#**carfis

Totally. I mean, ANYTHING that would have helped to make the ST more thematically and tonally cohesive would have been good??? Like, WHY DOES THE STORYGROUP EXIST IF NOT TO WHACK DIRECTORS ON THE HEAD AND GO, “NO, THAT CONTRADICTS THE ESTABLISHED CANON, WRITE IT AGAIN RIAN”??? I will truly never understand why LF invests so much time, energy, and money into having a Canon Bible if the biggest of their properties aren’t beholden to it. Like! What! Why!

Also, the visual look of TLJ being so different from both TFA and TROS -- which is really just prominent, imo, because TFA/TROS both had the same director and visual style; if they’d kept it three separate directors and styles, it would have at least had that level of intention to it, yk? -- is so jarring, so the fact that the directors were/are allowed to bring in their own BTS crews and stuff is... like, IMO, TLJ doesn’t ~look like Star Wars~ because the visual language is so different from TFA, Rogue One, and Solo, but also, the Prequels look nothing like the OT so I know I’m also very biased about what Star Wars “is supposed to look like.” I mean, yes, Star Wars looks like Rey’s AT-AT and the happabore at the watering hole and the grit of D’qar, but it also looks like Padme’s sumptuous gowns and flying CGI Artoo, so. It can look like hyperclear red-black-and-white ultra-digital TLJ, too, I guess. But still. At least pretend to be interested in being the sequel to a film that already came out.

Today is the ten-year anniversary of when I was hospitalized after a suicide attempt.

Today, Carrie Fisher died.

I had been thinking for a few weeks now whether, and/or how, I wanted to post anything about my experience, because I expended a lot of energy on last year’s unfortunate tenth post (and yes: OBVIOUSLY it is related that they happened a year apart).

But I owe it to Carrie Fisher to be open and be honest about mental illness, because she made it feel safer to be that way.

(She made A LOT of things feel safer: when I’m not crying, and when it’s not an anniversary of being raped, ask me how much I admire and respect the way Carrie, and Leia through her and in her image, treated being literally objectified and being enslaved and being turned into something outside of her own autonomy for the consumption of men. She made it feel safer to be smart and to be angry and to be bossy. Not a boss, but BOSSY. She was funnier on one episode of 30 Rock than Tina Fey in her entire career. She was the most iconic, legendary, recognizable, memorable female movie character arguably ever, and she also made the entire franchise palatable in the first place – seriously, Marcia Lucas and Carrie deserve ALL of the credit for the original trilogy being any good at all. They did the damn thing.)

When I was nineteen, on winter break from my second year of college, I tried to kill myself. I don’t actually remember doing it. I do remember biting an intake nurse. I don’t remember much of being in the hospital, although I do remember that on New Year’s Eve 2007, we were allowed to stay up until 10PM and it just felt like, really? We don’t even get to pretend to do a normal-life thing?

And I remember lying about why I had done it. I lied for years about why I had done it, because I did not want to say the words I was raped, and I did not want anyone to think that I actually was sick. I didn’t want to have PTSD (and obviously, I still don’t WANT to, but I do). I didn’t want to be depressed (and obviously, I still don’t WANT to, but I am). I wanted, so badly, to seem like it was a sudden snap of collegiate ennui and that I was miraculously and instantaneously better when I decided, OK, I’ve watched them discharge people and here are the steps to getting out NOW.

I wish that I had not done that. I wish that I had been honest back then – if only because it was within the statute of limitations back then. But also because I wish, GOOD LORD do I wish, that I’d spent more of my first 20 years being honest about myself. Because if I had been honest, I would have gotten help years sooner than I did.

I cannot explain how much I admire Carrie’s radical honesty. She was open about mental illness before… probably anyone. She was open about the scary experiences of it, and the hard work, and the stress and changes that it put on her life and her relationships and her career and her body. And she did it all in a galaxy that, let’s be real, was never going to love her for it until she held out a blaster and made it. I don’t think there will ever be another person who’s like, “You wanna love the image of who I was at nineteen? Then you have to love me, because we’re the same person. This is who that girl becomes. And that’s fucking great.”

And we all listened. And loved her for it. Because she is who that girl became, and that’s fucking awesome.

She made it okay to grow up into someone who is… all of the things that Carrie made okay.

Female and Jewish and smart and angry and bossy and insecure and confident and loving in an earnest way so big it should have its own zip code.

She made it feel safe to grow from being the princess into being the General.

I feel like it’s only fitting that Carrie, who was so one-of-a-kind, played a character who was the surviving leader of a people who were targeted and extinguished and hunted down. She played a one-of-a-kind character in every sense, and I don’t think that’s an accident. Carrie was a million more things than Princess Leia, but I feel like she’d be the first to tell you that she and Princess Leia were, very much, each other.

In the Princess Leia comic, there’s a line that as long as a single drop of Alderaanian blood survives, Alderaan survives.

I think that being radically honest and radically smart and radically loving is that Alderaanian blood, so to speak. As long as a single person tries to carry on all of the things that Carrie valued and tried to live and tried to teach and show, then… part of her survives.

As long as we survive, she survives, I guess is what I’m saying. I’m probably not making sense because I’m crying so hard again, but. I guess what I’m saying is: