I’ve been working my way through White Lotus before the new season drops, and I’ve been dragging my feet on starting season two because I know I’ll binge the whole thing but, also, I wasn’t all that wild about season one. It was more about catching up on what everybody was talking about, though I absolutely love the premise: let’s create an anthology series that moves around luxury resorts in stunning locales as an excuse to talk about class issues. Kai’s story was just so gut-wrenching, and not necessarily in an edifying way, but my favorite storyline was the absolute dork of a teenage boy (the crazy emperor twin from GladIIator) slowly falling in love with the ocean, as unrealistic as that resolution was (as was the quick and sloppy law and order that surrounds every crime that takes place, but I guess if you want a justice procedural, you know exactly where to find one that’s been on the air for two decades and launched countless spinoffs).

This overlaps with some personal heartbreak of mine, and this is my attempt to feel my feelings. I saw something during a doomscroll that said you ruminate when you are not letting yourself feel something–you’re trying to intellectualize pain, or sadness, or heartache, or rage, or whatever. So the rumination on this particular White Lotus storyline is partly because it’s a fictional depiction–one of the few I’ve ever seen on this topic–that perfectly illustrates something I thought only I felt.

As an aside, I have to add that one of the people who told me about this show was the resident floozy (her words) on the one and only foreign yoga retreat I have ever attended. She and I happened to be on the same flight out of Houston, a fact we discovered in the pre-trip WhatsApp group. She was late to the airport, but we sat together–I held her a seat while she held up the plane, and I should’ve known then, but I was in my namaste open-to-the-universe phase of healing…a time ripe for picking by hustlers and manipulators. I can see why women my age GOING THROUGH IT get sucked into cults. Anyway, she talked about White Lotus on the plane, since we were heading to a tropical resort, but I had no idea that I was sitting next to our very own Jennifer Coolidge. The Tanya McQuoid of that week in paradise was twenty years younger and without the family money, but she was every bit as lacking in self-awareness and wrongly convinced of her own business acumen. (Again, I have only seen Season One, but I know what happens at the end of Season Two because the internet cannot keep a secret for long–including me. I’m about to lightly spoil Season One if you haven’t seen it.)

Anyway, there’s a very long rambling tangent (one might say rumination?) on my introduction to White Lotus. Without any further ado, here’s the character that scared the shit out of me in Season One.

Rachel’s backstory is that she has married a man who covets her but does not understand her. He may love her, as much as he is capable of love, but she knows she is trading what she wants (a career in journalism) in a “Faustian bargain” for money and security. Needless to say, this happens a lot. So often, in fact, that I would argue we’ve grown numb to this storyline, so I think what caught me off guard about Rachel is the fresh take the show brings to that fear, and I do wonder, without googling, how much of Mike White’s own professional career has fed into Rachel’s story.

There are two-to-three major knots in this story thread that I want to tease out. First, Rachel has in the past written a profile on another guest at the White Lotus (Mrs. Coach T, playing a type of Sheryl Sandberg character here). Rachel has somehow profiled the woman without ever meeting let alone interviewing her. She admits, twice, that she basically repurposed something that ran in another publication, which Mrs. Coach T. rightly calls “just bad journalism.” I know I’m not currently earning a living in New York media, but I’m not sure that a Business Week-esque magazine would run a refurbished profile based on someone else’s reporting, but I could be very naive here. Rachel does say she writes a lot of clickbait, so it’s possible it was an online-only piece. Regardless, the magazine has enough legitimacy for Mrs. Coach T. to have read the profile…which she hated.

[Insert screenshot of Mrs. Coach T. saying “That was…a…hatchet job” with such aplomb I’m still hearing it.]

This ties in with the other knots in this thread, because that’s how knots work. Rachel has been offered another profile that honestly sounds like a lot of fun (van orgy at Burning Man) but her husband doesn’t want her working on their honeymoon. He, meanwhile, has spent their honeymoon “throwing the world’s biggest tantrum” and “tormenting that poor man” (Rachel’s words), capped off with a visit from his mother, so basically he’s been doing the rich person version of “work” the entire time. But when she wants to accept an assignment, to keep the network connected and wheels greased on her career, he says no. It is under this premise that she approaches Mrs. Coach T, to get advice, one career girl to another. She then gets eviscerated as only a writer can: It wasn’t your story to tell (twice removed) and, furthermore, you butchered it.

Pausing here to think of times in my career when that has happened, and often (but not always) it was the heavy hand of a bad editor. I cannot stress enough the importance of a good editor. Maybe this is what Rachel is alluding to when she talks about her industry connections, because there is no mention of a bad editor when Mrs. Coach T quotes “She rode the Me Too wave,” the line she take offense to in Rachel’s piece because it implies she stood on the empty and broken husks of other women’s careers to reach the pinnacle of hers.

