It was also deeply familiar and comforting to see different aspects of the same person often in conflict with one another (discussion and debate occur most often between the Reason Cell and the Emotion Cell in Yu-mi’s interior life). Yumi’s Cells, which is a kdrama that was released in September 2021, places emotions front and centre by making them the drama’s “stars.” In a world where social media has limited our identities to snapshots and tweets seeing individuals represented as complex entities was refreshing to me. Even, and almost especially, villains are offered understanding but no forgiveness for allowing their unchecked emotions to cause harm. Korean dramas are known for their emotional sophistication they draw viewers in with well-placed tension amidst complex narratives to explore the richness of the characters’ emotional life. By October of that same year, which marks the anniversary of a terrible breakup/eviction from several years prior, I was right back to where I was during that last week of April…but this time I had the benefit of watching Yumi’s Cells. My inability to process my feelings during this time had significant consequences though. Under capitalism, feelings are often situated as indulgent, so exploring them may be deemed time-consuming and ‘unproductive’ (see Ahmed 2004, p. Intellectually, I made sense of things that had happened but I never really felt them (see de Azevedo Hanks 2016, Chapter 5). In doing so, I never fully reconciled with how overwhelmed and sad I’d been. Ultimately, I bandaged up my emotional life as best as I could to cobble together some semblance of normalcy so I could keep performing my regular tasks. My schedule remained packed though and I needed to press on. At first, I thought I was fine because I wasn’t tired and I was able to “write” my papers at all hours (even though the quality of the writing was so poor and I didn’t have the cognitive ability to judge its poverty) but I managed to recover a bit with some good chats with friends and family as well as an emergency sleeping pill prescription. By the end of April, I became so overwhelmed that I didn’t sleep for five days. Not only had I been stressed out by their behaviour for four months (so much so that I was often sleeping in my living room) I had final papers due for a part-time MSW that I was enrolled in I was in the middle of a job transition I was unsuccessfully searching for a vaccine appointment (despite having to work with the public) my oldest friend had just been diagnosed with cancer and there were more things going on that I can’t be bothered to share here. By the time they departed and my old neighbour returned, I was a mess. There was tension, anger, and frustration on my part and I imagine on theirs as well. The province was under lockdown due to the COVID-19 pandemic and as I was working from home and basically sequestered to my apartment. They were loud and generally disrespectful. The apartment was tiny they were young and had never lived outside their respective family homes before. In the winter of 2021 (one of the worst on record), I had the unfortunate experience of having short-term subletters move into the apartment below me.
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