​Anxiety is a fight-or-flight instinct. It’s something people use in times of trauma to be able to identify potential threats and continue to survive. And it works, right? I’ve been worried about shit for fifteen-plus years now and I’m still alive, ergo, it works. 

Except—no. That’s not how it works. That’s a correlative approach, not a causative one. And that’s honestly a whole other chapter.

WHENEVER I MENTION REALITY TV to my friend across the country, she rolls her eyes at me. My kid's godparents do, too. But I've been obsessed with reality television for a long time now--mostly because I feel like it's an impressive, meta-anthropological study into White people in America. Not the delicately performed captured footage of everyday White people and their six billion kids, but also the questions people don't often consider around them:

• Why are White audiences so obsessed with people who are obsessed with having children?
• What are the TLC staff thinking when they're observing these people's lives from behind the cameras?
• Why am I so obsessed with this show? And why do people compulsively assume that reality TV is trash?
• Is it really all "fake"? How are we defining "fake"? 
• How much of people calling reality TV "fake" is really a dismissal of how uncomfortable and emotionally traumatic people's lives really are?

In my experience, watching TV is like a treasure hunt: you're constantly reading between the lines to find out what's really going on. 

And what's really going on is the same thing that's going on in all of our lives: heartbreak, love, birth, death, oppression of feelings, working within the confines of ridiculous societal expectations, turning blind eyes to things we aren't sure we want to be true.

This is especially illuminating when watching conservative, religious families, because they have such a much-higher pile of shit to work through than people who have been living outside the confines of American evangelical religion, which is a whole Thing in and of itself. So the answer to my question of why I'm so obsessed with this show is simple: I recognize how my beliefs used to be the same way, and I'm interested in watching other people make similar journeys toward reconciling their beliefs with the increasingly accepting world outside those religious communities. There's a catharsis in my viewership of those stories. 
​
Specifically, let's talk about the Brown family from "Sister Wives": a polygynous, Mormon-fundamentalist family featuring one dad, four moms, and a whole bunch o' kids (and now a couple of grandkids). The Browns get a lot of hate and a lot of love, which depends on the viewer's own values. And I think that's how my viewership of reality television tends to be different: I specifically push my own values out of my mindset when I watch other families. 

A key part of my personality is that I tend to be extremely empathetic, and therefore I have the ability to rationalize anything. This, of course, has its good sides and its bad sides, but for the sake of this blog post it certainly is an effective trait in making me an ideal viewer for empathizing with a polygynous family. 

I'm also probably more charitable toward the Brown family than most viewers because I'm also from a pretty conservative, religious community, and I got out of it and became comfortable with myself and my beliefs. The main thing that people balk at (when it comes to the Browns) is the polygyny--the comments on YouTube are filled to the brim with people shouting at Meri (the first wife) to leave and be happy elsewhere, or making judgmental remarks about how the polygamous lifestyle is dirty and wrong, and the Browns deserve every hardship they endure because they've chosen to live their lives this way. 

But to me, this is just viewer-anonymity rearing its ugly head. This is people looking at another family and assuming that the way they run their own families is superior. So for you, viewers, as in the same breath I also acknowledge that much of reality TV (see: "Sex Sent Me to the ER," "Yummy Mummies") is indeed trash, I offer a different interpretation:

I read the family as flawed, but earnest. I see the whole family owning up to their mistakes as they can comprehend them and constantly trying to just be better people. I'm impressed at how public they are about their struggles as a plural family, and the fact that they are so honest about their jealousies and failing relationships and, later, the hard-won successes in those same relationships. You don't get into polygamy/polyamory unless you're willing to deal with those sometimes-ugly emotions and fucking up on treating your family with love and respect.

​In this way, the Browns just seem like a regular American family: a patriarch who fucks up with his language a whole lot and isn't emotionally well-regulated, â€‹but still has a whole lot of love for 

I KEEP LOOKING FOR THE ENDING of this story. Where it's supposed to end, based on all the stories I know of from mythology, from history, from science, from life. I find comfort in these stories, in knowing that they have endings, and I've made it my life's mission to study them. I used to study them to understand the structure of a story, so that I could be a Writer with a capital W, because Writer was some sort of fantasy occupation I had in my head for ages, or because creating worlds let me escape the uncertainty of my life. 

I didn't understand, then, that I was studying them to find something. Treasure-hunting for a fabled reward, for something that didn't necessarily exist in reality, but I thought that if I could use the power of my mind--if I could just figure out where the cracks in the world were that served as gateways to another dimension, where things were tangible and I could manipulate reality enough to make...I don't know, magic happen? If I could do this, I could see It coming. Where "It" is not a sewer-clown, but the grizzly reality that inevitably awaited me, and with this knowledge, I could avoid It. I could save myself. 

This morning, I realized the worst thing I could have possibly realized: that stories are nothing but human-fabricated frameworks, our imaginations trying to make sense out of our own realities. 

Well, fuck me.

I think I've known this a long time, but I've been too afraid to admit it: that the story structures I've studied are frames I try to fit onto a chaotic world, one that doesn't care about story structures. The attempt to create books and mythologies and anthologies about the world is merely a human source of comfort--there's no inherent truth to any of these stories. They're just reflections of what we value. ​

In some ways, this is freeing. That real-life Lord of the Flies newspiece that came out a while ago allows a different, counter-Golding narrative to be told, wrecking our predisposition to assume that people are innately vicious and evil--a predisposition that likely lasted as long as it did because of the influence of one storyteller. That storyteller understood life through one frame, and we started to accept that as fact, as reality. But reality twists and turns and isn't as simple and straightforward as storytellers have told us it is. It doesn't always have the tragic ending for girls, but also doesn't always have the heroic ending for girls. It doesn't tell the story of heroes and villains because no one is entirely hero and no one is entirely villain. 

But in other ways, it's terrifying. 

Now how am I supposed to perform risk-management on my life? When things can go any which way? When I don't know if fleeing the country in the midst of growing tensions that have been popping at the seams into all-out riots over the past few years is the right answer, or staying put is the right answer? If the tale of my life ends in my premature death, will it be a tragedy or a victory? Tragic for some, victorious for others? 

If I'm the protagonist in this story, and not some random background character (which is more likely, let's be honest), my author sucks at plotting. (I can relate.) 

I keep looking for the ending of my story so that I can shape the story in that direction, I can make myself learn the lessons I'm supposed to learn, I can become the kind of protagonist I want to be. But I can't see the ending because story structures shift as humanity continues on. We see bigger parts of the picture. We accept various narratives in place of our reality, because life is easier to cope with when you have a roadmap. That roadmap is an illusion, of course, and there is no set end to the journey, there is no right way to get there, and while that may be comforting for some--and even for me, in my good moments--I feel like I'm swimming in the uncertainty of what this presents to me. The frameworks around me that used to support my life narrative are collapsing and I'm Alice falling down the rabbit hole, books that used to be on shelves now floating in space as I pass them by, unable to swim out of the wind tunnel, no clue where I'm going to land. ​