I’m Bored

“I’M BORED.”

It used to be annoying when my kids said this. I’d point to their dirty rooms or their musical instruments or ask about their homework. They would roll their eyes.

Now “I’m bored” is a threat because my child has been diagnosed as bipolar. “I’m bored” is now the warning she gives that she is having the anxiety that leads to suicidal thoughts.

One thing that our family did when we had ordinary boredom was watch TV and we all loved The Good Place. We loved the big ideas and the metaphorical pies in the face. I don’t know that I have seen a show that cared so much for all of its characters, protagonists and antagonists, major and minor. That had such a big heart.

Here’s something I didn’t know about depression and bipolar illness. People hear voices and have visions when the depression is profound. For my daughter, these voices are a chorus of good and bad. Voices that tell her to stay alive, voices that tell her to be logical and voices that tell her suicide is good, an escape. This illness has made it hard for her to enjoy her life. She thinks it’s boring because it isn’t as interesting as what she sees on TV.

She is highly susceptible to the artificially rich worlds of TV shows and movies. If she sees a show on magic, she believes in magic. When she was really ill, she started watching Charmed. Her eyes looked weird and I knew that she was getting something from that show other than a bit of camp and drama. Later, in her therapy and during her hospitalization, we had discussed how much she believed in magic.  She believed in it for the same reason that it added interest to the show. It would take an ordinary life and make it bigger.

The visions are sometimes like daydreams that are real. Sometimes these daydreams became memories that we had to work with the therapist to root out. When she was getting better, they became static, like a spread in a book. There was one that she had while watching the show, Superstore. We learned this at a therapy session. The store in the series had some religious affiliations. She hallucinated an angel spreading her wings from an angel in the background of one of the scenes. At some point, in her illness she moved from the belief in magic into a belief in the afterlife as a way to cure her boredom.

This isn’t a criticism of these shows. I’m not a right-wing Christian from the eighties who sees Satanism everywhere. It isn’t any of these shows’ fault that my daughter is ill.

The Good Place dances between life and the afterlife. The line between these two things becomes smaller and smaller as the show goes on. In the beginning, the main characters do not seem that upset to find out that they are dead. Their deaths are played for maximum laughs. They are, to excuse the pun, all mortifying deaths. For example, Eleanor is done in reaching for a bottle of Margarita mix,  and Tehani crushed by a statue of the sister that she was jealous of. Chidi, frozen in a moment of indecision, was killed by a falling air conditioner that dropped on him like a safe onto Wiley Coyote. There was shame in their deaths because they were linked to their character flaws. There was not much pain in the way the deaths were presented. As the show went on, the deaths, the jumps from life to life, the reboots, became as sudden as blinking.

It was probably my favorite part of the show, the episode where they show them figuring out The Good Place is hell in rapid sequence. It does what great art does. It put human nature in this crazy laboratory and tested it. Refined out the impurities, the noise, to show us that part of human nature that seeks, that questions, that is the hero on a journey.

I think my daughter understood that but what she also took from The Good Place was that death is an easy transition, an escape. It is too bad that this aspect of the show, these easy transitions from life to after life and back, overshadowed the hard work each character was putting into being a better person and finding happiness.

With the combination of her symptoms at the time, the voices and visions and growing suicidal ideation, we banned the show in the house. We kept her from seeing the final few episodes. Especially, the final episode was something that I didn’t want her to see. Characters were provided a mystical door to take when the boredom of heaven became too much. The door was in a peaceful wood. Seeing this through my daughter’s eyes, reminded me too much of the forest in Japan where people kill themselves.

We kept the show from her after she got home from her hospitalization. Home for us is Brooklyn, the epicenter of the U.S. coronavirus outbreak as I write this. Life is boring, and we are trapped inside. Because she is a teenager, she snuck the final episodes. She admitted this to us and it became a topic in our video session with her therapist. We had to discuss the point system as if it were real and not a metaphor. We had to discuss the probability of an afterlife existing. We discussed the unhappiness of the characters in the show and how even if there is an afterlife, there is no guarantee that it would be good.

We had to discuss the failing in the show that my daughter’s illness showed me. It is a very sanitized version of death. The horror of it is omitted. The sadness. No one is gasping for breath. No one writhes in pain. These are things you have to make your teenager understand about the death that they are contemplating. The only part that shows the sadness of death in the show is a brief glimpse of Michael at the hospital bedside of a friend in a montage of him as a real human.

This is not a criticism of the show. It is more a limitation of the genre. In that discussion with the therapist, discussing the potential pain and horror of death, my daughter said, “But nobody would watch a show like that.”

She was right.