks too much. She turns to alcohol when she’s happy and when she’s desperately sad. The same is true for many of the other characters. I will venture to say that the tiny-tini deserves a costarring credit.

Sam also uses isolation to self medicate. She pushes people away and acts as if she does not see the shape of her life and the consequences of her actions. Like all addicts (and Sam is surely an addict), she creates walls to protect herself from having to face who she is and where she’s headed.

I have known the black dog of melancholy
snarling
biting at my heels as I struggle to climb from this hole
of slump and despair

The sound of a rain that will not stop falling
or the fog that seeps into the head
clouding all thoughts of redemption

I have known the helplessness
and the vulnerability
the inability to rise from a funk
to drive the ghastly cur away

Showing Up

Despite the messiness, Somebody Someone isn’t just a show about people screwing up (even though they do plenty of that). It’s actually about how failure can lead to awakening, change, and transformation. It’s about reaching the point where we either let our demons devour us or we see them for what they are and find the courage to stumble down a different path.

In the show, people marry. They move on from toxic relationships. They go off to rehab. They begin to build their spiritual cores. They take ownership of their health. They show up for others. They build new relationships. They ask for help. They fall in love. They reach their personal bottoms and start to look up. They ask for what they need.

And they change.

But not in a sitcom, rainbows and unicorns manner. This is not The Brady Bunch. Every change, no matter how hard fought and messy, feels real. They feel a lot like the difficult changes I’ve had to make in my life.

I am not sure what I want, I have no idea where to begin, I am not ready to throw off the chains that are holding me down, and I keep hoping I can find an easier, softer way. And yet, I still take that first stumbling step towards a scary unknown.

Frogs on a Log

There is a common joke in the recovery community. It goes like this:

Three frogs are sitting on a log and one decides to jump. How many are left?

Three. To decide is not to act.

As sloppy as it might be, to stumble is to act. It’s making the decision to get off that log and doing something about it. It may not be pretty and there is a good chance that you might get hurt along the way, but you do it anyway. It’s faith in an uncertain future and the knowledge that where you are today is no longer working — if it ever did.

In the third season of the show, Sam’s sister, Tricia, sums this up quite nicely with a very simple truth. “Nobody knows what they’re doing. Nobody.” That’s a theme I am very familiar with.

What Happened to You

In their 2021 book, What Happened to You?: Conversations on Trauma, Resilience, and Healing, Dr. Bruce Perry and Oprah Winfrey discuss how childhood trauma shapes our adult lives. Whether it’s abuse, neglect, or abandonment, these painful experiences find a home in our lizard brains and unconsciously guide behaviors throughout life. This is especially true of harms inflicted at a very young age. They become core to our fight, flight, or freeze reactions.

I cannot look at most of the characters from Somebody Somewhere (Sam, Joel, Fred, Tricia, Brad, Iceland, etc.) and not ask myself what happened to them. What events, remembered or forgotten, continue to direct how they respond to present day events? We know that Joel was bullied for being gay, and as a transgender man, Fred has surely known confusion, hatred (both from within and without), and discrimination. We never fully understand Sam’s story, but it’s clear that she has her own buried traumas that push her in directions she appears to have little control over.

If Sam was in a 12-Step program, she would still be stuck at Step One for most of the series: “We admitted that we were powerless over our addictive behavior — that our lives had become unmanageable.” Until Sam can admit to her powerlessness and unmanageability, she is doomed to live a Groundhog Day, definition-of-insanity life.

It’s The Climb

I said there will be no spoilers, so I will not tell you how the final season ends. Like life in the real world, though, nothing ever truly ends. No matter where we are today, we carry all of our yesterdays within us. It’s our choice to use them to hold ourselves in place or to coax us ever onward.

Here is another recovery saying. No matter how far you drive down the road you are always three feet from the ditch. Even so, it’s better than sitting in a parked car, deciding to drive away, and getting absolutely nowhere. Be the frog that makes a decision and then jumps off the log or if necessary, out of the ditch.

Thank you for reading.

Some see cuts and bruises
the lacerations shallow, abrasions deep
some see lesions old and new

Some see hurt from years of scarring
battles won and battles forgotten
sores and blisters
boils and scrapes
some see only the wounds of shame and humiliation

But all I see is the healing
the change and restoration
for through the eyes that have known such devastation
all life is redemption