When A Story Creates Headlocks and Dropkicks

Stories have a way of drawing me in close like a headlock… and every now and then, pushing you right back out, like a dropkick.

Elizabeth Gilbert does that to me. One minute she’s got me in a headlock… completely pulled into the moment, and the next, she’ll drop kick me with a line that makes me step back and think, “Well… where the hell did that come from?”

I enjoy that.

There’s a rhythm to her storytelling….a way of noticing things many of us pass right by. And when she’s in that space, I find myself nodding along with her more often than not.

But every now and then… something shifts.

A line. A paragraph. A tone. Usually around politics.

It’s not so much what is being said. It’s how it’s being said….certain, settled, maybe a little dismissive of other ways of seeing things. And when that happens, I feel myself step just slightly outside the story leaving me feeling alone with my thoughts.

I noticed something similar watching The Pitt.

Not offended so much as… cautiously aware.

There was a scene involving U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement—agents entering a hospital, tensions rising, a confrontation unfolding. It was compelling. But something felt familiar.

The agents came across as insensitive, robotic, while the medical staff were clearly positioned as the moral center. And maybe that was the point… but it felt like a perspective was missing.

I said to myself: “That scene felt seriously unfair to the ICE Agents.”

Not the conflict.

The complexity. The balance.

No sense of the pressures, protocols, or realities shaping both sides. It felt less like a window… and more like a frame.

And I recognized that feeling.

The same one I get when a story shifts from exploring reality to presenting it with certainty.

It doesn’t make me stop reading.

It doesn’t make me turn off the show.

But it does create a little distance.

Because in my experience, life rarely offers clean lines between right and wrong. More often, it gives us people doing the best they can within imperfect systems.

When that’s missing, something feels incomplete.

Maybe even a little disappointing.

For a moment, I wondered if it might change how I saw the show.

But it didn’t.

Because I’m not there for agreement—I’m there for the story.

And part of that is accepting that every story comes from a point of view.

That doesn’t mean I have to adopt it.

Just recognize it.

So now, when I feel that shift, I don’t push back as much as I used to.

I just notice it.

“That’s how they see it.”

And then I keep going.

Because more often than not, a few pages, or scenes, later, I’m right back in a headlock again.