The flipside of that is "use it to deal with your actual life."
YES because using storytelling to make sense of your own life (rather than escaping dealing) is a time-honored way of coping and healing. The story provides distance one may need to gain perspective and free oneself from a reactionary, repetitive, self-defeating cycle. But if taken too far, the escapism overwhelms. So finding the balance between Fiction and Reality is the hope -- what Season 6 strives for and Season 7 accomplishes. Buffy heals herself by learning the narrative of the Slayer, a narrative that she's used as escape, but like with escaping into fiction, it can lead to extreme isolation and even depression. Buffy comes to terms with the story and learns to use the story to forge connection -- to stop her pattern of superior-inferiority and losing her Buffy identity in her mythic Slayerhood as she just "slips away" into the night to fight the metaphor demons rather than dealing directly with the causes of the metaphor. Dealing directly by looking within herself and her team for solutions (can't fight evil by doing evil, by supporting Spike, by supporting Willow, by empowering the Potentials) and shining a light on the heart of the fictional source, the hellmouth, which essentially ERASES the monstrous metaphor mothership. Throwing the monsters into the light, as if the ink of the narrative can only be read in secret like a spy's missive. (Am now imagining Giles deciphering demonic texts with a black light and LSD...)
no subject
YES because using storytelling to make sense of your own life (rather than escaping dealing) is a time-honored way of coping and healing. The story provides distance one may need to gain perspective and free oneself from a reactionary, repetitive, self-defeating cycle. But if taken too far, the escapism overwhelms. So finding the balance between Fiction and Reality is the hope -- what Season 6 strives for and Season 7 accomplishes. Buffy heals herself by learning the narrative of the Slayer, a narrative that she's used as escape, but like with escaping into fiction, it can lead to extreme isolation and even depression. Buffy comes to terms with the story and learns to use the story to forge connection -- to stop her pattern of superior-inferiority and losing her Buffy identity in her mythic Slayerhood as she just "slips away" into the night to fight the metaphor demons rather than dealing directly with the causes of the metaphor. Dealing directly by looking within herself and her team for solutions (can't fight evil by doing evil, by supporting Spike, by supporting Willow, by empowering the Potentials) and shining a light on the heart of the fictional source, the hellmouth, which essentially ERASES the monstrous metaphor mothership. Throwing the monsters into the light, as if the ink of the narrative can only be read in secret like a spy's missive. (Am now imagining Giles deciphering demonic texts with a black light and LSD...)