How I Met Your Mother Was Unbelievable, And It Saved Me.

  These shorts are written as practices in writing and all are unedited and are not proofread. 

Life around me has been pretty consistent with the whole family and friends thing, hell I can barely think of anyone from my high school that hasn’t started a family. Legit, at least married, divorced, mother, father, whatever, I know this through Facebook updates. The most trusted source in knowing how far behind you are in your list of goals for life.

Okay, let’s be clear here, this is probably not true I have just been cursed with a feed that shows only those with kids, marriages, and everything else.

In reality, this is all about where I thought I would be at the age of thirty, mostly at least not going to bed each night alone. That thing is big and lonely, though I do get to kick the covers in every which way I wish. The simple fact I have no job and no income means that in my thirtieth year on this blue earth, it feels like everything has paused.

This weighed heavily on my mind until I recently binged How I Met Your Mother, a series that has so many impossible things happen that you know it's impossible. Barney sleeps with over 300-woman, Robin gets a job without an interview, and they lick the liberty bell. That last one sounds like something I want to do just to say that I did it. But in a more South African way, I wonder if I could lick Pres. Mandela’s head in Sandton Square?

As I continued to watch the show, I started noticing something, something that was prevalent in both Friends and Scrubs. These people are not in their early twenties, despite how articles refer to them. They are all over the hill of 25, at the start of each series they are closer to 30 than they were to their high school lives.

Over the next few seasons of the show, How I Met Your Mother (HIMYM), the gang did a lot of things, they lost jobs, fell in love, almost got married, fell out of love, traveled the world, and most importantly became depressed. In fact, Ted, Robin, and Marshall are the three characters that are without work the longest.

The shocking thing is that Ted is 30 when he’s without a job, and so is Robin, and Marshall is nearing his mid-thirties when he loses his job, or well he quits. As I continued to watch the show it slowly but surely dawned on me, each of these characters felt like an absolute failure. They were alone, with no money, and barely making it day-to-day only thanks to those close to them.

The show is wacky, with tonnes of ups, downs, and almost everything you can imagine five friends can go through before ending. And let’s make it clear here, I only consider the DVD special ending to be the true ending, the one that aired is an atrocity that undoes nine years of progress.

The ending is bittersweet for me, as I realized that Ted thought his life was over in that last episode as he sat waiting for the train in Farhampton. His best friend had just married the woman he had loved in a very unhealthy way, and his other best friends moving to Rome. By all rights, he was embarking on a journey that should have been one filled with pain.

But when he least expects it, when he had no reason to suspect any positive change in his life, he was tapped on the shoulder by an old lady, “This bass player, is that her?”.

Honestly, when old Ted says he had to do the stupidest, dumbest, bravest thing any man could do, “Go up to that girl and say hello”. That, that line right there broke me, because for me it was like reliving the 9 years of HIMYM over again. Ted thought the life he knew was over, and it was, instead his real life was only just starting.

The real kicker for me, as a thirty-year-old, sitting alone at home each night, was that he was 34 years old when this happened. We saw in the flash-forwards that he would start a family, marry, have kids, and honestly, just grow even more. His life just kept changing, evolving, growing, and becoming something that for all his planning was beyond anything he expected.

So, if I were to go with everything I knew from my life or my plans then it would seem that I would be behind. But then I look at HIMYM and realize, hey, I am actually on track, the only thing I need to do now is somehow get a job that pays the bills but is only tangentially related to my career.

Of course, we have to consider that this is the real world and things out here never seem to quite happen in the way that we would like to believe from the shows. The cynic in me would have me believe that in the next 10 years, I will barely have any chance of success.

However, the realist in me knows this isn’t true, for the simple reason that I know the younger me could not imagine where I am right now. In the way that the 20-year-old idiot would not have been able to understand what living alone is like. Or the fact that I’ve been writing in styles and lengths that never even seemed real back then.

So, we need to actually touch on the headline of this piece, HIMYM is completely unbelievable. A show about five friends drinking every night, having fun in the city, meeting new people, and having a good and healthy life. That is believable.

What is unbelievable about HIMYM is the fact that it has saved me from completely losing my fight against the depression I am facing.

I genuinely thought this was it, at 30, it felt like there was nothing moving, no career opportunities, no friends just around the corner, and no romantic life to speak of. Instead, I find myself looking forward to what could happen in the next ten years.

The truth is that I may be here again at 40 or even 50, but the truth is that I know I won’t. The romantic in me, the one that makes me trip over words when flirting but hopes to one day find love tells me so.

If you’ve made it this far down my rambling, rumbling, train of thought I commend you, reader. If you felt some familiarity in these words to your own situation, I have only this to say.

 

You need to be brave.

You need to be stupid.

You need to do the dumbest thing any person on earth can do.

 

You need to take the next step forward even if you can’t see where your foot will land.