jeez, louise

Continuing on with my hopefulness arc.

The title of this post is a famous line from a show called FLCL, pronounced Fooly Cooly in English. It’s an old anime I remember watching on Adult Swim as a kid – it had a pretty good English dub and was that right blend of wacky, violent, horny, and absurd that sticks in your head through adolescence and into adulthood. And the soundtrack entirely done by Japanese indie band, the pillows, whew, lord, what a vibe.

Without me summing up the entire show, the context is that the main character, Naoto, looks up to his older brother, Tasuku, who is really good at baseball amongst other things. Naoto himself is miserable due to this, both worshipping his brother and resenting being in his shadow. When Tasuku leaves to go out of country, Naoto is left alone on their baseball team. Being much worse at baseball, Naoto doesn’t even try to swing at the pitches coming towards him, there’s a montage of him getting struck out inning after inning, standing there without even an ounce of conviction towards making an attempt. He views trying to do something, especially something his idol succeeds at, is futile.

The main girl in the series, an alien named Haruko, talks to Naoto after the game and says a pretty simple line – “Anyway, nothing can happen until you swing the bat.” While this line has plot ramifications since original series ends with Naoto swinging a guitar at a meteor to knock it away from Earth, the point of the show (and this isn’t an original thought, you are literally beat over the head with this theme) is that the only way for things to happen is if you swing.

It’s stupid to write a whole blog post about one of the most common morsels of self-help advice pedaled out by anyone with a M.Psych, but whatever. Naoto won’t swing the bat because he’ll never hit the ball like his brother. The expectation of the hit and the impression of those who could hit it serves as a tether that prevents him from ever doing so in the first place. Furthermore, these expectations also inform who Naoto is as a person, someone who will not try because he will never measure up. There’s comfort in knowing who you are, even if it makes you inert.

Whatever, I just don’t want to do schoolwork. I’ve got grad photos later and I don’t want to do that either. But as is patently obvious, I relate a lot to this character and the ways our fear of failure and the cages we make out of others and their expectations makes us miserable. So, the goal then is to swing the bat. Maybe baseball’s not my thing, but get acquainted with failure. When I think of myself and who I am, I feel like I have trouble defining that because I really don’t try to do much. On the contrary, a lot of my identity is informed by the dissonance between my ideal self and the expectations that come with that and the me who is scared to swing because I know I can’t be him. But I don’t know what I can be, or am, because I live in this quagmire of comfortable inaction.

I don’t think I’ve swung for the fences once in my life. I wonder what that feels like.