I said it first

My husband is a devout fan of the Fox show, Fringe.I enjoy the show tremendously, although the portrayal of the main character, Walter Bishop, can border on mockery. Walter is a brilliant but extremely quirky researcher whose work is a mix of medical research, science, chemistry, and a touch of the paranormal.

Walter spent years in a mental hospital, a fact that is often treated with tongue-in-cheek irreverence. Not just often, but a bit too much.

Walter's son works with him as more of a handler than anything. He occasionally shows flashes of irritation toward his father, and in the first episodes was estranged from his father and still bitter. He had a lot of resentment about Walter succumbing to eccentricity and then being institutionalized.

As the show has progressed, Peter Bishop has started to see his father from a more compassionate angle. He's beginning to understand that Walter's mental meanderings are not malicious in any way, and that his institutionalization took a profound toll on his wellbeing.

At the end of the last episode, Peter was talking to one of the other characters about Walter. He was somber and he said, "I didn't really understand what was going on. Life was so hard for my mother and me when he was gone, that I could only concentrate on how angry I was at him for getting into that situation. The whole time, I only thought about it as what he was doing to us and not as something that was happening to him.

Somewhere in the early days of this blog or perhaps in my pre-online journal, I said the same thing, pretty much verbatim. I remember sobbing in Lisa's office and saying, "Everybody acts like this is something I'm doing to them but they just can't see that really it's something that's happening to me."

When I heard this on Fringe, I sat up straight and whispered, "That's what I said. That's exactly what I said to Lisa."

Frank had forgotten about it, but once I pointed it out, he remembered, and he remembered the pain and frustration that I was re-experiencing in that moment.

No, I didn't do anything to anyone--something horrible was happening to me. To me.