Скачать или смотреть The Spiritual Alchemy of Rock Bottom: Understanding Calcination through Fleabag & Kendall Roy

First it has to burn. Whenever I try to look up "Spiritual Alchemy," I usually end up clicking away because it feels too academic or, honestly, a little pretentious. But the more I looked into it, the more I realized that the best writers in "prestige TV" have been using these stages for years to craft the characters we’re in love with.

It starts with Calcination, which is just a fancy way of saying you’re entering the fire. It’s that brutal, necessary ego death where everything you thought you were gets incinerated.

You see it in the slow-motion car crash of Kendall Roy’s life in Succession, and you see it in Fleabag when she finally runs out of jokes to hide behind. It’s the entire foundation of Breaking Bad—watching the "Mr. Chips" ego die a violent death so that something much darker can take its place. In shows like Buffy, we see Willow go through a literal and metaphorical fire, and in Inside Out, we see Joy realize that her old way of running things has to burn down for Riley to survive.

I’m not a guru and I don't have the answers, but I’ve found that these stories are a much better map for the "rock bottom" moments in my life as an autistic person who understands the real world through television tropes. If it feels like everything is falling apart, you might just be in Stage 1.

Let's talk about the alchemy of the ego death.