Euphoria monologue series#

And then suddenly, you give it air again. And everything you feel and wish and want to forget, it all just sinks. And every time you breathe, you breathe out all the oxygen you have, and everything stops: your heart. This monologue led to a scene of Rue getting high, experiencing her two seconds of 'euphoria,' and a new, similarly heartbreaking narrative stunner: And then it happens: That moment when your breath starts to slow. And I know it all may seem sad, but guess what? I didn't build this system. I just showed up one day without a map or a compass, or to be honest, anyone capable of giving one iota of good fucking advice. And at some point, you make a choice about who you are and what you want. Until every second of every day, you find yourself trying to outrun your anxiety, and quite frankly, I'm just fucking exhausted.

In particular, the following bit of Rue's narration-delivered in a perfectly distressing monotone by Zendaya-playing over a scene in which she experiences a panic attack, brought me to tears: Every now and then, if I focused too closely on the way I breathed, I'd die. Upon watching the first two episodes, I was actually happy-and by 'happy,' I mean devastated-to see the things I feel and endure mirrored on my smudgy laptop screen. The conversation on mental health amongst young women is sparse on-screen, and that's why Euphoria was refreshing for me, even if it was also destabilizing. We don't tap into that darkness, that looming, ceaseless nature of anxiety, and how hard our fights feel-because anxiety is exhausting. Sure, there are rare positive and accurate portrayals of people with mental health issues, like in Silver Linings Playbook, or in The Skeleton Twins. This is not the kind of thing we see often on film and TV. The amount of abject terror I hold in my chest every day can be isolating it's hard to not feel alone when I'm sobbing in a fetal position on my couch, begging God, or the moon, or an alien overlord-whoever is responsible up there-to make me normal, and to give me the mental tools that it seems like most people were naturally equipped with in order to deal with existing as a person in a body. Still, though, Euphoria illustrates anxiety in ways that I haven't seen before on TV-especially when it comes to young women. That's sus! And it definitely sensationalizes drug addiction, in that it makes a pretty good case as to why we should all be as fucked up as possible all the time.

Euphoria monologue series#

Now, I have to admit, I was initially skeptical of Euphoria it's a dark series about the toils of modern teenage girlhood-which was created by a man. Rue's voice-over in Euphoria not only echoed that sentiment with gutting poignancy but also did so in a way that was so jarring to hear that it brought me to tears within minutes.

I'm not looking for an anxiety cure-all-because that feels out of reach-I'm simply looking for moments of respite, slivers of peace in a Sisyphean battle with my own brain. Most days, this world is too much for me, and like a Bizarro Ariel, I don't want to be where the people are I want to be alone and warm, where I don't have to worry about health care premiums and my inevitable march toward death. And when I panic, and I lose that battle to the unrelenting scream of anxiety, I often wish I could time travel-not back to middle school, not to my childhood, not even to when I was a baby (although being swaddled sounds tight as hell)-but back to the womb. I would smash thedouble-tap if this monologue was written in girlish script on Instagram. I identify with this like an influencer identifies with memes about pizza. I put up a good fight, but I lost for the first time-but not the last.'

'Then one day, for reasons beyond my control, I was repeatedly crushed over and over by the cruel cervix of my mother, Leslie. 'I was once happy, content, sloshing around in my own primordial pool,' Rue says in the pilot's opening narration. Apparently, that's a sentiment I share with Rue, the protagonist of HBO's new series Euphoria, who is played to perfection by Zendaya. I didn't ask to be born, is something I often think in my darkest moments-or at least, the ones where I'm feeling playful enough to joke about my own nonconsensual mortality. Shut Up, Brain is a column by Jill Gutowitz in which she looks at everything from pop culture phenomena to the quirks of interpersonal relationships through the lens of someone who lives with anxiety.