A review of American Horror Story (mostly)

If you keep staring at a really difficult problem you're never going to fix it. You need to walk away for a moment and shift your perspective because right now, you’re just too close to see a solution. As any of us can attest to, we’ve all experienced it at some point or another – there can be an eternity in a moment. You have to take those moments, you have to stop being you for a heartbeat and come back with fresh eyes. The pauses are important.

With that in mind, I’m going to change things up and launch into a review blog, of sorts, about a show I have watched recently that I feel is worth a review. I dallied a while over whether or not to recommend it, and my hesitation over this will become clear as I explain myself. But the main reason I decided to sit and write finally this was that the show made me think, and ultimately I believe that any story that makes you think is worth experiencing. This show has moved forward my ideas regarding horror, on why I'm drawn to it as a genre, and why I think it's an important part of our spectrum of experience.

The show I’m going to talk about is American Horror Story, hereafter referred to as AHS. Now, I predict that a few of you might react with ‘oh, but I don’t like horror’, and, I hear that, but also, I sincerely feel that you might be missing out by cutting off this genre entirely. It’s also in my vested interest to encourage you to like horror, if only in the hopes that you’ll then read my first book (I have no delusions of grandeur, it’s not like it’s going to be published, but it is going to be finished) So, please bear with me on the recommendation, and I’ll come back to why it matters later.

Act 2

The advice I find myself giving out most to people these days (solicited advice, I hasten to add) particularly when they are feeling directionless or unhappy or without confidence, is this – move to another country.

By this I don’t literally mean move to another country. But I don’t not mean that either. What I’m trying to tell people is, from my point of view, if you’re not happy with your life, don’t know who you are or what you want - throw yourself into totally alien situation. Plan a bit, maybe, but what you’re planning for is unknowable so by the same token, you can’t really plan for it. Because what happens when you turn your world onto its head is this - you deal with it, and while you’re dealing with it, you start to work the other bits out.

I’m really bad at taking my own advice, although who isn’t, actually? I write all of these blogs about loving yourself and being kind to yourself and being your own hero, and then when it comes to me I’ve carried this voice in my head that’s always said, ‘yeah, but not you, because you’re a dick.’ I know, proper unhealthy, right?

We can be heroes, but not just for one day

Say that you had to create a superhero for yourself.

You could go with an obvious choice, from pop culture lore. Someone with preternatural strengths or abilities, God-like powers over their immediate environment, or unlimited financial resources. And most probably male. I mean, you'll get your Wonder Womans or your Black Widows, but odds are on they will be dressed in something tight and leather, otherwise how else can they remain strong but only in such a way as to still be sexually conquerable?

You could point out here that you have your Buffys of the world, and yeah, that's true. Buffy being a character I've always identified with, but not for the reasons you might imagine.

A letter to my friend

Once we knew we were losing you, we acted fast, we booked tickets that same day, for a week away. We averted facing our grief through action, forward movement. Whatever else, we would get to see you again. Then I entertained a daydream of us, the wee gang we had just been forming before you got that news: having a laugh together, standing on a hill, posing, looking out to sea, of us driving, through the beauty, in the bubble of each other’s company. Or if we couldn’t do that, sat having a coffee, listening to each other’s voices, enjoying the moment. That moment would signify all of the other potential moments we never got to have.

‘Your head throbbing like a heart, and your heart throbbing like a drum, and the drums throbbing like the point is just go ahead and jump’ *

That last post was a bit intense, wasn’t it? Well, technically now I’m referring to the post before the last one, because the unexpected entry last time was more along the lines of ‘shit, there's been an earthquake, fuuuuck, I was not prepared for that.’ But the general arc of my posts has been quite intensely introspective and steeped in navel gazing self-analysis, and, it’s not like all of that stuff has gone anywhere, but nobody can, or should, run at that level at all times, mainly because, it’s just too exhausting. Things ebb and flow, so I’m going to ease up the tempo now and focus on something a bit less, well, less. Although, I say this, but in actuality this blog is really just the next step in the same arc, I’m just trying to have a bit more fun with the whole thing because life can be so damn heavy, y’know?

5 things I now understand about earthquakes that I didn’t a week ago

This wasn’t going to be the topic of my next post, but you know, shit happens, and as somebody who considers themselves an outsider to this New land we call Zea, as well as somebody with an addictive habit for writing about everything, it seemed appropriate to give you some thoughts from the front line of shudder city.

You can’t predict the damage

The earthquake that hit near Kaikoura on Sunday night/ Monday morning was much bigger than the one that gave destroying Christchurch a really good go in 2011. The Kaikoura area has been badly damaged but the devastation is nothing like the scale of that which followed the Christchurch quake. This tells me two things:

1.       It’s not always the size of the quake on the Richter scale that’s the true indicator of how damaging an earthquake can be, but where the epicentre is and how deep underground it is, and

2.       The risk to personal safety is vastly reduced when a quake happens during a time of day when people are not at work or travelling.

These seats will return to their upright position

Depression is medical condition that we have a much better understanding of these days. We understand that for some people, this state is not necessarily caused by external factors, but by a chemical imbalance, it’s just the way their minds process the world, like a faulty switch going off or on when it shouldn’t. But I think sometimes it’s hard to remember that while this imbalance can affect some people all of the time, any of us can, and likely will, at points, become depressed. This can be directly influenced and caused by external factors, but how we process those factors, the pre-determined way in which our minds are programmed to work, will dictate whether you will get past those particular difficult times with the normal ebb and flow (usually along the lines of the anger-sadness-emotional release-perspective-acceptance arc) or whether the issues will become more deeply ingrained and start to affect you long term. For me personally, this has manifested in serious issues with self-esteem, irrational mood swings, physical symptoms that seem on the surface entirely unrelated and feelings of hopelessness, and those are just the side effects I’m willing to discuss. I'm aware that these issues, if left to develop further, can lead to far more detrimental outcomes, because people who are feeling hopeless don’t make the best life choices. Of course, we all demonstrate aspects of these issues at points, but when you’ve been carrying something for a long time, and you’re somewhat in denial about it, well, that’s how you start to recognise, through these flashes of abnormal behaviours, that something really isn’t right.

It’s been a fucking mental couple of years, it really has.