Last January, Netflix released the final episodes of Bojack Horseman. I found myself binge watching the series the same night it was released, eager to see how the series would end.
In one episode titled “Good Damage,” Diane is desperate to finish the memoir she dreamt of publishing. It’s a memoir centered on her damage, a compound of tightly-knit and distressing clump of tendrils that she ached to validate.
Living in Boston with her new partner, Diane is arguably in the best state of mind that the viewer has seen her in since the show began in 2014. After distancing herself from the toxic hustle and bustle of Los Angeles, it only makes sense that the writing should finish itself.
Only, it doesn’t. The writing process stays jumbled and fuzzy. Her trauma seems too far deep, too tucked away to salvage. She blames the fuzziness on her medication and stops taking it for a night, desperate to get her masterpiece out. The plan goes as well as it sounds: Diane suffers the consequences in the form of withdrawals, a deep pit she was desperate to climb out of, and the hollow realization that the years she spent in misery were for naught.
“Good Damage” stuck with me for more reasons than I was comfortable accepting. In the first semester of senior year, I enlisted into a creative nonfiction class. Come the first or second lecture, I learned that aspects of the craft varied little from fiction. It still called for narrative structure and its elements. The genre still needed characters, setting, conflict, resolution—familiar terms I learned during my elementary lessons.
What stood out was the necessity for self-reflection. I wasn’t writing about imaginary worlds and imaginary lives this time. Instead, nonfiction called for a much-ignored retreat into the self–and retreat I did. The longer the semester went, the more I found myself digging deep into my psyche and facing certain experiences and memories I deprived myself of confronting. They were too painful, too raw, and too much to handle at any given point in time.
After a few months of introspection, I arrived at a funny truth: That the most painful memories seemed the easiest to immerse into. All I avoided came back rushing into the light. Certain memories and experiences were brought into the surface, begging to be given the attention I deprived them of.
The best way to give them attention, I thought, was to mold them into something beautiful—essays dedicated to pain, to the experience of pain. Essays I actually wanted to write so that I could wallow.
But it had its consequences: The more I looked into my damage instead of actually confronting it, the more the writing ran flat. One week I wrote a creative high as I tackled my bodily insecurities with a sincerity I hadn’t felt in months. On the next, I could barely get a word out about something that left its mark years back. There was no sincerity in the latter—just hurt, just ache, just festering.
I used to think that the pain validates itself as long as it’s made beautiful. The experience of pain, I believed, becomes more forgiving as long as it could be transformed into something memorable.
Does any damage become “good” in light of its reshaping? Is any damage worth the wallow, or is it better to let it come, stay, and go? Is damage worth writing about in the first place if it keeps us from confronting it fully?
A bigger truth reveals itself: There is no deeper meaning to the damage we take. Some of it is meant to teach a lesson. Some of it is only meant to hurt. There is no such thing as “good” damage; damage is damage, one no more special than the other. At the end of the episode, Diane agrees to work on another project instead of her memoir. It’s not a total happy ending, given that her memoir was her be-all and end-all, but it’s a start in distancing herself from the damage she received throughout the years.
What makes us who we are, after all, is not the damage we take, but who we choose to become in the aftermath.
Maxine A. Buenaventura (AB LIT-ENG ‘19) was The GUIDON’s Human Resources Manager for AY 2017-2018 and AY 2018-2019. She may be reached at maxinebuena@gmail.com.
