Spoiler Alert
A PSA at the Crossroads of *Shrinking* & Goodbye
First off, all of you Shrinking fans could have at least warned me. Even despite my already grouchy and outsized feelings about the show - though, to be fair, given repeated viewings of only the same three episodes - I’m a little miffed that I wasn’t at least warned. No one gave me any indication that I should mentally prepare myself.
So, consider this a Public Service Announcement. Here’s a warning for any of you who have not yet watched Shrinking, and are entertaining doing so:
If you have nearly finished all three seasons on the night before your youngest child launches from the nest and leaves home, please STOP watching Shrinking.
And if your youngest son is launching from home only two months after his big brother flew from the nest for a job out of state, I urge you at all costs, do yourself a favor and DEFINITELY STOP WATCHING SHRINKING.
Because - big spoiler alert:
At the end of season three, EVERYONE IS LEAVING. And if you’re already an emotional basket case about your two kids leaving home within only a few weeks of each other, this show will do nothing for you but exacerbate all the big feelings already blindsiding you left and right for days and weeks after all the leaving stuff happens.
Even if you’re thinking of only passively watching Shrinking while you scroll Instagram or pay your taxes or run through NYT puzzles - guess what? Don’t watch Shrinking. Passively-watch Rooster or Severance. But not Shrinking, because here is everything you need to know about the show: Everyone leaves. So, there you have it. Now I’ve provided you the Cliff Notes for the show, and you can thank me later.
Not sold? Not enough? Ok. More spoiler alerts. Here’s what you get in the final episode of the most recent season:
You’ve got the cranky but oft-wise Han Solo guy moving from LA to Connecticut - which is, I know, the absolute LAST place in eight star systems that you’d expect Han Solo to spend his retirement.
The Roy Kent guy kind of leaves, too (maybe).
Then, you’ve got Jimmy’s patient, Sean, finally - I mean, FI-NUH-LEE- moving out of Jimmy’s pool house and into the empty apartment that Neighbor Derek Guy owns. This is actually, in terms of the show’s nonstop therapy-specific ethical quandaries, a good thing. But even though the idea of one of Jimmy’s therapy patients living in his pool house has eaten me alive through a rapid ingestion of all three seasons, serving as one of the bigger blocks preventing me from seeing this show beyond all its nonstop boundary violations, his leaving is still one more person leaving.
But all that leaving? That’s just the opening act of leaving.
All those departures are just setting you - or me - up for the heavy-hitter departure of them all: Granted, it’s a little on the nose when it’s time for Jimmy’s daughter, Alice, who has just graduated high school, to board a plane and bound off into her next chapter. Definitely one of those “I’m not crying you’re crying” moments, because - as noted - my youngest was doing the leaving thing, too, and exactly at the moment I arrived to Alice’s sendoff in the series.
On the one hand, you can’t help feeling excited for Alice. You can remember that feeling yourself years ago: That whole bounding off and away from everything overly familiar; that dashing into the great wide open.
Don’t get me wrong. I know how to be happy for all these eager young people leaping out of the nest - including, if not especially, my own two boys. They’ve got their new lease on life in hand, and they are spring-loaded and ready - with butterflies in their stomachs - to make a path into the world. None of what I’ve shared until now is to suggest I have not been happy for my boys and everything they’ve leaned into. I appreciate Alice’s excitement and journey. She needs to leave her dad. So did my boys.
But then you cut to Jimmy - who, true to form - is so devastated by his daughter’s leaving, because - as three seasons have revealed, and as his mentor, Han Solo, has pointed out - Jimmy’s a bit extra-sensitive. And, well, then every other major character on the show has pointed this out to him at different times, too.
It’s not a bad thing that Jimmy is sensitive. However, it certainly never helps him that his sensitivities cause him to go from so quickly full of big feelings to sulky to dysregulated and to frantic, to then becoming very agitated - the rapid culmination of which amounts to his inability to stop himself from distributing and projecting those big feelings everywhere. A pattern of self-sabotaging behaviors which comprise 98% of his challenges and “learning moments” over 50+ years. Wait, I meant three seasons. Who are we talking about here?
Either way, Jimmy’s conundrums often remind me of how, on the dating apps now, it’s not unusual to see people load their profiles with the pressurized-hope or expectation that their potential partner has “done the work”, or is actively “doing all the work.” Jimmy? He hasn’t done all the work. Maybe a little, but definitely not all. (And here’s a trade secret: A lot of therapists are still not doing (or crushing) all the work. And in some cases, not even a little bit of the work.)
Even so, it’s hard not to wince and then crack down the middle when Alice’s bestie, Summer, steals all the thunder from Jimmy’s efforts and hopes for a memorable sendoff with his daughter at the airport. Though, disclaimer, I don’t know if that scene packs an actual, bona fide, heavy emotional wallop, or if Jimmy’s dissatisfying farewell with Alice hurts to watch because it specifically twists some pointed object lodged in a very familiar location of my heart at the same exact moment in my real life.
