I’ve been wanting to write about Being Erica for a while now. But first, a nod to our AI overlords, as thanks is due to the Hulu algorithm for finding this show for me. How my interest in shows like Greek and The Bachelorette indicated that this would be the perfect show for me, I’m not sure. Now that I say it though, it makes sense. A combination of early thousands campy nostalgia with female protagonist personal development is a suiting if not immediately appealing description of this Canadian drama from 2009. (For your own mental health, it is not advisable to calculate how long ago 2009 was.)
I would be surprised if you’d heard of this show. No one I’ve mentioned it to (mostly my knitting group) has heard about it. So let me set out the premise for you. At the beginning of the show, Erica, a 32-year-old Jewish woman from Toronto is having a bad day. She was fired from her customer service job, stood up on a date, and is now in the hospital due to an allergic reaction to a mocha latte. Repeat: a bad day.
Then a doctor enters her hospital room. Only, he’s not a medical doctor, he’s a therapist (maybe that’s still a medical doctor, but he’s not a physical doctor, rather, a mental one (he not mental, as in crazy in British, but psychological)). He offers to take her on as a patient to help her with her life. She initially refuses, but ultimately accepts. The twist, this therapy involves time travel.
Each episode Erica has another session, learns another lesson, and slowly starts to turn her life around.
Time travel therapy has a lot of potential to be, well, bad, but this is very well done. Erica’s therapist sends her back in time to redo the moments of her life she regrets, and while each lesson is somewhat different, I’ve taken away a couple of lessons throughout the seasons:
- Live by your values. American (and apparently Canadian, let’s just say Western) culture is very goal oriented. Success is measured by achievements. However, as Erica learns time and time again (get it, cuz time travel?), if you sacrifice your values for your goals (e.g. being a dick to someone to get a promotion), you won’t end up being the person or living the life you actually care about. You may get promoted, but your employees will hate you because you used them as rungs on your ladder of “success.” Reframing your definition of success to be living by your values instead of achieving your goals can take a lot of the pressure off. Because you never know if you’re going to achieve your goals, but each day you can wake up and live your life in line with your values.
- You don’t control outcomes. Erica often goes back in time thinking that if she changes her behavior, she can change the outcome of the situation. *SPOILER WARNING* That basically never happens. She can change her behavior, but, even though she is the main character, the world doesn’t revolve around her. Time and time again (heh heh, ok I’ll stop), she goes back to discover that she didn’t have as much of an influence in the situation as she thought and she did not know the whole story. This helped me with thinking about my own regrets. We like (or more like don’t like) to think that we could have changed an outcome if only we’d done one thing differently. But the reality is, we have no freaking clue what would have happened. We can’t predict the future, and, similarly, we can predict the past. Future past. Past future. Whatever. This doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t take accountability when we’ve done something wrong or that we can’t learn lessons from what happened, but we can let go of those thoughts of if only I’d done that differently.
Both of these lessons fit in well with what I’ve been learning in my studies on Acceptance and Commitment Therapy and Stoicism: we can’t control what happens to us, but we can continue to live by our values.
So, if you want some honestly very real life lessons, and an entertaining time-travel plot, take some time to watch Being Erica. You won’t regret it ;)
