Rue Isn’t Alone. Neither am I. And Neither Are You.
Revisiting one of my favorite essays I've ever written. It's about 'Euphoria', but it's also about the state of mental health discourse in 2023.
Looks like I’m keeping up with my tradition of getting a post out on the literal last day of the month to maintain my “two per month” schedule.
Since this is the place for me to share my thoughts unhindered, I should tell you, this essay was previously shared in a public forum: my portfolio website.
(Maybe I shouldn’t have told you? The road to hell is paved with good intentions after all).
Anyway, what’s done is done. Essentially I used to have a blog on my website for a while before I started this newsletter, and I’ve been trying to figure out the best way to integrate them.
At first, I thought about copying my substack posts into the website blog, but that turned out to be a pain in the ass. While the opposite, taking the blog posts and putting them on substack was easy.
So intermittently I’ll be making some reposts (with slight updates to the copy to make them chronologically viable). Apologies if you’ve read anything before. But this transfer will give me some breathing room when I’m feeling crunched to write a fresh post while simultaneously bringing all my personal writings into one place.
Truth be told, this essay might be my favorite thing I’ve ever written for a personal forum. It allowed me to be vulnerable and unfiltered in my writing style, to demonstrate my adept ability to analyze film and television, and share my thoughts on repugnant social norms.
I hope you enjoy it as well (and marvel at my premier screenshot game).
Like a large percentage of the population who are concerned with popular culture, In 2022 I spent several of my Sundays watching Sam Levinson’s exploration of high school hedonism, Euphoria, on HBO.
From week to week, I found it entertaining and intriguing. Nothing near the narrative mastery of True Detective season one or Breaking Bad, but entertaining. A sobering (pun intended) perspective on what high school was like and what it could have been.
In my case, what the show was missing, what prevented my own personal connection to the admittedly wonderful performances from the ensemble cast, was inherent relatability.
I didn’t have any relationships in high school. I’m not trans. I’m not overweight. I’m not an addict. I wasn’t one of the “popular” kids, and I didn’t do anything that would have landed me in prison or made me the subject of internet harassment.
I’m a white, cis, straight, male, and I believed I had a generally “normal” and/or “banal” high school experience, annotated by the traditional dilemmas attached to the growing mind within the growing body.
This show, like all serialized entertainment, was meant to depict a departure from the norm, experiences nobody wishes they had, but experiences that millions of people would find compelling to witness.
The second season was particularly compelling, but also particularly unfocused in the earlier stages. Sure there were a few poignant moments flanked by a few utterly tense sequences, but after four episodes of the second season, I was mostly watching as a perennial exercise (and to be in the know on Twitter).
Then came the fifth episode of the second season, entitled “Stand Still Like the Hummingbird”.
(Moving forward, beware of extreme spoilers about Euphoria).
The episode begins with Rue’s mother, Leslie, confronting Rue about her persisting drug use. Rue believes her sister, Gia, ratted her out after Rue told Gia that she was smoking weed on occasion to help with panic attacks (a blatant lie as Rue had been actively using since the first episode of the first season), but it’s then revealed that Leslie is aware Rue has fully relapsed; using opiates, among other heinous substances.
Suddenly, Rue begins slamming doors, deflecting, seeking pity, doing anything she can to purport the lie that she was merely smoking weed, and not using opiates, among other heinous substances. She’s so sure she can get away with it, demanding a drug test, until Leslie mentions Jules, Rue’s ambiguous paramour/best friend.
At that point, Rue basically admits her misdeeds. Goes searching for the suitcase full of opiates, among other heinous substances, that she acquired from a career drug dealer and begins a long, messy, and dreadful downward spiral.
Watching Rue emit all of her fear, pain, shame, and embarrassment certainly contrived the departure from the norm television is meant to provide…
There was just something about her though…in her spiral, that was, dare I say, recognizable…
…causing the cloud cover of inherent unfamiliarity looming over the series that hung like thunderheads ready to burst to slowly dissolve.
