Issue #188: Most Lifestyle Content Falls Short—Here’s What’s Missing

Introducing 'Plant Studies' 🌸

🎥 ‘The Friend,’ in theaters: Naomi Watts stars in this adaptation of Sigrid Nuñez’s novel as Iris, a writer mourning the death of her friend while navigating the unexpected ownership of his Great Dane. The movie, like the novel, offers an incredibly sweet depiction of the ways in which connection, even across species, can crack us wide open, and reveal new possibilities.

📚 Death of the Author by Knedi Okorafor: I’ve been thinking about this since I finished the audiobook last week—not only the novel, but the one embedded into it. Zelunjo or “Zelu,” a Nigerian American woman, has been fired from an adjunct professor position (for criticizing a white male student) when she throws herself into writing a novel called Rusted Robots set in a futuristic, humanless Nigeria. It turns out to be a massive hit, securing film rights and even an offer to turn Zelu, who has used a wheelchair since a childhood accident, into a robot with a biomechanical exoskeleton. Okorafor covers a lot of ground—ableism, racism, the future, art—and still manages to nail the ending, interspersed with pages of Zelu’s book.

📺 “Adolescence” on Netflix: Less of a “whodunnit” than a disturbing excavation into “why,” this four episode mini-series follows the a 13-year-old boy who has been accused of murdering a female classmate. Child digital safety expert

Chris McKenna

offered his thoughts here, and

Y.L. Wolfe

wrote about the horrifying fact that it’s based on real events, plural.

Quick note before we get into things that the timing of today’s post is not the most ideal given April Fools’, but I promise there’s no trickery here. Okay, let’s get into things! x

Nearly four years ago, I floated into my first graduate school class in an outfit I had carefully selected the night before. My cream-colored blouse and wide-leg denim, paired with a fresh blow-out, was intended to make me look polished, without being too fancy. I looked, I hoped, like a therapist.

I found a seat and made friendly conversation with my new classmates, strangers who would later shepherd me through the most difficult year of my life as close friends. As we chatted, I arranged my fresh pens and highlighters around a spiral-bound notebook and the textbook, Introduction to Counseling. I was still operating from the basic logic chain that supported my decade in lifestyle media: I look well, therefore I am well, and I can help you be well too. It would take another few months before I understood how little bearing that had on my effectiveness as a therapist.

I quickly excelled at the academic aspects of school, acing papers and presentations, until my first “practical skills” class, a year and a half in. In it, my classmates and I were separated into triads and assigned roles that rotated between therapist, client, and observer. Each week, we took turns filming videos of ourselves, applying our nascent counseling skills to the real-life challenges our classmates brought into the simulated sessions. In the “therapist” seat, my own mind read like a teleprompter of microskills, lean forward, not too far forward, ask an open-ended question, uncross your arms, add in an empathetic “hmmm.” I looked like a therapist and yet, I could tell in rewatching the videos that there was some fundamental disconnect between myself and the client in front of me.

My professor, who looks like Robin Wall Kimmerer and has a similarly generous demeanor, but delivers blunt observations with the cutting precision of Gordon Ramsay, put it this way, “You would make an excellent life coach.”