Je Suis Dans ta Tête

There’s a scene early in the fourth episode of Netflix’s Marianne that struck me as amazing. Emma, the main character, has just experienced something terribly traumatic, and her friends have gathered at her house to rally around her in support. In the scene, they sit around the kitchen table. Everyone is talking, except Emma.

Emma sits at the table, and her friends’ voices fade out until they are barely audible. It’s a simple effect; I watched the scene unfold, and I knew that feeling.

It’s a strange mix of being there in the present, while being a million miles and years away at the same time. You’re there, but not participating; you see and hear, maybe even interact, but it’s not you. It’s that lizard brain you evolved from millennia ago, that’s never quite left our species, forcing you to move through the motions of a fully functioning human. To do anything otherwise is to advertise that you are the weakest member of your herd, the sickest.

Survival instinct kicks in, pushing you.  The world roars around you, but nothing can penetrate the bubble you’ve constructed.  Inside that bubble, lizard brain pulls the levers and flips the switches and pushes buttons.  Outside that bubble, you behave like any other person, doing what you need to fool the world into thinking you’re alive inside.

I couldn’t give you an exact time, but I could tell you the exact moment – that moment when I looked into the kitchen and saw them put the cuffs on him – that lizard brain kicked in and took over, recording everything for playback later on the world’s worst DVR. I remember feeling that click, and the bubble expanded.  Buttons were pushed, levers pulled, and I began moving under auxiliary power.

I often wonder if I’ll run completely under my own power ever again, or if I’ll be in that bubble forever.  Over the last couple of years, and the last year in particular, I’m out of the bubble more than I had been.  I could be a lot better, for sure, but at least there’s cracks in that barrier and, slowly, the sound is coming through.