Lost in thought
The depressive spiral is circling the drain
“I've looked into the eye of this Island. And what I saw was beautiful.”
SPOILER & CRAZY GIRL ALERT.
When I was 17, my drug of choice was the critically acclaimed, mind-fuck of a show: LOST. From the moment I finished the two-part record breaking premiere, I was in. Hooked. Committed. I didn’t know it then through my excited and rapid ‘click to next episode’s, but I had just made a dire, life altering mistake I would never be able to undo. When I tell you this show turned me absolutely manic, I mean it.
I lost my mind. Pun intended.
I binged episode after episode until 7 in the morning, way back before a new definition of “Binge” had been added to the dictionary and streaming was fairly new to this world. I was a fiend.
Lost became all I could talk about. All I could think about. The twists and questions and answers leading to new questions, the deaths and births and hatches and others and buttons and numbers and what in the Jacob…
This show had a chokehold on me. I know I’m not alone, but at the time, I felt it. I obsessively attempted to get friends to watch with me (no one did). To watch on their own, and “report back” (only resulting in pitying nods). I would memorize monologues and sob into my laptop camera - stockpiling an archive of photobooth videos let’s pray will never resurface. Some highlights, if you’re looking for a new piece to perform at Monday night acting class:
I watched my daughter Alex die in front of me. And it was my fault. I had a chance to save her. But I chose the island over her. All in the name of Jacob. I sacrificed everything for him. And he didn't even care. Yeah I stabbed him, I was so angry…confused…I was terrified that I was about to lose the only thing that had ever mattered to me - my power. But the thing that really mattered was already gone. I'm sorry that I killed Jacob. I am, and I do not expect you to forgive me because…I can never forgive myself.
It's not your fault she's dead... It's mine. She was sitting right there, right where you are now, trying to leave this place - and I convinced her to stay. I made her stay on this island because I didn't want to be alone. You understand that right? But I think, some of us are meant to be alone.
I studied relativistic physics my entire life. One thing emerged over and over--can't change the past. Can't do it. Whatever happened happened. All right? But then I finally realized… I had been spending so much time focused on the constants, I forgot about the variables. Do you know what the variables in these equations are, Jack? Us. We're the variables. People. We think. We reason. We make choices. We have free will. We can change our destiny.
!!!!!!! I'm screaming. Anyone else screaming??
Between bouts of acting a ‘normal teenager’, I would retreat into my covers and weep at Sawyer, jumping from that helicopter. Weep at John’s crinkly-eye smile. For a few weeks there I became actually nocturnal, so unable to exhibit any sense of restraint or self-control that only after the sun had risen, and my laptop had died, would I allow for some respite. Was I okay? I’d argue not.
And when I reached the fateful end (my god, that END), what other choice was there but to fall into a crushing depression? I mean really, can you blame me? I had let the show become everything to me, until it became nothing at all. My guttural sobs echoing through a lonely, NYC apartment, you’d think someone had died. Everyone would roll their eyes and pity me, classic Kelly, overreacting just like I had that time Prue was killed off Charmed and I moped around my sixth grade halls for weeks (at least I’m consistent). But really, someone had died. Something had. Immediately unable to cope with the foreign, insurmountable grief overtaking me, I clicked open “Pilot (Part 1)” and began the show, again. From the beginning. Someone please call her a doctor.
So there I was, in desperate need of some real human contact and a laugh and, honestly, a life, instead choosing to re-experience 92 hours of trauma. And again I reached the gruesome conclusion, and again the screen cut to black, and again I found myself in the depths of a dark well of depression I had no capacity to climb out of. Much like Desmond, at the hands of ugh season 6 Sayid. The sorrow grew deeper. More final. I had lost all sense of time and place, all sense of reality, I was beyond myself. I looked in the mirror, eyes bloodshot and face a blotchy mess… and knew I needed to get a damn grip. Lost meant so much to me, but it needed to be left behind, then and there. Encased and preserved in its beauty and sorrow like a butterfly in glass. I resolved to never watch it again. And I didn’t. Until 10 years later. This October.
Look. It’s my favorite show. I will shout that from the rooftops, tell anyone who asks me, put it on a Letterboxd list if they were to create a tv-specific branch, whatever. I love Lost. We getttt itttt. But I’m also deeply distraught by this show, and definitely need to do some major work in therapy to figure out how to compartmentalize these emotions. I’m sure there’s some sort of psychological explanation for the way my deepest most painful emotions manifest through the watching of fictionalized, dramatized, stories. But this is not that essay.
My consciousness only remembers that capital L love and runs a damn marathon with it. My consciousness forgets about the dark well and the disturbing loss of reality and the obsessive unhealthy grief and the vow to leave it in 2013. My consciousness thinks that time heals all wounds.
