Time of post: 1:53PM
Quarantine Day: 423
Last Song I Listened To: "Not the Boy Next Door (Glee Cast Version)"
Last Person I Communicated With: The Taylor Swift group chat was freaking out about a "traitor" (by Olivia Rodrigo) & "Burn" (from Hamilton) mashup (this one: https://vm.tiktok.com/ZMeW1h21G/)
Last Thing I Ate: Mediterranean chicken patty on a pretzel bun with a caesar salad (because I'm adult who cooks sometimes now)
Last Thing I Read: Stranger Than Fanfiction by Chris Colfer
Current Mood: nostalgic and content
One Thing I’ve Accomplished Today: Not today, but I've done a lot of summer teaching prep this week, so I'm relaxing today.
One Thing I Want To Accomplish Today: Take a shower and do some dishes
One Reason I’m Stressed Today: gotta do more summer teaching prep
One Reason I’m Happy Today: I'm really excited about starting a new book today (don't know which one yet)
Dear Apocalypsers,
There are 2 things you need to know before I start: 1) I graduated high school 7 years ago today and 2) Glee has changed my life.
I’ve watched all 6 seasons of Glee since February, so when I say it’s “changed my life,” I don’t mean that it was foundational to my high school career or that it inspired me to chase my Arts dreams or anything like that. (Full disclosure, I watched 20 episodes—S4E4 “The Break Up” to S5E1 “Love, Love, Love”—within 24 hours at one point because I was mad they broke Kurt and Blaine up and swore to watch until they got back together. Honestly, I think I watched Seasons 3-6 in a couple weeks.) I never got into the show in high school—which, in retrospect makes no sense—but I existed between 2009 and 2015, so I knew about the show, and I knew about every Taylor Swift cover, and I had definite opinions about them.
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| The number of times they broke Kurt & Blaine up was unreasonable. If you're gonna commit to teen marriage, then commit to it. |
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| Dylan, you should have known... |
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| Pretty sure he never forced me to watch Glee with him in high school because he KNEW I'd react like this and wanted to save himself. |
I didn’t have a lot of expectations for Glee, but I certainly didn’t expect it to give me closure about my own high school experience.
Like I said in my opening, I graduated high school 7 years ago, and for the first time since then, I’ve been able to look at pictures of my friend group from that time and not feel like I’ve swallowed a razorblade and it’s just perforated my stomach. And that’s, strangely, thanks to Glee.
If you haven’t caught on yet, I’m an unfailing optimist, and I always have been. (I didn’t believe in love for four days my first semester of grad school, and it was, quite frankly, the most concerning time of my life.) I want every single moment to be straight out of a coming-of-age movie or a Disney fairytale. I want things to come full circle; I want signs from higher powers; sweepingly grand gestures, little miracles, and for my memories to all be coated in that warm, hazy, sunshine nostalgia that feels like a country song about your hometown. And as much as I’ve tried to force myself to “be more realistic” because I’m “getting older” and “can’t be this naïve,” but, dear readers, I’m writing this from a pillow fort I constructed in my living room a week ago. The point is, I don’t think my heart is ever going to “grow up” in the way that some people think it “should.”
But when your heart’s built like that, it gets broken more often than you think it will and you have to decide to keep believing that it will all work out like a YA movie.
That’s what I didn’t realize when I graduated high school.
My high school friend group were the first people to break my heart.
When we graduated, we were all going different places—as you do when you graduate high school. I was cut up about it literally all of Senior Year. I did the thing I do when I try to make every moment count; everything is heightened and important, and it matters. I started school in August holding on like it was May and they were leaving me the next day. And they laughed at me for it.
“There’s so much time.”
“Where are you even going to college?”
“We’ll always be friends.”
We’ll always be friends. That’s what I wanted, of course. That’s what I had planned. (I do love a good plan, you know.) And I would have done anything to make that happen.
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| This was Dylan's 18th birthday party. It was a decades themed murder mystery that I wrote. |
Spoiler alert: it didn’t.
I see now why it didn’t work out. We all had growing to do. Most of those friendships were friendships or convenience, of having grow up together, of having a place in the social war zone that is the high school hallways. I still talk to all of them. We like each other’s Instagram posts and respond to Snapchat stories, but I’m only close to one of them, really. And that almost makes my heart break more, because nothing happened. There was no big implosion, so there’s no one to blame. We just…grew apart.
But they told me not to worry. They said we’d always be friends. And, like falling asleep—slowly, then all at once, as the 2014 Tumblr posts said—my worst fear came true, and we…weren’t.
By the end of my freshman year of college, we pretty much weren’t speaking, and we definitely weren’t hanging out. And I was jaded and resentful about that for years.
We were supposed to be in each other’s weddings where they married their high school sweethearts. But, instead, they all broke up. We were supposed to move to New York City and live in the same apartment building. Instead, all but 2 of us are still in Alabama. (Maybe 3; I honestly don’t know where one of the guys is.) And 4 out of the 8 are within 20 minutes of our hometown. We were supposed to live together and fall in love together and have all the quintessential young person sitcom struggles, and we were supposed to reminisce and laugh about it all when we were middle-aged and our children were all best friends. We were supposed to be each other’s go-tos, ride-or-dies forever. Instead, I find out about relationships from updated Facebook statuses instead of giddy midnight phone calls, and I know I’ll find out about engagements and pregnancies and births the same way.
