Lenten Reflection (2024)
That green light, I DON'T want it
Almost two years ago, after a particularly strong endorsement from Lauren Halvorsen’s Nothing For The Group newsletter, I bought bus tickets and headed up (down? West? I don’t know America that well) to DC to watch Kimberly Belflower’s John Proctor Is The Villain at Studio Theatre. The play is a re-examination (or as they say in Brazil, a “re-reading”) of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible that, beyond asking the obvious question of “was John Proctor a hero, or a molester and all-around asshole?” (just those long speeches alone merit the noose in my book), also digs into the inner lives of its 2016, rural Georgia teenage protagonists—mostly female and drunk on Tumblr. I quite enjoyed it; upon returning to New York, I personally emailed some theaters being like “you should at least read this, but ideally do either a big workshop or a full production” (they didn’t listen to me because they don’t know what’s good for them).
The play has been on my mind lately because it’s been running at the Huntington around the same time as Machine Learning (maybe they’ll come to New York together?), so I’m going to catch it again in Boston before I see the last performance of my own show. And in this 2024 Lenten season (are these reflections becoming a yearly tradition? We’ll see!), I’m receiving it with a somewhat different mindset than I did the first time.
Without spoiling anything, Lorde’s song “Green Light” plays a significant role in it. If you’re not familiar with it (probably due to young, or old, age), please listen to it because it’s really good. BUT, if you can’t be bothered, know that it’s about a woman who has broken up with her ex and wants to move on:
But honey I’ll be seein’ you down every road
(I’m waiting for it, that green light, I want it)
’Cause honey I’ll come get my things, but I can’t let go
(I’m waiting for it, that green light, I want it)
Oh, I wish I could get my things and just let go
(I’m waiting for it, that green light, I want it)
The characters in John Proctor, however, give this chorus a new interpretation:
BETH
it’s interesting because in the context of the song
a green light is kinda like permission to move on?
or like that’s how I interpret it like she wants to move on
which is obviously the connotation at like stoplights or whatever
but in [The Great Gatsby], it’s the thing [Gatsby] uses to let Daisy know he’ll never move on
so it’s just a
yeah
I’m just thinking about the contrast I guess
like as symbolismMR. SMITH
or maybe
Lorde was never using it like a stoplight at all
maybe she wants her ex to leave the metaphoric green light on for her
just like Gatsby
it seems like there’s a commonality there —
youth, parties, longing...
maybe Lorde is absolutely conscious of that reference
This scene is the one I remember most from the whole show (well, this and the ending). It’s a very interesting reflection, at least at face value; it basically changes the meaning of the song (plus it taps into whatever Gatsby thing is going on right now — there are two separate musicals headed to Broadway, kinda like when I was a kid and we got Armageddon and Deep Impact, or Dante’s Peak and Volcano).
Following this interpretation, we go from a Lorde who desperately wants to move on but is powerless to do so to a Lorde who doesn’t want to move on and is hoping for a sign that she doesn’t have to.
Or
OR
Maybe it doesn’t change the meaning of the song at all. Two years after first seeing the show, I’m now coming to believe that those two Lordes are one and the same.
“Who cares?” you rightly ask. “That song is old.” And so am I, dear reader. So am I. A few weeks ago, I turned the ancient age of 34 (which I celebrated by going to Puerto Rico for a week—trips over parties any day of the week). It could be argued I am now middle-aged; if we break the 90ish years we usually live for in three parts, I have entered the middle potion, and it shows. I’ve always been an old soul, so it isn’t my aversion to shenanigans (I lived my early 20s fully and feel no desire to recapture them) that clued me in. It was my body! All these years, I’ve been evil skinny, my body crushing any food I threw inside it with no demands for me to exercise. Then, out of nowhere, my cholesterol levels were high during an annual check-up, and later that year, on their usual visit to New York, both my parents pointed at my belly and said “you’re fat.” Without validating their approach, it is fair to say a flotation device has been inflated in my abdomen without me having landed in water (also, you’re supposed to inflate those after leaving the plane, stupid). It’s now constantly on my mind as motivation while I rack up steps and “active minutes” on my Fitbit and eat leafy greens, and as a guilty thought when I indulge myself in my beloved fast food (though, as customary, I have given it up for Lent). I see it in pictures; I notice it in shirts that ride up my waist when they used to lie flat. It seems I’m always spending more money and fewer calories than I should. My only relief is that it appears to be common: looking around a room the other day and seeing most of the men in my age range sporting the same baby bump has made me feel less alone.
I am not used to being insecure—or at least that’s what I thought when these shards of self-hatred started stabbing me on the daily. I, who for so long gave two shits about what anyone thought of me, have found myself ashamed of my body, and slowly that shame has seemed to taint other areas as well. I worry that people think I’m rude, or thoughtless, or lazy, or a mansplainer, or weak, or weird, or untalented. I rethink interactions, revisit texts, untag myself from photos. What is this?
“This,” it turns out, is who I’ve always been; along with my fleshy lifesaver, God has granted me the gift of self-knowledge as I move into a new phase of my life. See, until not too long ago, I thought the world was divided into people with anxious attachments (the human equivalent of dogs) and secure ones (cats). Anxious people need to be told they are loved, while secure ones don’t. Because I don’t usually ask people to validate me (valuing words of affirmation is a red flag in my book), I had always assumed I was a secure person. BUT, as I learned recently, there is a third category — avoidants. We, it seems, look like secure people on the outside, but in fact have the same hangups as anxious people; we just don’t tell anyone. If anxious people are like snails that are afraid to go into their shells lest everyone has left by the time they come out again, avoidant people are like snails afraid to come out of their shells lest everyone stabs them to death once they expose their soft parts. (Secure people, who supposedly know they are loved and therefore don’t worry about it, don’t really exist, so no metaphor is needed to describe them).
