Resurrection

It’s 10:00 o’clock on a Monday night, and my brother and I are, once again, discussing Jon Snow’s resurrection on Game of Thrones.

“It’s such lazy character writing! I mean, it goes against everything the show has set out to do! It’s all about subverting expectations. From the season they establish, characters who always do the right thing can’t survive in this world. It happened to Ned, it happened to Robb, but when it happens to Jon, of course, he gets to come back to life, because he’s Jon!”

“You hate him so much,” my brother laughs. “I love it.”

I could go into more detail about why I find this particular plot point to be such a cop-out, but that’s not the point. My brother has called three times today already, and we have had this conversation countless times. It isn’t always Jon Snow that we talk about. Sometimes it’s musings on our favorite characters and how much we love them. Sometimes it’s a new detail one of us has noticed about the show. Sometimes our parents join in as well. More often than not, there’s no specific purpose for our conversations. But since I’ve been back at college, my brother and I call every day to talk about Game of Thrones. It’s become a sort of ritual, in a way. He’s in the process of re-watching the show for the fourth time through and I’m currently reading the books, so discussion topics are always at the forefront of our minds, even before one of us picks up the phone. It sometimes feels as though we’ve covered every minute detail about the series in our talks. Yet still, every day, we call.

“I don’t think I’ll ever get tired of hearing you complain about Jon,” my brother tells me, with just the right mix of humor and sincerity in his voice.

“Good. Because I’m not going to stop,” I respond.

It’s keeping me going.

I first started watching the show at the behest of my father and brother, whose obsessions had begun the previous year. My entire summer had been so filled with their references and in-jokes that I was starting to understand them despite never having seen a single second of the show. I had been nursing a summer cold when finally I accepted the inevitable, and I will always remember how comforting it felt to curl up in front of the family computer with a mug of spiced tea and hit play on the first episode. I watched intermittently from then on, and it took me the better part of the year to finish the entire series.

Throughout my life I have had a tendency to immerse myself entirely in whatever media I am consuming at the time. When I find a book, TV show, or musical I really, really love, it becomes my entire life for anywhere from a month to a year. I’ve been aware of this pattern in my behavior for as long as I can remember. These phases of obsession range from endearing to embarrassing, but they are a part of my history that I cannot deny. I seem to be incapable of enjoying something a normal amount. I had honestly expected that to be the outcome of my watching Game of Thrones, and I was surprised to say the least when it did not happen. The show was enjoyable enough, but I wasn’t immersed in it the way I had expected to be. I had bigger things to focus on—namely a large, tight-knit group of friends and a boyfriend. These were novelties to me at the time, as someone who had spent the better portion of her life longing for the kind of close connections I now had. It felt, in a way, like my life was finally starting. As a result, my penchant for fictional obsessions, which had long been the driving force in my life, was taking a backseat to reality.

I had hoped that this newfound version of myself would persist as I started the newest chapter of my life. I could not have been more wrong. Coming to college seemed to shatter any sort of contentment I had found. Those things that had preoccupied me in the year before were gone—I had left behind my closest friends, my boyfriend and I had broken up, and I was now surrounded by strangers with no one to turn to. I tried my best to befriend my suitemates but it felt impossible. Loneliness seeped into everything I did. I chose to spend most nights in my dorm with nothing but my thoughts to keep me company. It was easier than watching everyone else and their effortless conversation, their casual affection with each other. When I came home for winter break, I expected things to get better, since I was returning to the place I’d last been truly happy. But even being at home couldn’t change the way I felt. Instead, all it did was amplify how empty I felt in contrast to how happy I used to be.

At home, I fell into a pattern of keeping myself awake with mindless tasks until I was so physically exhausted that I fell asleep as soon as I laid down in bed, just so I wouldn’t be alone with my thoughts at night. When I woke up the next morning I could never find the energy to leave my bed. This usually extended well into the afternoon, and when I finally left my room I did little besides lie in front of the fireplace, ruminating on everything in my life I was unhappy with. The fire burned too hot on my back, my arms, the sides of my legs, but I couldn’t be bothered to move.

One one such day, my father interrupted my routine of aimless staring with his usual enthusiasm.

