Complicated Airflow

by Zac Bentz

As his father lies catatonic somewhere in the labyrinthine ICU, he stands poised before three of the company’s top aides. He’s gaunt, haggard, and more than a little mousy, and the slopes of his shoulders seem to stretch infinitely downward as his arms all but melt into the sides of his perfectly tailored blazer. Here, in the second episode of the inaugural season of HBO’s Succession, the show delivers its central thesis.

“Words are just… what? Nothing. Complicated airflow.”

This throwaway line of dialogue, delivered by Jeremy Strong’s Kendall Roy as his father lies dying (or so we think) in a hospital bed, leaving the fate of his empire which itself was built (and continues to thrive) on the exchange of hollow, meaningless words, has been rattling around in my brain since the first time I watched the show. This piece isn’t about Succession per se, but I think that line illustrates something that’s slowly been eating away at me for the majority of my adult life, which is the all-consuming temptation to keep secrets from yourself. It seems like an oxymoron – actively withholding knowledge from yourself after already engaging with it doesn’t seem logically possible – but we know, for example, how good our brains are at burying traumatic events due to our primal muscle of self-preservation, so it doesn’t seem like too much of a stretch.

And I think it’s something we all do, but it took me a very long time to realize the extent to which I was burying myself beneath a tangled web of convoluted secrets, meticulously compartmentalizing my mind based on what I felt prepared to deal with and what I couldn’t bear to confront. Like acknowledging that I was unhappy in a year-and-a-half long relationship, something a stranger on the street could instantly glean with a single glance, but a reality which felt so unfathomably impossible to me that I withheld it from myself to the point where I started to accept feelings like, for example, resentment toward the creative outlets that made me happy because my partner refused to acknowledge how integral they were to my well-being and instead actively stoked the insecurities I held around my passions for them, as just part of “being in love.” I kept secrets from myself that had such deep, transformative, unhealthy effects on me that once I worked up the courage to come clean and be honest with myself, I could hardly recognize the side of me that had needed so desperately for so long to be let in on the mystery.

This summer, I started having conversations with myself on my drives home from work. Cruising down Myra as fast as I could legally go, I’d start talking with myself as though I was another person in the passenger seat, and I’d start to interrogate, and ask probing questions. I’d say, “It seems like you’re feeling anxious.” And I’d start talking and I wouldn’t stop until I’d unpacked everything that could be making me feel what I was feeling, using every word you could possibly use to describe those feelings with. As I continued to have these conversations with myself, these little moments of confession, I began to get better at noticing when I was keeping secrets. I began to get better at knowing when to step in and confront my feelings. And I began to reject the central thesis of Succession – these words weren’t simply complicated airflow, like the words I used to justify keeping those secrets had been. They were tangible, they were heavy, they were weapons. They gave me control. They showed me how to be honest.