Learning that I am an avoidant (at least generally speaking; I also learned our attachment style is fluid and context-dependent) led me to realize I have had some of these insecurities for a long time; I just wasn’t aware of them or how they affected my behaviors. One feature in particular, my supposed imperviousness to FOMO (if anything, I sometimes look forward to missing out), revealed itself to also be a defense mechanism, avoiding situations in which I felt I would be graded socially, an experience too similar to the schoolyard for me to want to repeat. What I had always assumed was security revealed itself to be a security system, switching the lever in the tracks so that the trolley kills one person (not going to the party) instead of many (going to the party and feeling like a loser).
Has being aware of it made my life better? Eh, I don’t know. Sometimes I wish I didn’t know so much about myself. I wanna go back to thinking the Matrix is the real world! On my worst days, that awareness has become another way to judge myself, for being an insecure little bitch. But, on my best ones (and here I return to the Green Light of it all), it allows me to navigate relationships better. Doing my 4th and 5th steps with my sponsor, I’ve noticed how much I put it on other people to assuage my insecurities: “This person didn’t reply to my text, which means they hate me, which means I am hateable.” I take other people’s actions personally all the time, instead of seeing them for what they (mostly) are—something that they would do regardless of me. That person never answers texts! Their phonephobia is unrelated to me.
Seeing that allows me to either accept people for who they are and calibrate how I love them or, should the behavior be legitimately harmful (I can’t accept abuse, no matter how unrelated to me it is), create a boundary that can keep me safe. A boundary which, by the way, doesn’t necessarily mean I need to cut the person off—or even if it does, doesn’t mean I need to erase them from my heart; as my sponsor always encourages me, I need to remain open to God bringing this person back into my life in a moment where I could truly be helpful. What I cannot do is love people conditionally, only if they behave in a way that soothes my fears—not only because that’s shitty, but also because I’ve learned the hard way that even if everything goes exactly as I want it to (the rarest of occasions), those fears are still in me and can still rule me.
Green lights, be them a permission to move on or a beacon of longing, should not define my behavior. What should is a set of principles by which I commit to live by; in my case, the core five I’ve landed on are honesty, consideration, responsibility, grace, and connection. Other people’s behavior matters less than whether I am acting according to my principles. That’s the only green light I need. Do I always practice it? Of course not! It’s hard to unlearn 33 years of behavior. But at least now I have the tools to examine situations in a way that focuses on my actions—the only thing I have (a modicum of) control over.
To give a grounded example, this year I was fortunate enough to see a play of mine produced for the first time. It was a lovely experience: I got to work with a director (Gabriel Vega-Weissman) whom I love and trust, a creative team that was ingenious and very open to collaborating, and a cast that was committed to the play and gave it their all—no one, regardless of what their job was, phoned this in. Still, there were moments when things didn’t go as planned, or how I would’ve liked them to, and quite often, the temptation was there to see it through a lens of “they don’t respect me/the play” or the like. One case in particular: the Boston Globe switched the day they were coming to review the play to after Gabe and I were supposed to leave, something that made both of us anxious. Irrational as it was, we felt that we needed to be there to, I don’t know, control everything? It felt like the stakes were too high. But we talked about it and decided to surrender: the date shift was beyond our control, and we needed to go home. And then our fears came true: a loss of power before the show caused lighting queues to misfire and threw the actors off, so the Globe critic saw a show that was not up to our standards, something he mentioned in his lukewarm review of the play.
When I first read it, I was gutted: all the other reviews had been positive, so I had been hoping for a rave from the paper of record. Not getting it felt personal—my collaborators had failed me, the critic had been unfair, this would kill the life of the play and my career in general, etcetera. What good is it being enlightened if it doesn’t get you what you want?? Of course, after meditating and talking it over with people I trust, I returned to sanity. My actions had been in accordance with my ethos; I did not have any particular lessons to learn from this. What happened was an accident beyond our control, and I had to accept it as God’s will. The Globe’s critic is not obligated to act in any particular way towards me; once I am distant enough from the situation, I’m sure I’ll see his feedback as either illuminating of things to work on or as an opinion that runs counter to the intentions of the play, and that I can therefore put aside. My well-being is not in his hands or anyone else’s.
It is now a week later from when I started this newsletter; I saw John Proctor again in Cambridge this past weekend, and it again left “Green Light” stuck in my head because, let’s face it, it’s a banger. But in this season of penance, prayer, and almsgiving, I am recommitting to putting aside not only fast food but also my need for green lights to tell me how to feel or what to do.
Shameless self-promotion
A lot of you went up to see the play, which humbles me and fills me with gratitude—but if you’re not amongst those, and you want to feel like you did, you can check out:
The Globe’s preview feature, to go inside the rehearsal room (you can
deactivate JavaScriptmake a free account to bypass the paywall here),My interview in The Culture Show, in which I answered the questions I wanted to be asked instead of the ones that were actually posed to me,
And Nile Scott’s gorgeous pictures of the show!