Right then, the series wasn’t only familiar. It was relatable, reflective. I felt intertwined with the spirit of Ruby Bennet in her cascade of blunders and atrocities.
I didn’t know why. After all, Rue and I have mostly nothing in common, right?
It was only when I saw her strike fear in the eyes of her family that I knew how misguided and oblivious I was not to see that she and I are identical in so many ways.
As I saw this lanky walking pharmaceutical Petri dish cope with being outed once more as just that, I saw myself.
I am Rue. Rue is me.
In just under one full hour of immaculate television, we see her take a jackhammer to rock bottom. And when the jackhammer wears out, she tears up her fingernails, clawing and scratching, ripping out any atoms she can of the sedimentary floor beneath her so she can go deeper.
A metaphor, of course, and it’s the actions that create said metaphor where our amalgamation is salient.
Rue then begins to speak the most disgusting and vile words to her mother. Claiming her mother doesn’t recognize her, hates her…
…I’ve done that.
Rue puts her feet through a wooden door…
…I’ve done that, except with my head.
Rue cries and begs for pity…
…I’ve done that.
Then Jules reveals her presence in the scenario, and now the relatability is attached to my friends. All the vile, horrendous, atrocious, and disgusting shit Rue said to her mom, she now says to her best friend.
Except because I am closer with my friends than I ever have been with my parents (just like Rue) my barbaric slanders towards my friends were far more personal, far more hurtful, far more reprehensible. The most vile, malignant, poisonous, words for no other reason than to fuel the animus in my blackened heart.
Rue calls Jules “a fucking greedy whore who just likes sucking the life out of people.”
I’ve said the equivalent. If not far worse. One thing about having a writer’s brain is you have the dubious ability to devise insults most people couldn’t fathom.
Following the exhausting release of energy that comes with vomiting hate upon people who are trying to help you, Rue submits to a state of capitulation. She gets in the car with her mother and sister, heading towards the ER, a precursor to another stint in rehab.
Sitting in the car, a far more specific overlap in our experiences comes to the fore.
Rue’s suicide fantasy where she lays on the sand and the waves take her out to sea…that’s my fantasy, too.
Mine’s more specific, though. I’m sitting on Black Sands Beach in Northern California, and I shoot myself in the head before the waves wash me away.
I wrote a song about this exact scenario.
It’s actually really good.
Like really really good because the feelings I poured into it were authentic.
Rue poured those same authentic feelings into a different version of the same thing.
Thankfully after that, there is some personal relief for me when Rue gets out of the car in the middle of traffic. Don’t get me wrong I was stressed the fuck out, especially because of my newly realized connection to this suffering character, but one thing I haven’t done is run into the middle of traffic to avoid going to rehab.
Unfortunately, the feeling of relief was quickly shattered when Rue tries to steal drugs from Fezco. It wasn’t drugs, but I’ve stolen from friends and loved ones (and I was probably wearing chucks while I did it).
Really the only things that our dear Rue did in this episode that I haven’t done were predicate a pedestrian police pursuit and shoot up morphine in a strange drug dealer’s bathtub (although I have spent time with strange drug dealers to combat my own loneliness).
But as I write this, those truths provide no alleviation, as those were the sequences scripted for visual suspense. They were meant to depart from reality.
What was possible and feasible in the episode, I’ve done. Almost all of it.
Before going any further I feel obligated to share that I no longer experience suicidal thoughts, and I engaged in most of the actions through which Rue and I overlap around the same age as her. She’s 17. I’m 30 now. It’s been a while.
And yet when I was watching the episode, the same pattern of thought from my teenage years hopped the cerebral express to the present, and my normal, self-deprecating, reactions came to the fore:
“What’s your excuse?” I ask myself with a tone of threatening interrogation.
