Running With Phoebe

On Trauma, Therapy, and Friendship

I’ve been behind the pop culture curve my whole life.

Video may have killed the radio star, but I didn’t know it living in a house without cable. I only heard about MTV from friends’ stories, listening intently while longing to be cool, but knowing it to be out of reach while wearing clothes from Kohl's. I was not watching Madonna on TV, nor was I wearing Guess jeans or Jams shorts. All I had was the BetaMax recording of Thriller that my Dad recorded from network television and my parents’ (stellar!) record collection.

This lasted long after I moved out of my parent's house. In my early twenties, I was a caring and dedicated, but budgetarily challenged employee at a local non-profit, earning peanuts and spending most of it at the local gay bar (my very first gay bar!). I always managed to pay my rent, but I’m not quite sure how, given that I racked up significant credit card debt buying CDs and DVDs from Circuit City, my credit staring down a similar fate as the chain.

This was the early aughts, and I didn’t have a television in my basement apartment. If I watched TV or movies, it was on DVDs through my massive computer. I had heard of Friends, but I hadn’t really watched it, not from the beginning anyway. That changed when I became friends with a woman a few years younger than me but who was impressively responsible. She had a respectable job, nice things that I assumed weren’t hand-me-downs or thrift purchases, and television!

I started watching Friends with her and her cat every Thursday, and she would supply us both (Not the cat. Well, only once.) with beer and pizza. I was rarely able to reciprocate with the food and drink so I did what I could by offering her my time, watching her sweet cat whenever she left town. Her cat loved that it was my only opportunity to watch TV alone and soaked up all the couch attention.

It’s hard for me to think of anything but this time in my life when I watch Friends now. Sure, from my current vantage point, I could critique it in strongly worded sociological terms like controlling images and intersectionality. But it will always hold this warm, comforting nostalgia, made sweeter by that friendship lasting long enough for me to buy her beer and pizza; long enough for me to have texted her twice this week with some Friends-themed silliness meant to connect, and maybe soften, a grief-filled moment.

Friends started in 1994, and though I did watch the final episode live on television, I didn’t start watching the show regularly until 2000. I was six years behind the curve, which is typical for me. I only just joined Instagram about a year ago (and I’ve already deleted it from my phone).

Anyway, I’ve been thinking about Phoebe a lot lately. She was also late to the party, often not on the same cultural wavelength as her friends, but at the same time, so often ahead of the game.

Recently I was in a car accident — the bad kind that totaled my car and left me alive but fearful of highway driving — and realized that Phoebe understood what Bessel van der Kolk knows. Trauma lodges in our bodies and movement therapy is as central to healing as talk therapy is. Maybe even more so.

I remember the first time my therapist told me, some months after major surgery, to do yoga and pay attention to what my body was telling me while on the mat. I thought, “Okay, and then what?” It felt like an incomplete instruction, but still, I did yoga and waited for some kind of magical, therapeutic insight that never arrived.

About a year later, during a frustrating period of revising my first book, my therapist suggested that I walk away from my computer and jump around, punch the air, or otherwise act like a dog that’s shaking off a chance meeting with another pooch on a walk. Again, I admit my initial reaction was (though I politely kept this in my head) “Really? This is what you are offering me?”

But later that week I was sitting at my desk, staring at the computer and not sure how to proceed, wracked with grief over a recent loss, and I thought, “What the hell.” I got up out of my chair, closed my office door (I do have a sense of decorum, after all), and jumped around, waving and swaying, my arms and legs akimbo. Whatever energy I was sitting with moved around, and sure enough, it worked. I was able to be productive for a few hours.

There are many reasons I keep going back to my therapist, this being just one of them: even when I’m skeptical, she turns out to be right. There are also many reasons I still watch Friends reruns, despite knowing what I know about those sociological ideas like controlling images and intersectionality.

When I had my car accident I could feel the trauma lodged in my body. No matter what my mind knew, when I was driving on the expressway my body felt flooded, stuck, and fearful; my head buzzing with so much anxiety I had a hard time seeing. I tried to shake like a dog while driving, just a little bit, mind you; shaking, for example, my arms when stopped at a red light, desperately trying to move some of the energy around so it wouldn’t stay so stuck. When I got to campus, I’d close the office door and jump up and down, yet again, arms and legs akimbo.

Turns out, Phoebe knew this, too.

This morning I was sitting at my desk, feeling pretty low. Moody like a grey day, unmotivated like a rainy day, all while the sun was shining outside. I had work to do that I of course did not want to do. I kept coming up with little distracting things to do like checking my credit card statement and reviewing my calendar when I decided to make some tea.

Something came over me when I stood up from my desk chair, and I thought about the episode when Rachel runs with Phoebe, and Phoebe runs like a woman who knows how to have fun, arms and legs akimbo. I thought: “This is what I should do right now.” So I did, and turns out, Phoebe was right. Running a little mad, from my office to the kitchen, brought me a brief boost of joy. Running a little mad, from the kitchen to my office, while the tea steeped, brought my mood up just enough to open up to my work. Running a little mad, from my office back to the kitchen, and back again to my desk, filled me with a crucial ingredient I needed to face the rest of my day with a little life, and a little love.

Love for my body, my life, my work, my friends. Maybe I’ve been behind the curve on a lot of things in my life. But running like Phoebe brought me exactly where I needed to be today.