You Have No Power Over Me

I know what I am experiencing is significant because Buffy, my lifelong companion, has popped up to tell me where I am at.

I am located at the end of ‘Once More With Feeling’. We beat the bad guy but at what cost?

I love this episode. Everyone who I have subjected to Buffy generally gets something out of it but no one gets this episode. Maybe it is my own relationship with singing. You can’t withhold your soul when you sing. This is an episode of revelation (yes ok, and really dodgy early 2000’s girl on girl sex metaphors. The world wasn’t ready).

I don’t have the brain space for a full on analysis. I think describing it as an episode of revelation will suffice. With a quick nod to Tara dressing up as medieval woman for no known reason. At the end, where I am located, they sing their final song. I have always wondered why that song is even there. Presumably the spell causing them to sing was lifted when Sweet left?

I think they are in a state akin to shock. I think I am in a state akin to shock. ‘Shock’ doesn’t feel like quite the right word so I am qualifying it. The state feels similar but I am not sure it is the right word.

This is how I have felt since I submitted my final assessment yesterday.

Back to Buffy. As they sing ‘where do we go from here’, you can see each of them start to react to everything that has been revealed through song. This victory feels empty. The bad guy no longer even features. That they won this battle is an incidental side note. What matters here is the moment of clarity. The moment of recognising their own and each others wounds and the cumulative cost of who they are and how they live their lives.

Now I find myself slipping into another movie. I am in Labyrinth. In considering the costs my mind shifts to how hard I fought to be there. Sarah’s monologue has started to play:

Pause for analysis before her final line. I have literally put myself in danger to study. I have never learned how to navigate my college which means two years where the simplest things have never been in place. I don’t need much. Everything I need is easy to implement. Without them there have been times I have literally been in danger. For stupid reasons like I couldn’t get someone to sign a form, or I couldn’t get the right letter.

Getting to college and staying in college has felt like a battle for my life. In some respects it has been. It was the route I chose out of a situation I needed to end. I have put more energy and determination into making it work than I have put in to anything. Ever.

The last few weeks of assessments, now they are over, feel like an assault. Perhaps that is what they are from an autistic perspective. Too many words and ideas to process, too many competing demands, too fast. If I pass them all I will be surprised. I couldn’t cope. That is a hard thing to say. I want to say hey look, look, look how well I did. Actually I couldn’t cope. I tried. I crashed badly. In the end I gave up trying to process even my own words. I have vague memories of what I handed in and there is a lot of shame, so I switch the memories off. Lets go to Sarah’s final line. The line she can never remember, the line she doesn’t remember until the end when her speaking it breaks the spell:

I guess that is where I am at. I don’t know if I want to go back next year and perhaps that is ok. I have tried to make myself fit and I can’t. Why am I trying so hard to make myself fit into a space not designed for me to occupy. Is this battle worth the cost. Perhaps my energy would be better spent seeking out spaces where I fit.

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