The Mental Health Conditioning of WandaVision
Waiting sucks.
Waiting in line. Waiting to exhale. Waiting for that cutie you Tindered to Tinder you back. Waiting to understand how Tinder works.
But waiting is also necessary because it forces us to lean into my favorite virtue: patience, which also happens to be the one I’m not so good at signaling.
WandaVision has ended (though not without disaster!). The ninth and final episode is currently streaming on Disney+. As of this writing, I have not watched it. But, boy am I excited to. I’ve been waiting since mid-January to watch this series finale. The slow burn of the whole thing with its clever clues and nerd-gasm Easter eggs… And what a wait it’s been.
Before the series premiered, I was waiting for something else. A watch. I purchased a wristwatch from Vaer. The order was placed on January 4. It arrived February 1. I was an anxious goblin throughout January. Thank God for the January 6 insurrection—it was the only thing that distracted me from refreshing my order page every two hours. I could have ordered another Timex. The thing would have arrived within the week. But this Vaer was higher quality, handmade, had the style I wanted—in short, it was perfect. I wanted it and I wanted it immediately. The near psychosis I experienced waiting almost an entire month for something I didn’t need in the slightest way was not due to my grand excitement over receiving this new timepiece, but because I’m not quite used to waiting very long for things.
Few of us are. Amazon Prime has same day delivery. The internet gives us all of humanity’s knowledge and a whole lot of bullshit immediately. And a lot of our best TV, or episodic entertainment, new and old, can be binged. One right after another like PEZ candy or a fist full of Quaaludes after a really — hard — day. Immediate gratification is what we crave and most of the time it’s exactly what we get. This is, along with the more serious implications, why we’re all furious that the USPS can’t get its shit together and deliver our shit already. Such easy access to this gratification is weakening us. We’re pleased, but we’re not resilient.
Having to wait is like soaking in a hot tub for twenty minutes then getting out and diving into a lap pool. The temperature difference is shocking and we don’t know what to do. Should we finish the dive and swim this through? Should we come up and leap back into the hot tub? Should we just freeze and die?
WandaVision isn’t the only non-network show to not offer the full season at once. But WandaVision comes to an end today. And that’s important.
Week by week since mid-January when I was still frantically being patient for my wristwatch to arrive we’ve been mostly patient. And during that patience, we theorized, we bullied our friends and co-workers into watching it, we burned up thirty-eight minutes of a forty-five minute meeting talking about it, we made friends on Facebook posting about it.
And we were overcome with joy each Friday when a new episode dropped. The high was an active high, not the lame buzz we get when our screen tells us the next episode will begin in …7 …6…5… It’s a deserved a high. A high we earned. Like dessert after we finish our dinners. Along the way, in between theories and sharing YouTube links and think pieces, we had time to think for ourselves. Even think about things that weren’t related to WandaVision. We maybe, just maybe, learned to appreciate that feeling. The one where everything inside us slows down but we can still feel the warmth from the flame of excitement, anticipation, burning down deep in our guts. It’s almost as good a feeling as finally blowing one out after holding in a fart all day.
Some anticipation is a good thing. It gives us something to look forward to. Something more than the screen telling us NEXT. Something that lets us ask ourselves and each other, WHAT NEXT?
And what is next? I don’t know yet. Still haven’t watched the episode. I know one thing for sure: I can’t wait to find out. And I will. I will wait as long as I have to. But only because I have to. And I’ll go crazy doing it, which will work magic on my mental health.