“She’s an addict. She watched her dad die when she was a kid. You’ve never experienced that kind of pain or that kind of disease. How can you live with yourself for behaving that way?”
Eventually, the questions stop and the condemnations begin:
“You’re a worthless, pathetic, disgusting, failure.”
It’s in that moment, that I (well the real me at least) realize I’ve now become Jules. Staring my demons in the eyes as they hover over me. I’m crying, trembling, only doing my best to express love.
Mere inches from my face they stare back at me, just like Rue stared at Jules.
(Side note, the way Zendaya moves during those moments when she’s as close to Hunter Schafer as possible, shifting into place in Jules’s eye line to where Rue knows Jules can’t see anything beyond Rue’s virulent leer and the mane of unkempt hair. Enveloping her entire visual field…in that moment Zendaya won her second Emmy.)
((Side side note: I called that Emmy win))
In a past age, I would have crumbled before the demons, submitting to their hateful and toxic rhetoric the way Rue submitted to drugs. Complete and resolute surrender. What they said, what they say. That is the truth and nothing less.
Luckily, to my own credit, over the last decade or so in addressing my mental and spiritual health, I’ve developed a handy little tool called self-awareness, which is like if Yoda appeared in front of the demons and eradicated them with his lightsaber.
So after mental Yoda did his thing as I was watching, I returned to the present in the throws of a pensive moment…
That scene triggered me both internally and externally. It depicted a photo negative of some of my lowest moments while also managing to conjure the internal process that reminded me of those moments over and over and over and over again.
I found it truly fascinating really that fiction could have such a visceral effect on me, and such effects come only through relatability.
I felt something because I saw myself in Rue, and if I, someone who thought they had a generally “normal” and/or “banal” high school experience, felt something, then the chances are millions of Euphoria viewers felt something as well.
Because the story, whether it includes an uncanny number of overlapping actions or not, is relatable to millions of people. It simply couldn’t become the era-defining success that it is if it didn’t.
My pattern of thought stemming from my high school years asks what my excuse is for behaving in such a way to where I related to Rue. But the truth is, no one needs an “excuse” if they’re struggling like she was, whether they’re an addict or not. Whether they watched their father die or not.
It’s the stigma against mental health discourse that demands an explanation, and so many people spend their lives truly, and unequivocally, believing there is something wrong with them because they can’t find one.
With no apparent or obvious source for the issue, the issue must not exist. If your life is inherently manageable by the standards handed down from the historical patriarchy, you’re not allowed to be sad, or angry, or upset, or scared. You should be grateful for what you have, right?
Just shrug it off. Man up. Stop being a little bitch (as my demons would put it).
Then people feel guilty about revealing the struggles they’re not supposed to have. So instead they bottle them up, compress them, and hide them in the darkest corners of their minds (literally the part of the brain Pink Floyd discussed throughout their illustrious 1973 masterpiece, Dark Side of the Moon).
And because everyone is too ashamed to reveal that they’re struggling, everyone is suddenly alone in their struggles. The ubiquitous feeling of existential dread is only to be experienced by one, accursed human being, suffering the consequences of every sin committed by mankind.
Kinda like Jesus except no one is going to worship you afterward because remember, you don’t actually have a reason to feel this way.
So where do so many people turn once they’re are all alone, drowning in anguish? Drugs, alcohol. Any number of dissociative substances or activities solely synthesized to remove people from present observation and awareness.
For it is within present observation and awareness that existential dread lies, and with a drink or a pill or a line or a fuck, you can forget about it for a little while.
I sincerely hope the experience I described is not one with which you are familiar. I actually did meet someone in late 2019 who said they never struggled with their mental health in their life (until they decided to become a DJ lolz). I didn’t think that was possible.
The fact is not everyone goes through that experience, but so many people do, and the first thing for those people to know is that they are not alone.
The finale of the second season of Euphoria is entitled “All My Life, My Heart Has Yearned for a Thing I Cannot Name”. In it, we see the reactions to Lexi’s play, the play that was all too derivative of her own middle school and high school years.
