how the buffy musical changed my life

Going Through the Motions

(Joss Whedon for the Buffy the Vampire Slayer musical episode "Once More, With Feeling")

Every single night, the same arrangement
I go out and fight the fight
Still I always feel the strange estrangement
Nothing here is real, nothing here is right
I’ve been making shows of trading blows
Just hoping no one knows
That I’ve been going through the motions
Walking through the part
Nothing seems to penetrate my heart

I was always brave and kind of righteous
Now I find I’m wavering
Crawl out of your grave, you’ll find this fight
Just doesn’t mean a thing
(She ain’t got that swing)

Thanks for noticing
(She does pretty well with things from hell
But lately we can tell
That she’s just going through the motions
Faking it somehow
She’s not even half the girl she--- owwwww!)

Will I stay this way forever
Sleepwalk through my life’s endeavor
(How can I repay you?)
Whatever
I don’t wanna be

Going through the motions
Losing all my drive
I can’t even see if this is really me
And I just wanna be alive.

I have not listened to my favorite soundtrack in a very long time. Today that I attempted to sing from it, I was reminded of why I loved it so much. It wasn’t just because of the fact that it was very amusing and amazing that a once-teenybopper TV series could come up with such an ingenious episode and that the cast had amazing singing voices. Once More with Feeling practically became the soundtrack of my life at that time.

Flashback to early 2003 when I was jobless by choice and totally lost, need I say more. To start with, Going Through the Motions originally intended to describe Buffy’s reluctance about being back from the dead, enjoying heaven only to be pulled out by well-meaning friends back into the living, thus hating everything that she used to do with so much passion before. It was the same feeling of loss as far as my career went at that time. While I wasn’t any superhero at my field, it did feel forced just because it was something related to what I studied in college. At some point, I may have done my work with passion but like most slayers' lives, this was short-lived thus I opted for bumhood for a while. While enjoying this kind of heaven - there was the pressure of living up to other people’s expectations of what you were before, going back to work, being a promising talent in my field. Except that it felt I was, like Buffy, going through the motions, losing all my drive, faking it, uncertain that it is really me.

Fast forward to 2007 - my quarter-life crisis has long been over and am now quite indifferent as to where my career takes me. It’s a “red herring”, as one book described it. I was probably wanting something else all along that I couldn’t really achieve on my own. And right now, I may very well still be wanting the same thing.