Posted by “this is everybody’s first time living, so we are all clumsy.” – quote from “It’s Okay. That’s Love”
An interesting drama – one of the only Korean ones I’ve seen to explicitly have sex be a part of relationships. It’s a story of psychiatrists and their families and friends and the ways in which people are broken and how to heal.
Things told quite differently than they would in an American drama:
Amongst a group of friends, one of them falls in love with a woman who has schizophrenia. The couple is afraid of committing to each other. The friends all commit to be a lifelong support team. When we meet them, the couple are pregnant. The wife is afraid to take medications while she’s pregnant and they are nervous about episodes occurring. They call the friends and the friends all come and stay with them for a while. They see them through an episode and devise a plan to get through pregnancy.
A woman has been traumatized by seeing her mother in the throes of an affair when she quite young. She now associates physical intimacy with “sin”, so she’s unable to be intimate. This topic is discussed openly and with a lot of compassion. When she meets a man who has the patience and caring for her to be with her and see if he can help, her friends openly support him and discuss what they think will and won’t help.
A man with some serious PTSD from being seriously physically abused by his step-father and his brother, can only sleep in the bathroom because it was the only safe place for him when he was a child. He has been hiding this for his entire adult life. When a potential girlfriend learns of it, there is zero shaming or questioning or trying to get him to change. Instead, she tells him she understands. Later there is a scene of her gently tucking him in to sleep with blankets and pillows in the bathtub. Much later, after they’ve known each other a while and its clear they are in love she asks him if he would be interested in getting help with this, not because its weird, but because “some day, I’d like to sleep in the same bed with you.”
There are a lot of other examples of these kinds of scenarios, where people are dysfunctional but not harming anyone else. So, the people around them love them and protect them from being shamed by others.
When someone is harming themselves or others, then action is taken to protect people. Still, it’s tender and caring and everyone is seeking ways to address what’s causing them to be this way.
I’m continually struck by this theme in all the stories. Even the ridiculously absurd melodramatic ones.
from FB post 1/27/17
una muses 