Reading that back, it all sounds a little silly and unreasonable to expect us to stay locked into that high school mentality for the rest of our lives. But, in my defense, every book or movie I saw about high school had the main characters staying friends. So when I realized in undergrad that my friend group was unravelling/had unraveled, I was constantly trying to blame someone for taking away the fairytale that should have been.
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| One of the highlights of Senior Year was the Piedmont Band Competition where we won all these trophies! I was beyond proud! |
I blamed myself for a while: “Maybe I shouldn’t post so much about my new friends. Maybe my old friends feel like I’m replacing them and pushing them away.” (But, if you know me, you know I’m “all in.” I fall in love fast and hard and loud.) Then, I blamed them: “They let it go. They gave up. They abandoned me. They didn’t want this as much as I did.” (The last statement is a sentiment that’s plagued my entire life, and it’s always the sentiment that, regardless of the truth of it, breaks my heart the most.)
And for a long, long time, I carried some cynicism and resentment with me. I realized recently that I didn’t have a single high school picture up in my apartment. The photos had been up in my college dorm room, but stayed packed away when I moved to Kansas. And it didn’t bother me until nearly 3 years later. Because, until I watched Glee, it hurt too much. Because when I looked at those pictures and my smiley, naïve face, all I saw were broken promises of forever. (Dramatic, I know, but very raw and honest and real for what I was feeling at that time of my life.)
So you’re wondering, “How on Earth did Glee give you closure?”
Great question.
The answer hit me like a Lady Gaga group number to the face.
The answer is that: because the Glee kids got what I had always wanted for me and my friends.
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| Giving myself whiplash the way my tone changed between 1AM and 6PM |
In Season 4, Rachel and Kurt move to New York and live together while attending NYADA (fictional performing arts school a la Julliard). Artie is already in Brooklyn for film school. Eventually Santana (who leaves her cheerleading scholarship at the University of Louisville to pursue her dreams of being a star), Mercedes (who convinces her producers to move her to New York from LA to give her album a “more urban” sound), Sam (whose character motivation is to be a male model and see himself half naked on the side of a bus, but is there for the plot purpose of getting back together with Mercedes), and Blaine (who’s also attending NYADA but is also engaged to Kurt by this point) all join them, and they all basically share 2 apartments for Seasons 4-6.
So they got that dream of mine: running away to NYC, living together, and pursuing their dreams.
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| Screenshot from S5E14 "New York, New York" of Sam, Blaine, Artie, Rachel, and Kurt in the apartment in Bushwick. |
They also get to marry their high school sweethearts—not without an unnecessary amount of heart palpitating drama, but still. In a move that I’ve learned is either loved or loathed by fans, there was a Brittany/Santana and Kurt/Blaine double wedding in Season 6. All their friends were there, and they were bridesmaids and groomsmen, and it was everything! And, yes, they’re only 20-21 at that point, and, yes Kurt and Blaine got engaged when they were 18-19, and, yes, I logically know that it’s ridiculous, but my romance-loving, true-love-believing Pisces heart absolutely eats that kind of stuff up.
So they got another dream of mine.
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| Santana & Brittany and Kurt & Blaine's double wedding in S6E8 "A Wedding" |
But what really solidified all of my feelings was the time jump in the series finale. It flashed forward 5 years, to 2020 (big yikes!) making the Class of 2012—Rachel, Kurt, Quinn, Santana, Brittany*, Mercedes, Artie, Mike, Finn**, and Puck—26-years-old, and the Class of 2013—Sam, Blaine, Tina—25-years-old; basically, they were supposed to be the age I am now.
And, in that flashback, we get the most perfect Katie Cline Ending: it all works out for them; their dreams come true. Rachel, now married to Jesse St. James (whom she dated in Season 1, so she also kind of gets to marry her high school sweetheart) wins her Tony while all of her friends watch. She’s also very pregnant, acting as a surrogate for Kurt and Blaine, who are still married and performing together (most recently in the first “LGBTQ version of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolfe? at Lincoln Center,” which I would pay so much to see, honestly). Mercedes has had a world tour of her own, and Tina starred in Artie’s film which got accepted to “Slamdance” film festival. (They’re also together, which is wrong, because it should have been Mike and Tina, but whatever. Also, Mike went to the Joffrey Ballet Academy of Dance in Chicago after graduating.)
All of those dreams that people laughed at them for for 6 seasons came true. And that’s all I’ve ever wanted for my friends.
(*Brittany was supposed to graduate in 2012 but had to repeat her Senior Year. **After actor Cory Monteith’s death in 2013, Finn was written off the show, so he isn’t featured in the Season 6 flashback.)
