Imagining a Way Out of My Codependency
My codependency is always trying to convince me that it deserves to live. It asks me to keep the poison coming.
I have my reasons. Like fiction, some essays deserve to keep their secrets. Names, little wounds, ghosts. You can stitch them into the lining, not so much to fix them in time but to leave them behind for good.
There are things I can try to explain instead—like what a film can make you see about yourself that you didn’t want to see.
it
This fear is difficult to name, but like a shadow, it can follow you around. It pushes you into relationships you know are bad, and it keeps you out of ones that are good. It convinces you that being alone is a strong and valiant choice.
It takes me a long time to learn that I still have a choice. That this time, I can choose differently.
Phantom Thread
Phantom ThreadAnderson seems to badly want Alma to be both Reynolds’s handmaiden and an independent, even subversive, woman, and perhaps he believes she is. But she is only given one action, in the end: She’s trapped in that movement, like a tape on loop, while the film attempts to convince you she’s free.
Kristen Evans is a freelance critic and culture writer with work in BuzzFeed, The Los Angeles Times, LA Weekly, Literary Hub, The New Republic, and elsewhere. She is the author of a poetry collection, MAMMAL ROOM, and is at work on a novel. She lives in Cleveland, OH.
Enter your email address to receive notifications for author Kristen Evans
Success!
Confirmation link sent to your email to add you to notification list for author Kristen Evans
More in this series
How Watching Asian American Dads Onscreen Helps Me Face My Own
Our fathers may never know us the way we wish they would. And if we learned that ignorance is bliss, it’s because we learned it from them.
‘Camelot,’ the Hollywood Failure That Taught Me to Live Again
I think now, what is life if not a rather ridiculous, fumbling, histrionic, financially ruinous, unwieldy thing?
Looking into the Reflections of Andrei Tarkovsky’s ‘Mirror’
The filmmaker’s retreat from the conventions of Socialist realism—patriotism, militarism, subservience—becomes a journey to locate the self outside the strictures of state ideology.