“You can stand anything for 10 seconds,” says Kimmy Schmidt. “Then you just start on a new 10 seconds.”
Kimmy’s maxim, delivered in episode two of Netflix’s “Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt,” sounds chirpy and childlike (especially since it’s delivered partly in Mary-Poppins-style song). But it’s a sign of something serious: the show’s quietly revolutionary approach to its main character’s painful past.
Kimmy has survived 15 years of imprisonment by a cult leader in an underground bunker. Post-rescue, she moves to New York City and carves out a life, marked by her imprisonment but, per the show’s title, not broken by it. At The New Yorker, Emily Nussbaum likens her to the real-life kidnapping survivor Michelle Knight:
“Like Kimmy, Knight had no family to go back to; her upbringing was a horror. But, to judge from newspaper profiles, she has not merely survived the abuse — she’s resilient and downright giggly, a fan of karaoke and dancing, angels and affirmations. It’s a powerfully girlish model of human toughness.”
“Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt” isn’t perfect — as Ms. Nussbaum points out, the treatment of its characters of color often leaves much to be desired. But it’s groundbreaking for TV in the way it shows us, with humor and a light touch, not just a strong female character but someone who’s had to work hard to maintain her sanity under terrible circumstances.
Kimmy survives not because she’s unfazed by her troubles — we learn in this season’s penultimate episode that her fear of risking a fellow kidnap victim’s life scuttled what could have been a successful escape. Rather, she survives because she learns to deal with being fazed. She learns, for instance, to divide her scary and absurd life in the bunker (including stints “turning a heavy crank, the purpose of which is unknown to this day”) into manageable 10-second increments. Kimmy’s not a paragon of impassive self-control — she is a human woman who is coping.
Mac McClelland’s recent memoir, “Irritable Hearts: A PTSD Love Story,” about the post-traumatic stress disorder she developed on a reporting trip to Haiti, is worlds away in tone from the generally lighthearted “Kimmy Schmidt.” But it, too, tells a story of survival through hard internal work. As Ann Friedman writes at The Cut, Ms. McClelland presents herself as someone trying to deal with sometimes overwhelming emotions — emotions she doubts she is entitled to feel. Ms. McClelland’s openness about all this makes her somewhat unusual: “As women carve out careers and comfortably adopt traits that were once considered ‘masculine,’” Ms. Friedman writes, “there’s strong social pressure on them to mimic the stoicism that men have traditionally been expected to maintain in the face of hardship.”
Popular culture has frequently reinforced this expectation, for men and for women — we see steely resolve more often than we see effective coping mechanisms. That’s why it is so refreshing to see the seams of Kimmy’s — and Ms. McClelland’s — recovery, the tricks and tools they have to use to keep going and enjoy what is good in their lives.
If stoicism is the standard, then the moment you feel awful, you’ve already failed. But for Kimmy, strength isn’t about never feeling awful. It’s just about getting through the next 10 seconds.