After Jimmy’s dissatisfying farewell to Alice at the airport, the show cuts to him the next morning, entering his kitchen, and taking a seat at his kitchen table, alone and glum.
I feel it’s necessary to point out that if the show stopped right there, right then - with Jimmy alone and a little melancholy at his kitchen table, hands wrapped around his coffee mug, I would possess entirely different feelings about the show than I do today.
But no. Of course this crazy-making show doesn’t stop there. No, obviously, it canNOT stop there: This is (pretty corny) TV. This is not real life! So, naturally, it’s at this moment that devastated, wet-noodle Jimmy must be afforded his happy-ending escape hatch. So, it’s Han Solo to the rescue. Yup, in the final moments of Shrinking’s season 3 finale, that rogue wise guy shows up in the nick of time and swoops in and does that thing for Jimmy that he did for Luke in the final moments of Star Wars – though this time minus a big explosion. Nevertheless, he provides lonely, sad Jimmy a way to win this thing, after all.
When I hugged Matt goodbye at the airport a few days ago, and then waved goodbye to him on the other side of TSA, and then pleaded with my chest to quit doing that crazed fluttering thing when I returned to my car, Han Solo was nowhere to be found. Not even Chewbacca, dammit all. I drove to work wondering why I didn’t have the good sense to request the day off weeks ago. Or, rather, why I didn’t actually request a few weeks off after the roller coaster ride of these last couple months. I should have, because that day at work, after this new goodbye, my mind stayed entirely elsewhere – in a whole fatherhood-long span of different places – all day long. And for a few days afterward, too.
When I arrived home after work that evening, I entered a house that had in the space of only a few hours adopted a new variety of sound, a never-before experienced layer of quiet. This new quiet proved distinct from the silence of the home during the in between days and weeks that the boys spent at their mom’s over all the years leading to now.
I encountered, in this unfamiliar space, a curious new texture to the silence of empty; an uncharted region within the cartography of absence.
*
Maybe you’ve seen Shrinking; maybe you haven’t. Maybe you’re a therapist who knows how to put some exceptionally effective blinders on when you consume bewildering media featuring hapless and boundaryless therapists engaged in a slap-happy array of blatant ethical conundrums. (If so, send me some tips for donning said blinders.)
But no matter your feelings about the show, I offer one last spoiler alert. Don’t worry - it doesn’t concern Shrinking. Because I don’t care if you ever watch or don’t watch Shrinking. If not for the unique circumstances that led to my recently consuming it, I don’t know that I would have ever watched all three seasons of it either.
Meanwhile, I do care about the ways we come to engage in the experiences of our lifetimes.
Spoiler Alert: You will love your children fiercely and you will also fail them tremendously. You will adore who they are in the world and you will cringe at the personas they reveal on social media or with friends (theirs and yours). Your kids will remember all your maniacal conniptions and rage-heavy episodes as pitch-perfectly as they preserve memories of transcendent trips together and Hallmark-worthy holiday gatherings.
You will turn the world upside down for them when you can, and you will let them down in all sorts of profound ways that select TikTok influencers, Fox News commentators, and cool, hip therapy gurus apparently never fail their children.
You will want them to soar into the great wide open with their own remarkable wingspan, but you will also want to experience watching Home Alone, ET, and Goonies on the couch with them for the first time all over again. You will forever want to relive seeing them hit a baseball for the first time, too, while looking forward with enlivening curiosity towards the experiences and conversations you hope to have with them as you all grow older.
You will want your children to figure life out without too much babying, helicopter-ing, and umbrella-tactics from the crazypants peanut gallery of You, and you will also want to preserve your memory of specific stages of their lives in amber. You will want to bless the paths they tread into the mutilated world with all the fervor and heart of an Irish poet, while also wishing they were still actively at play in their bedrooms, building cool Lego ships, or playing Star Wars and fighting over who gets to be Han Solo.
If you’re lucky, and if, over time, you built relationships with these grown people that you long ago held in the crook of your arm, you will let go of them one day and they will not fall, and you will together stand grounded in advance of soaring in whichever directions you separately fly. And wherever your individual paths take you, you and they will know you’re never too far away, no matter the miles between you.
P.S.
A Few June Tunes:
Lilo - The Japanese House
Under the Red Sky - Bob Dylan
Zoom 97 - Kurt Vile
Never So Far - Greg Brown
Kings Highway - Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers
You Found Me - Waxahatchee & Kevin Morby
Cotton Flower - Future Islands
Everywhere I Go - Willie Nelson & Emmylou Harris
All Night All Day - Big Thief
Just Stand There - Fred again.., Joy Anonymous, Duskus, Four Tet