impulse control
I barely remember season 1 of Platonic—2023 is a long time ago!—but it was the first show I ever watched without my spouse, which seems significant. Season two, which came out August of this year and which I only just watched this month, is probably the hardest and most consistently I’ve LOL’d at a streaming show. I don’t want to give away any nuances or plot points, except to say it is perfect.
I also couldn’t shake the sensation that Platonic’s second season reminded me of another half-hour streaming sitcom: The Santa Clarita Diet. I finally returned to s1e1 of Santa Clarita Diet (2017) to investigate. Aha!! This is a show about midlife and, correspondingly, about impulse control.
Someone once said—probably Jung, as he seems to’ve gotten around to saying everything—that real life begins in midlife, when everything that has been repressed and subjugated suddenly becomes unrepressed, uncontrollable. (The recent revelation that adolescence prolongs itself up to around age 32 has me feeling a little more forgiving of myself.)
In early 2024, Naltrexone—an opioid antagonist that can help quell impulsive behaviors like drinking, overeating, gambling, etc., and which is prescribed off-label for fibromyalgia, and which was previously plentiful and inexpensive—suddenly ceased its manufacture internationally, with no explanations offered. I began to panic. I realized I’d overrelied on this medication, and I was terrified of what would happen to me without it. I house-sat for some friends while reading Dopamine Nation. Later my husband would ask me if I’d seriously quit drinking in order to avoid falling off a cruise ship. I had, but I’d also been shaken up by the deaths of Anne Heche and Chance Perdomo. (To be clear, substances weren’t involved in either of those tragedies.) A doctor re-prescribed the impulse control drug about a year later.
Much more recently I was talking through a TV episode with two friends. I apologized, then, and admitted I’d actually intended to take my impulse-control medication before TV-watching, but had forgotten.
“Why would you need to control your impulses?” one friend asked.
“Yeah, I like when you talk! Everything you say is so interesting, I keep pausing the TV so I can hear you.”
I looked back and forth at the faces of these two friends. They weren’t lying. My eyes filled up with tears; my childhood was flashing before my eyes. I’d been in trouble all the time: for talking, for pacing, for punching people in the nose in retaliation. Stay silent, don’t move, never defend yourself, that was childhood’s lesson. When we suppress certain normal instincts, I guess, the whole central nervous system goes haywire.
The Santa Clarita Diet is about a husband’s adult responsibilities piling up while his wife’s own behavior spins out. In the first episode she eats a man who won’t take no for an answer. She is very sorry. “It looks bad,” the show seems to concede, “but in the scheme of things it’s basically fine.” More upsetting to her spouse is the Range Rover his wife has just purchased. A teen boy, tasked with dispensing exposition, explains what the ‘id’ is. (“I know what the id is,” another teen, representing the audience lens, snaps at him.) It’s really all about picking and choosing which urge to follow through on.
It was at this moment of typing, on cue, that the husky went absolutely insane. My present-day mother figure has the most wolflike dog a person can legally own, which I think about a lot. The husky continued to pounce on me as I changed shoes, as I put on a coat, as I strapped her into a harness. She ran after some builders outside; at first I was holding her on a short leash, then I was walking her like a suitcase. “Yep,” I thought to myself, “this is what it feels like.” If I could be a woman who runs with the wolves, I would, but my hip hurts and my foot is bleeding.
The husky eventually settled down, slowed her pace, and sniffed some rocks. She went re-insane a short while later, when the hired caregiver walked in to begin her shift. “I already prayed over her,” I yelled across the house, “I’d do it in Latin if I knew how.” The caregiver laughed. Then I mused that the dog is the physical manifestation of her owner’s id. We project a lot onto our dogs! Anyway, we proceeded to have a whole conversation like this, shouting across the house from separate rooms.
A few nights ago, as I was tossing and turning and trying to get settled for the night, I had the unpleasant realization that I was still a “community manager”—my all-time least favorite job—but now I’m responsible for all the competing voices and directives of my own inner turmoil, made up of however-many generations of whatever. I groaned out loud. It was obnoxious to realize that I’d been elected president of myself (incumbent, actually), and I’ve vowed to do a better job than my predecessors.