Twilight Time Machine

Hey Little Spider Monkeys,

How we doing out there? I’m grateful for the conversations that opened up after last week’s Bside on “How to Engage.” I hope everyone’s doing good this week.

I’m STOKED for today’s Brightside, and I’m not sure how it’s taken me so long to dedicate an entire newsletter to one of my most fundamental personality traits: TWILIGHT.

So without further ado - please enjoy (yet another!) embarrassing anecdote from my past.

If I ever got access to a time machine, I know exactly where I’d go. 

I’d travel back to November 21, 2008, for one of the most culturally important and formative moments of my adolescence: The Twilight Premiere. 

I know that this is totally the wrong choice. I hope whichever scientists are busting their asses on time travel technology choose a more worthy candidate for the first trip through the chambers of space and time — because come on.

The gift of time travel would be so much better bestowed on someone with a more inspired and worldy destination. Ancient Egypt. Paris in the 1920s. China in like, 2000 BCE.

However, if the odds were in my favor and those dumb geniuses did choose me – I wouldn’t waver. Yes sir, I’d go back to the parking lot of my hometown’s dinky movie theater, marching hand-in-hand with my 14-year-old besties to see the Twilight movie again through virgin eyes. You know how today, all high school freshmen are like, doing get-ready-with-me videos on TikTok, and they completely skipped over any awkwardness? Yeah. Let’s just say, I was the opposite of them. 

The thought came to me as I was watching Twilight for the 230498th time this past Monday. By now, I can recite almost every line by heart, and the familiar anticipation of the scenes I know so well comfort me like a warm blanket. And don’t even get me started on the soundtrack … 

As I was live-texting my group chat about my at-home screening, the memory of seeing the movie for the first time filtered through my head. I had just wrapped up my first semester at boarding school and I was back home for Thanksgiving. The first order of business, of course, was going to see Twilight with my friends. Everything else could wait. 

My mom, bless her heart, brought the gaggle of us to Destinta Theaters in Middletown, CT and we loaded into the theater with giddy anticipation. Twilight was life. 

The movie started and we were all rapt with attention, glued to the supernatural teen drama unfolding in front of us. I might as well have been in Forks, I was so engrossed in the movie. Until all of the sudden, I found myself having my first encounter with what I now know to be (dramatic pause) intrusive thoughts. I was prone to migraines as a kid (still am), and although I was feeling fine at the Twilight Premiere, somehow my mind jumped from THIS IS THE SKIN OF A KILLER, BELLA to, oh my god do I have a brain tumor? 

And just like that, I was having a full-blown panic attack. RUDE. Once the seed was planted (and again, I have no idea how I went from Twilight to terminally ill – such is the magic of intrusive thoughts), it was all I could think about. I was freaking out. I even made my mom leave the theater with me – we went outside to get some fresh air and I was like OH MY GOD MOM I THINK I’M DYING!!!

Yes. You read that right. I made my mom leave Twilight in the middle of the movie so I could have a panic attack about an imaginary brain tumor. 

I don’t remember much of our conversation, but somehow my mom talked me off the ledge (most likely by saying: well, there’s nothing we can do about it now, so let’s just go finish watching this god-damned movie). We went back in, saw Bella through her trials and tribulations as a human in a world of vampires, and that was that. By the time we got home, I crawled into my twin-sized bed and drifted off to a Rob-Pat-dream-state, my brain-tumor panic behind me. 

Thankfully, capital-P Panic Attacks didn’t persist throughout my teen years, and my episode at the Twilight Premiere was a pretty isolated event. But the more I’ve learned about intrusive thoughts (a strange, disturbing thought or a troubling image that pops into your mind), the more I realize that I’ve been living with these for a really long time. 

Not like serial-killer intrusive thoughts, but just like, really anxious thoughts. Now I realize this is extremely common, but growing up, I spent a lot of time in my own head and dealt with anxiety in the worst way possible – in the echo chamber of my mind. In retrospect, I must have been really freaking the fuck out to have brought my mom into my imagined reality at the movies.

Mostly, my MO was to keep my anxious thoughts to myself – letting scenarios play out in all of their horrible glory until they went away. These would last minutes, hours or sometimes days. 

Over the years, as I exited the intense hormonal portal of puberty, endured the growing pains of college, and survived the rollercoaster of my 20s in New York – my anxiety and I have developed let’s just say, “a better working relationship.” Thanks to countless podcasts and hours of therapy and reading stories of other women (and men) who deal with anxiety or intrusive thoughts, I’ve learned a thing or two about coexisting with them. 

Breathing techniques, self-soothing mechanisms, morning routines. I’m not here to rattle off the ways to cope with anxiety though, because I’m really not an expert, but I am here to say if you, too, deal with low-grade anxiety that always seems to be humming in the background – I see you. 

Even today, anxious thoughts flare up and have the power to completely suck the joy out of daily experiences until I snap back to reality. This crush thinks I’m insane (actually, that could be real). My boss hates me (highly unlikely). My friends find me fucking annoying (eh, sometimes). 

AsI think back to my Twilight-Premiere-Panic-Attack, the thing that got me through it the fastest was simple: talking about it. Telling my mom I was freaking out took the power away from the imaginary scenario I had built in my mind. 

To this day, in the midst of my most unruly anxious flare-ups, that strategy continues to be the most powerful for me. Whether it’s my therapist, or my best friends, or my brother – the value of asking someone for a sanity check is beyond measure. 

Even that has been a practice, though - sometimes the last thing I want to do is voice what’s creeping in, for fear of making it real. However,  the minute I say it out loud, the thing gets smaller. And whomever I’m sharing it with can even help me laugh about it.

Anyway. I said what I said. 

If I had access to a time machine, I’d go back to the Twilight Premiere circa 2009. Not to imbue that anxious experience with the wisdom I’ve gained at 29 – honestly, I just want to see the movie for the first time again. And I really think when it comes to anxiety - the only way out is through. There’s a lot to learn from that experience, and I’m glad I can laugh about it all these years later.

And so the lion fell in love with the lamb, 

BOGS