How I Met Battlestar Galactica

There's no denying the fact that the last...six months or so of my life have been somewhat less than awesome. In fact, the I've spent vast majority of that time either in a state of complete mania and panic or catatonia. I always knew adult life posed its own unique challenges, but this has all seemed a bit excessive. I fucking get it, Universe.

So, with the collapse of my entire life plan (boyfriend, career, housing, financial whatever), and without any sort of employment in which to immerse myself, I naturally returned to my first, best method of coping: TV.

I love Friday Night Lights more than most people, and it really is very relatable, but for some reason it was more of a Band-Aid than actual healing tissue. (I'm talking about biological tissue here, not Kleenex.) Apparently my worldview was so thrown off-kilter I needed two radically different four-season-long shows to get it back on track. It took Battlestar Galactica to put my problems into context, but it was How I Met Your Mother that taught me how to solve them.

I started out with my beloved Battlestar Galactica. [SPOILER ALERT for the next paragraph, if you haven't watched the show all the way through.] The concept of having your home eradicated, your species' entire future in doubt, spoke to my melodramatic streak, and I adopted that feeling. I wallowed in it. And the episode after they discover "Earth" is nothing more than an irradiated cinder, that their reason for living was all just a lie (4x11, "Sometimes a Great Notion")...Well, a character's death was never more poignant for me than when Anastasia Dualla--a character I didn't even like, mind you--pulled out her gun after one last happy moment and put a bullet in her brain. She worked until they wouldn't let her; she loved until her heart gave out. She fought until she couldn't. And that was the feeling I was struggling with: Once your life is blown all to hell, and everything you've ever believed has been proven a lie, how do you go on? How do you find another reason? Are there any other reasons?

Again, I wallowed in these questions for a while. It was only natural. (Gossip Girl's funeral episode also contributed to this period of deconstruction. What happens when you're measured and found wanting, but you never get another chance to be measured? What happens when you're just not enough?)

I didn't intend to leave my existential crisis anytime soon, but thankfully the TV gods intervened and sent me the first three seasons of How I Met Your Mother on DVD. (Well, they sent my roommate the first three seasons. It amounts to the same thing.)

Of course, I blew through those three seasons (and SurftheChannel'd the fourth) in no time and loved every hilarious, sweet, realistic second. Granted, these characters are a good six to ten years older than me, but they're wrestling with the exact same issues as I am.

Logically, I knew the odds of staying together with the first person you ever dated, or keeping the first job you ever have, are astronomically small, but for some reason I always had this horrific sense of shame that accompanied thoughts of that not happening. HIMYM finally got it through my thick head that it is okay for you to be unlucky on the first try. That it does happen with some (Lily and Marshall), but that even those who seem really well-suited for each other don't make it (Ted and Robin). Oh, and [SPOILER ALERT if you haven't gotten through season three] that sometimes what you really wanted was in front of you all along (Barney and Robin, which, by the way, I am such a fucking fangirl 'shipper for them it is ridiculous: "But with you, the trouble doesn't seem so...troubling." God bless you, NPH).

The fourth season continued drilling those ideas into my head, but one of my favorite moments in the entire show came in the finale:

Ted: This is a disaster. How am I going to come back from this?
Lily: Okay, I'm just going to ask this. Do you really want to come back from this?
Ted: What's that supposed to mean?
Lily: Architecture is killing you, Ted. And it's killing us to watch it killing you. You're like that goat with the washcloth. You want it so bad, and every time the world tries to take it away from you, you keep grabbing it. But, you know what? It's just a washcloth. Why do you even want it?
Ted: Because I have to be an architect! That's the plan.
Lily: Screw the plan! [...] Look, you can't design your life like a building. It doesn't work that way; you just have to live it and it'll design itself.
Ted: So I should just do nothing?
Lily: No. Listen to what the world is telling you to do...And take the leap.

What my leap is remains to be seen, but at least I'm not holding on to that washcloth anymore.