we're all a little bit un-understandable until understood

thanking baby reindeer for this reminder! everyone go watch this gem of a show rn

“We’re all varying degrees of weird pretending to be human.”

- Baby Reindeer (2024)

I can’t remember the last time a television show has stuck with me with the depth and intimacy that Baby Reindeer has made me feel all week. Every minute of this carefully produced show inspired by real experiences, strikes a provocative chord underlining how profusely complex, deeply individual, and stirringly absurd the human experience can be.

It’s Friday, so what are you doing if you have not watched this vulnerable work of candid non-fiction? A little bit of context before I dive into my own personal rumination inspired by it:

The show tracks the life of a struggling comedian after he meets a lonely woman who hyper-fixates on him and turns into his stalker overnight. She gets increasingly desperate, unstable, and dangerous, and begins to trespass into his life in ways that progressively ruin him. The story unfolds with increasing tension, as we simultaneously get an inside look into the protagonist’s past and life, that possibly attracts and even, harbors, people like his stalker.

Baby Reindeer is written by, directed by, and stars Richard Gadd, and is based on true events from his life. It is an autobiography portrayed in the most moving and disturbing ways rooted in dark comedy. An incredibly personal piercing into his life, he strips himself of any lingering manifestations of shame and guilt, and chooses to tell his story without anything drawing him back. I cannot imagine this process being easy to move on forth with, and this strikes another provocative chord of how vulnerability builds empathy.

For the first few episodes, I sat, eyes glued to the screen, pinching myself, and contorting my face as I dug into my shirt, watching Richard Gadd’s character, Donny, self-sabotage himself time and time again. It was unbelievable to me what I was watching. How could anyone in their right mind not choose the “obvious path” of solving this “fixable problem”?

But the answer to that question lies right within it.

Anyone in their right mind, I question but -

What does it mean to be in their right mind?

Is there such a thing as a right mind?

Are we all not just a bit off from what the DSM-5 would define as a right mind?

---

We are a product of every thing we were born into, every circumstance we grew up with, every person we brushed shoulders with, every ray of sun that hit our skin, every fight we heard from the neighbor’s house, every sensory experience we fell into either by choice or happenstance, every friend who we planned sleepovers with, every heartbreak, every drug, every laugh, every hurt, every moment in time that continues on as you read through this string of letters, and every version of ourselves that existed and exists and persisted and persists through all of this.

When we are that unbelievably complex of human beings, and when our journeys unfold in a permutation of ways uncountable, why is it sometimes often so incredibly hard for us to empathize?

What may be the most obvious path or choice to us may not be so for someone else. We scoff and shake our heads. We pass judgment. And we do this even more so to the people who are in need of the missing empathy the most. The lost who do not even realize they are lost. The broken that struggle to get stitches. The ones that blend right into the rest of us.

I was forced to meet my own failure to empathize until I was made to empathize, as I watched this show play out.

I thought about how we often do not give victims and survivors of all sorts of trauma lasting grace. When trauma occurs, it fundamentally re-wires vital pathways in our brains. And while of course course, it is absolutely possible to undo and re-wire what has been restructured, but this takes time, support, energy, and plenty of space for healing and relapses. In the interim, this will change the way we respond to any emotional or physical stimuli.

• The empathy seemingly comes more naturally when there is a physical manifestation of the differences. They look different, so it’s understandable that they react differently.

• The empathy stays when there is a recency effect involved. They just dealt with this traumatic incident, surely it is understandable they act differently.

• But with time, the empathy fades, even if the trauma has creeped into emotionally or behaviorally changing someone, in ways indistinguishable on a surface level. It is not understandable that they act differently, they’re just being unreasonable - grow up, move past it, be mature, she needs a therapist, she has major issues, he is diabolical, why the fuck is it so hard for them to get it, they’re insane.

(Apologies that this will be in vague in advance for I refuse to give any spoilers for this gem of a show!!!) Baby Reindeer forced me to understand what would have been previously un-understandable behavior to me. It made me realize that there is so much nuance, so much gray area, to what can seemingly, grudgingly be black-and-white concepts.

Is it ever right to unsolicitedly morally police someone without knowing what it is like to be them? An impossibility.

We are all just a little bit lost and broken, carrying on our backs different weights of trauma and experiences, leaving us to be sometimes sinners, sometimes saints. When we are not all-knowing, what gives us the authority to judge?

But part of the complexity and intricacy of being human is the fact that our perception is our reality, naturally leaving us to pass judgment. To ask of ourselves to never judge is to ask of ourselves another impossibility. Effectively, asking ourselves to not be human.

Surely, that would be ridiculous of me to expect. I’d be a hypocrite, taking plenty of cheat days myself.

But maybe this is not so ridiculous of a notion: can we consider giving more grace to those that we call ours?

When I think about my mom or dad, people I think I know like the back of my hand, I instinctively assume I can paint perfect canvases of their lives.

But when I sit and think about it, how much do I really know? What were the intricacies of their childhood? What were their deepest emotions, fears, and experiences they had growing up? What was it like to have been them 30 years ago? Who were they before they were my parents?

The reality is, the canvas is not perfectly painted - several gaps yet to be filled, different texture and balance that needs to be etched, new color palettes to be unveiled.

But maybe if we asked more questions and tried to get to know them just a bit more on the inside, we find threads of empathy to paint these canvases with an invigorating sense of clarity…

…allowing us to meet their flaws, impulses, shortcomings, and tendencies with more understanding.

This process takes time, patience, and effort - a whole lot of it. But imagine if we decided to go along this journey with at least the people we feel intimately connected to. Our parents, our partners, our in-laws, our soulmates.

It would be a world in which we would never fall out of love.

Humans feeling understood by their humans; we’d be timeless.

Seriously, Baby Reindeer re-wired my brain - for the better. My journal entries and conversations with friends have been thoroughly splashed with an essence of everything I wrote about here.

A new rush of empathy for everyone and everything around me is setting in - and I am fully bathing in it. And I trust that it is a cycle, really. Extending empathy allows moments of vulnerability in others. Vulnerability brings together community. And community makes us understand and feel understood.

Let me know in the comments below if you’ve resonated with anything here, or simply have thoughts about the rollercoaster ride that this show was. Happy Friday, everyone!