The real-time reactions were Euphoria-worthy, and, overall, the play was a touching depiction of a young girl’s life (with insane production value). Not just Lexi’s life, but the lives of her closest friends. Rue’s life. Their life together, and how they relate to one another.
Watching the finale, it was the first time I, as a viewer, realized Lexi and Rue shared the experience of losing their dads. I think it was the first time Rue realized it, too.
In her drug-addled mindset, Rue likely would have scoffed at Lexi if she proposed a bond over their absent fathers. Rue would have screamed at Lexi about how being dead and being gone aren’t the same thing. Rue would have cried about how she has more of a reason to be sad, and thus more of a reason to be selfish (I’ve done that, too).
In a sober mindset, however, watching the play Rue sees herself as more than her demons; more than her guilt; more than her mistakes. She sees herself as Lexi’s friend, both of whom have lost their fathers in one way or another.
With this discovery in mind and heart, Rue makes a healthy choice. She calls her friend Lexi, and they talk about their dads. They share tears, they share honesty, they share support, they share love.
Throughout the entire show, Rue has been searching for someone with whom she can share those feelings. Someone who can relate to her pain. From Fez to Jules to Elliot. Searching for someone who can help her figure out what to do with the hole in her heart, if not enable her choice to fill the hole with drugs.
Turns out, the person Rue was searching for was Lexi. Her oldest friend.
In their final chat of the season (swapping close-up shots of their faces to capture every minute detail of their emotional expressions) Rue tells Lexi stuff like “You know what to do with it,” and “You fucking figured it out.”
Lexi doesn’t contest the point too much. She says “I don’t know about that” more as a kneejerk reaction from her lacking self-confidence that pervades her character, but her face says that she’s just as lost as Rue.
Because this idea that anyone has life figured out, whether they’re 17 or 29 or 57 or on their fucking deathbed, is a big wash.
No one has it figured out. Everyone is figuring it out. Every minute of every day.
What Lexi did for Rue, what Rue needed in that moment, and what so many people need in this moment right now, is an open space; a forum to say things like “You know what to do with it,” and “You fucking figured it out.”
It’s also a forum to say things like “I think your play was the first time I was able to look at my life and not hate myself for everything I’ve done.”
In that space, it’s OK to be afraid and show it. It’s OK to be hopeless and show it, and it doesn’t matter one bit who is holding the space.
From the outside, It would seem that Lexi was the antithesis of Rue. They share the loss of their father, but Lexi is having the “normal” and/or “banal” high school experience while Rue's is as eventful as it was horrible.
Lexi is writing stage productions while Rue is asking Lexi to piss in a cup for her so she doesn’t fail a drug test.
But maybe that’s why Lexi is the person for whom Rue was searching. Because maybe the people who seem to be different are the people who are best suited to help because they have a different perspective.
Their experience of losing their fathers is different. The way they handled that loss is different, but the relatability is there.
And only in a television program does the level of relatability need to exist through the traumatic lens of losing a parent, whether to cancer or an unquenchable drug addiction.
In real life, the relatability is atmospheric, universal. If not through experiences within the physical plane, through the internal processing of human life, so often relegated and remanded to silence due to societal pressures that are infinite in their hereditary restraint.
I used so many ten-dollar words in that last graph to make the idea I was sharing sound scary and cryptic. I mean think about it. The fact that we live in such a society that demotes honest communication about one’s own experiences is pretty fucking terrifying if not shameful.
But the fear only shrouds the universal relatability. The relatability I didn’t see between my own life and Euphoria. The relatability you may not see between you, your best friend, your parents, or anyone else you know.
I thought I had a “normal” and/or “banal” high school experience. Well the normal high school experience is to struggle.
The normal life is to struggle, and no one is alone in the struggle.
Rue wasn’t alone.
Neither am I.
And neither are you.