So, you’d think that seeing these fictional characters live out my dreams would make me sadder and angstier—but it didn’t. It strangely gave me a sense of closure. And I can’t explain why unless you also happen to be an unfailing optimist with a romance-loving, true-love-believing Pisces heart colored with warm, hazy nostalgia and a hint of naivety. But, basically, I liked seeing that it was all possible—even if it was just fictional characters on long-finished TV show. Just seeing it made it feel more real and less like a pipe dream.
I honestly think that if I had watched Glee while it aired, I wouldn’t have viewed the finale the same way. It aired in March 2015, the middle of my second semester of my freshman year of college, right when I was realizing that my high school friends weren’t going to be the “forever friend group” I had hoped and begged and fought for. Seeing the finale at that point in my life would have been like rubbing salt in the wound. But enough time has passed that watching it in 2021 didn’t sting (as much; I definitely felt some twinges of jealousy). And I definitely still sobbed, but I was happy—for the characters, because I get ridiculously attached to fictional characters, and for me, because I still want those things to happen to me and my friends, and I still honestly believe we can have it in some way, shape, or form.
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| I don't think a day has passed in 7 years that I haven't thought about at least one of these weirdos. |
I recently told a friend that I go into every relationship expecting to be hurt. (Let’s not try to unpack that now.) That’s something that high school taught me, because I was blindsided when my fantasies didn’t become reality. Now, I still throw myself into friendships. I still come on strong and love too quickly and refuse to let it go until it’s pried forcibly from my hands. But now I do it with the expectation that it will end. Theoretically, that knowledge should make me more reserved and cautious, but I’m not in the habit of depriving myself of good things. I’d rather give everything for 2 years and make the most of that time than sequester myself off in an effort not to get hurt.
I have a soft heart; I’m going to get hurt regardless, so I might as well enjoy every moment that comes before the inevitable heartbreak.
So, to all my artist friends, this has been a very long-winded explanation as to why I’m also so aggressively supportive of your dreams: I want to have our Glee moment. I want to cheer you on when your book is published and wins awards and is made into a blockbuster movie; I want to be backstage at your Broadway debut and sit with you when you get your first (of many) Tony nominations and when you win it; I want to be the first follower on your indie film’s social media so that I can follow it all the way to its Oscar win. It’s why I jokingly ask for your autographs and tell Twitter how big you’re going to be—because I believe in the silliest and most far-fetched things, but because I believe in the most magical and wonderful things, too.
There’s a song in the Glee finale called “This Time.” Darren Criss (Blaine Anderson) wrote it and Lea Michele (Rachel Berry) sings it. And it’s such a me song that I can’t be embarrassed about loving it with every bit of my being. I mean, I dare you to listen to it and not think of me:
“These walls and all these picture frames
Every name they show
These halls I've walked a thousand times
Heartbreaks and valentines, friends of mine all know
I look at everything I was
And everything I ever loved
And I can see how much I've grown”
…
“I think of all the things I did and how I wish I knew what I know now
I see how far I've come and what I got right
When I was looking for that spotlight
I was looking for myself
Got over what I was afraid of
I showed 'em all that I was made of
More than trophies on a shelf
For all the battles that we lost or might have won
I never stopped believing in the words we sung, we sung”
…
And the chorus:
“This time no one's gonna say goodbye
I keep you in this heart of mine
This time I know it's never over
No matter who or what I am
I'll carry where we all began
This time that we had, I will hold forever”
This song is how I feel about every friendship I’ve ever been a part of, about every school I’ve left (with varying degrees of jaded cynicism and resentment—because I’m definitely not on good emotional terms with my undergrad yet).
“I never stopped believing in the words we sung” is an obvious reference to “Don’t Stop Believing,” which I think Glee was contractually obligated to perform once a season, but the line resonates with me because I have never stopped believing in these dreams and the possibility of reaching a “coming-of-age movie level of happiness.”
I also keep coming back to the lines “When I was looking for that spotlight / I was looking for myself,” because, while I’ve never had hyper-specific, Rachel-Berry-level dreams of the spotlight, I do have a performer’s personality (but not really the talent), and I definitely see “spotlight” as translating to “being the best in your discipline” and publishing articles and writing books and winning awards and being liked wherever you go. And, to an extent, I think we all have our own definition of what that spotlight looks like—it’s whatever our dreams are—and while we’re getting there, we do have to find ourselves.
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| Okay, maybe I was a little bit of a ham. (These are all the Senior cast and crew members of The Secret Garden--just the straight play, not the musical, unfortunately...or fortunately if you knew my high school's relationship with musicals.) |
I mean, what have I learned from this whole post? I want these neat endings all tied up with a bow because I crave certainty and reassurance and control. I want friendships to last forever because I hate conflict and want to be wanted. And I want to, need to, believe that remarkable and magical things can happen to kids from a small town in Ohio or Alabama or Kansas, because being a part of something special makes you special.
Or, as Rachel says in her Tony acceptance speech: “Being a part of something special does not make you special. Something is special because you are a part of that.”
That’s one lesson I’m still learning.
Talk to me 14 years after I’ve graduated high school, and we’ll see.
In the meantime, may the odds be ever in our favor,
Katie
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