Cut to 2023, where for four years of a four year relationship I have pled with my boyfriend to watch Lost together, a show he had never seen. (Red flag alert). I had tricked myself into thinking that this rewatch experience would be a dream come true. FINALLY he agreed, and I was flooded with love and nostalgia and meaning, the memory of Jack’s opening eyes, laying wake to the chaos soon to befall him, firmly latched into my soul. So I clicked on “Pilot (Part 1)” for the third time in my life, and we watched. And watched. At least this time I wouldn’t be binging under my covers until sunrise. Not that I didn’t want to.
At first I was thrilled to experience the show vicariously through virgin eyes. I’d cut glances as something critical took place, hold back shouts or explanations as he would simply mumble “huh??”, I would clap and whoop and scream - ISN’T IT THE BEST SHOW! as they’d smash to black on an incredibly paced cliffhanger. “It’s good, yeah.” he’d say unenthusiastically, still riding his Breaking Bad high. But excitement and favoritism does not a match for depression make, as I quickly began derailing into that same lonely and grieving 17 year old girl, crying in her closet. Episodes before ‘Not Penny’s Boat’ I was weeping out of sheer anticipation. A one off line would utterly SEND me. (“I wish you had believed me”… shivers down my spine). All the while, through my blurry hysteria, I’d notice said boyfriend had not an emotion in sight. Why wasn’t he devastated?? Is there something wrong with him?? But then I remembered that to most this was just a show, and to me, this was a bible, a pandora’s box, a repressed memory that unleashes a monster. I’m the problem. It’s me.
Our watch concluded a few weeks ago, and he was sad. (Honestly thank god). But I was beside myself. I didn’t sleep for two nights as the anxiety of memories that aren’t even my own stabbed into my chest. Again I found myself lost within spiraling thoughts around destiny and loss and what it all even means. Big Girl Pants existential questions I had no business mistaking for pleasure viewing. Again.
I’m broken but I try to be whole. I try to be a 28 year old adult who can recognize the difference between real life suffering and a writers room putting flashy twists on paper. Between my own grandpa’s death, and John Locke’s tearful pleads for someone to believe him, to love him, to not tell him what he can’t do, to mean something. Between my own questions around what the hell I'm doing in life, and a group of misfits on a magical island where there’s a black smoke monster and polar bears and ageless men and resurrected dead people and a glowing tunnel of powerful light.
But are they really all that different?
“What if this wasn’t supposed to be our life? What if we had some other life, and we changed things?” -Daniel Faraday (what a smarty pants icon)
I’m left wondering how I may have changed the course of my own life. What choices did I make, that had the power and ability to impact my future, setting me off on a totally separate trajectory had I chosen different? Choosing my college (and thus my state and friends), certainly. Randomly searching “ragdoll cats” on Craigslist one day. Declining one job and accepting another. Swiping right on Hinge. Did pressing play on the new Netflix streaming tab that fateful 2013 day, seal my fate as an obsessive, depressive, emotional girl who will simply never get over a TV show? Did the road divulge when I opted out of The Office in its place? Would I be happier? Would things be simpler? Can we change our destiny? I’m not so sure.
We are the variables. We do have free will. But each choice we make knocks into the next like a row of dominos, laying the track for the course. Maybe I am meant to be sitting here, writing about my feelings about a show on a blog almost twenty years after said show even aired. Maybe I am meant to let be, and let go, in order to find the answer as to why.
This is by no means the first personal account of a response to Lost. I’m sure there are thousands. I know I’m not unique or special in any which way. I KNOW, STOP YELLING AT ME. I’m only writing this so as not to feel so deeply alone and isolated in the grief that overtakes my consciousness with that final black screen. In the hopes that someone, one day, will find this like a message in a bottle Sun buried in the sand in season 2, and hold me in the warm embrace of understanding.
If you haven’t seen Lost, it’s careless of me to make you. To insist, to grumble and gasp and peer pressure and isolate you for not having a life experience so pivotal to my existence. Because perhaps you had a similarly impactful experience, somewhere else, with something else, entirely. Or maybe you’re just a more well adjusted individual than I, more capable of toeing the line between fiction and reality that I struggle to see through all the plane wreckage and bottles upon bottles of Oceanic 815 water (what flight carries that many water bottles, btw?).
This reaction is my own. “My relationship with Lost is extremely personal.”
In 10 more years, when I’m looking for something comforting to watch, or in 20 years, when I eagerly go to binge it with my kids…someone for the love of God remind me what this show does to me. Tell me it’s not a good idea. It’s not worth the therapy bills. Send me this utterly unhinged Substack think piece.
But even if you do remind me, I’m sorry to say that I probably will watch anyway. In fact I know I will. I won’t be able to help it. I think it’s my destiny.
And when I inevitably take a plane from Australia to LAX, or play a lottery ticket with 4815162342, or see a plume of black smoke billow out of my candle and wither away into the wind, or look at my legs and appreciate the feeling of walking, I’ll try to remember that I am good, I am grateful, I am right where I’m supposed to be. And all is not lost.
See you in another life, brotha.
Kelly