“Hey Maggie, I’m about to go downstairs and exercise. Do you want to watch something with me?” He asks me the same thing just about every time he wants to exercise, and since I’d been home from school, he’d been trying to spend as much time with me as possible. He often has lists of movies and TV planned out in his head for this exact purpose.

“Sure. What would we watch?” I wasn’t particularly interested, but then again I wasn’t particularly interested in anything these days. Besides, I felt bad saying no when he was so excited.

“Well, Mom said she’d be interested in starting Game of Thrones. You know, she feels kind of left out since we all love it and she’s never seen it. I figured we could start watching it with her while you’re home for break!”

And so, by that evening, my entire family had gathered in the basement to begin the series again. Four episodes in my mother was hooked, and so was I, in a way. I motivated myself out of bed in the mornings with the hope of catching an episode before my mother left for work. If we didn’t have time, we’d all stay up until she got home (usually after midnight) and watch until we couldn’t keep our eyes open anymore. We ended up finishing all seven seasons in just two weeks. Finally, I was doing something with my life again. Even if it was just a TV show, watching Game of Thrones gave me a purpose during that time, something to do instead of ruminating on how unhappy, lonely, and disappointed with myself I was. In the show, the characters fought epic battles, while in my brain they helped me combat an enemy much harder to beat. I had enjoyed the show when I watched it before, but this time I had developed a love for it that ran deeper than simple enjoyment. Now, it was saving me.

I developed a new routine, one centered around my newest obsession. Every day, my family would have long, in-depth conversations about Game of Thrones—things we’d noticed about the show, predictions for the next season, opinions on the characters. In my free time before my mother got home from work I still sat lost in thought in front of the fireplace, but now I was reveling in my musings on anything and everything to do with the show. Sometimes, my father would sit across from me, and we’d share our thoughts, which often dissolved into animated debates about my distaste for the Jon-Snow-resurrection plot.

“Name one trait of Jon’s that isn’t supposed to make the audience completely sympathetic towards him!” I’d shout, or “Name one time he actually has to face the consequences of his actions!”

“... I suppose I can’t.”

I grinned. Of course, I was happy to have proven my point, but it ran deeper than that. The plotline does bother me, it’s true, but I had to appreciate the irony in the situation. Even when I complained about it, there was a passion in my voice that I hadn’t heard for a long time. I’d come to realize that it wasn’t just Jon Snow who had come back from the dead. Game of Thrones, in its own way, had resurrected me as well.

I had previously mentioned a pattern of obsessive behavior, but there is another pattern as well, one that runs deeper: These obsessions of mine always come along at times in my life when I am struggling most. It’s a kind of coping mechanism, I am sure. Whenever things get tough, I find a fictional door to escape through, a way to leave behind the life I am unhappy with and project into a different world. When my mind is filled with plot points and characters, there’s no room for those otherwise suffocating negative thoughts to creep in. I do not know if these obsessions are healthy. In fact, I sometimes fear that I will never be able to connect with people as well as I connect with fiction, that I will struggle to find happiness in something more grounded in reality. But I do know that it works. And I know that, at least right now, I need it.

In the last week or so of break, I think I said, “I don’t want to go back to school” about a thousand times. I was terrified of losing the happiness I had just started to rediscover once I returned. When we stopped at a gas station about halfway between school and home, I made them all promise not to forget about Game of Thrones while I was away.

“You’ve seen how into it we are right now, right? That’s not gonna be a problem,” my brother pointed out.

He, of course, was right. They have all made good on their promise, and the show has made the transition back to college infinitely easier for me. I still have bad days, times where I want nothing more than to isolate myself in my dorm and block out the rest of the world. But even when I am alone I have the characters to keep me company, and my family to share them with, just a phone call away. And everything is ok. I recently joked to my dad that Game of Thrones was literally the only thing I thought about anymore. I had been kidding, but if I’m being honest, it isn’t much of a far cry from the truth. I keep the show on my mind constantly, because as long as I am thinking about it, I know I can keep going.

I don’t know how long this particular phase will last. I don’t know what will come after it. I don’t know if one day I will look back on it fondly, or if I will wonder why exactly it was that I cared so much (I presume it will be a combination of the two). What I do know is that my brother will call tomorrow, and the next day, and the day after that. Regardless of whatever has happened on these days, we will perform our little ritual, find some new point to discuss, and as long as we do, I will remain vividly alive.