What to watch while rotting in bed this season
An almost-winter TV roundup, plus some pods
I am spending lots of time grading and responding to student writing this week (big thoughts & reflections on teaching and academic work coming soon), which means I’m also spending lots of time numbing out after long days. Even if your bodily rhythms are not forever patterned to the cycle of academic semesters like mine are (if you read Touched Out you know, both my kids were born at the end of the fall and spring semesters respectively, which says a lot), I suspect that for many of you this season is probably already filled with lots of overwhelm and end-of-year burnout. It’s just that time.
For most of my adult life, I lived with several largely unquestioned assumptions about the seasons of my body. A lot of these ideas were rooted in unhealthy relationships to exercise and food and fatness— ideas about when and what and how much I should let myself eat, and when instead I should focus on, in effect, punishing myself, by eating very little. I’ve spent several years undoing this mentality, though admittedly, it’s still a battle. Collectively, we still very much endorse this idea that the body’s seasons are guided by diet and fitness culture, and not much else.
As I’ve let go of that approach to disciplining my body, however, I’ve discovered other internal seasons. When I was in grad school, there was a pattern not only to when stress levels peaked and plunged, but also to the way students and academics coped. People drank heavier at semester’s end when the work overwhelmed us, heavier still when grades were finalized and papers turned in, this time as congratulations; everyone drank less in the early months of the year, when anything seemed possible.
When I first quit drinking a couple of years ago, perhaps the biggest lack I noticed in my life was a way to mark the release of intense periods of work, and the transition from high productivity to rest. Where once there had been heavy drunkenness to celebrate or trash or culminate an end, now I was left only with a turbulent nervous system to quiet, a range of unmet needs suddenly laid bare, and the question of what to do with a sudden abundance of free time.
Since then, I’ve come to value making space for the comedown that follows busy periods, especially those that involve interfacing with lots of other people. I let myself rot in bed for a few days if I can, I eat all the good food, I watch all the bad TV.
In case the holiday season has already led you into a similarly fallow, blissfully unproductive period, or if it’s just nudging you to get there soon, here’s a TV roundup (and some podcasts) for those of you looking to settle into your stories in the coming weeks.