All that leads to this third knot, the scene that shook me: Rachel trying to explain to her husband that she is afraid she doesn’t have any talent. He’s not listening to her, which is telling, because the words coming out her mouth are some of the scariest words a person can say. I don’t know if it’s just women, or if it’s the circumstances surrounding Rachel’s doubt, but this slippery slope right here is where many, many people crash and burn. It’s a steep fucking slope, and the slickness is not the fun kind. It’s black-ice terrifying. And having a partner who fails to recognize that can rip the soul right out of you before you even realize you’re in danger.

Yeah, I’m mixing metaphors here. I’m ruminating over Rachel’s storyline because I’ve rarely seen that kind of vulnerability about the creative life expressed on screen. Mostly because no one gives a shit–I’m deflecting here, but I genuinely don’t think anyone cares about this part of Rachel’s storyline, not when there was so much else going on at the White Lotus. It’s that moment, when Mrs. Coach T asks “Did you sign a pre-nup?” that sets it up, and Mrs. Coach T knows what that means: he says he’ll take care of you, but if you get off this treadmill, you will never gain this momentum again.

So Rachel’s story, and this is so obnoxious that Belinda literally gets up and walks away (a separate “Magical Negro” issue that I have no business commenting on here, but for the Louise from St. Louis of it: someone argued the other day that Louise is a figment of Carrie’s imagination brought on by the trauma of being left at the altar, and I can’t get over that–none of Carrie’s friends ever interact with her!) Anyway, Rachel’s “problems” look like rich people problems because they’re invisible: you can’t get assignments without the clips, and you can’t get clips without the assignments, so you have to be reliable and available. This is a boundary-setting issue I am only just now figuring out, but there’s a reason publishing is populated by rich kids…no one else has the safety net required to navigate this industry.

But the fear that you aren’t talented enough to see it through–I’m trying to hold space for this one, and the lack of a supportive partner, not necessarily because he’s mean, but because he just doesn’t get it–it’s so isolating and lonely. I’m scared to write about this because it sounds like I’m writing about one man in particular, the Shane/Pete character on his honeymoon at the White Lotus, but I’m not. I have come to realize that this is a theme in my life, a consistent problem in my romantic partnerships, and this White Lotus storyline hit so hard because I never talk about it. But I once had a conversation with a situationship where I had to say (text) the words: “I don’t think you can support my creative life.”

I didn’t even have the courage to say it in person; I had to send a text. Because it was my truth, and it was real, but I have never been brave enough to fight for that part of my life. Even afterward, I didn’t feel strong or brave or empowered; I felt so stupid saying those words that I still haven’t gotten over the cringe. The only thing I can cling to, the only rationalization I can muster, is that I had to go through that awkward moment so it would be easier next time. So I never compromise on that slippery slope again.

In the most haunting aspect of Rachel’s story, she finally gets up the nerve to admit she’s made a mistake. It’s incredibly brave, and hard, and scary, and so complicated that it leads to the big death of season one. When it’s all said and done, we see her husband waiting at the airport. This is where we met him in the flashforward at the beginning of the season, when a couple asked “If you’re on your honeymoon, where is your wife?” He tells them to fuck off, politely, before staring out the window at the makeshift casket of human remains being loaded on to the plane [my law-and-order question here is, if Thailand was next on their honeymoon, which plane is this and should the body and killer be heading to the same destination, but that is a separate tangent]. We’re meant to suspect, at the beginning of the story, that the unseen wife of the honeymooning couple might be the body being loaded onto the plane, but Rachel’s fate is actually…dum dum dum…much worse.

Because she goes back to him. At the last moment, she arrives at the airport, and the relief on his face contrasts horribly with the apprehension on hers. I understand there’s an element of “til death do us part” here, and Shane/Pete has absolutely been through something perhaps life-changing (probably not, he’s obnoxious and rich), but we fucking know Rachel is lying when she claims: “I’m happy; I’ll be happy.”

So she made her choice, to ski down that slippery slope in the best ski gear money can buy. To give up on her career, which probably wasn’t going anywhere anyway, because Mrs. Coach T said she had no talent, which was probably true, but I guess we’ll never know because she gave up.

Oh! I just remembered another work of fiction where I have seen this done well! The original series finale of Party Down (ergo, spoiler). Lizzy Caplan finds out her one line, her big break, has been cut from the Apatow movie, and she is understandably distraught. Adam Scott (who has abandoned his own once-promising and passion-driven acting career) tries to comfort her in a ham-fisted way, and she tells him: “I know what you’re trying to do; I know that you’re trying to help me. Maybe if we were the same kind of crazy, but we’re not. Because if you’re not crazy enough to believe it for you, how are you going to believe it for me?”

And just like that…I found some compassion for the other half of this dynamic. Because their doubt in you–even if they love you–is rooted in doubt in themselves.