I think about this a lot: An old West Wing Christmas episode

Yo-Yo Ma and PTSD and me

I wrote this a few years ago as a pitch for an old guest series in The Cut, “I Think About This A Lot,” about “private memes: images, videos, and other random trivia we are doomed to play forever on loop in our minds.” Generally the things people wrote about were a little more light-hearted than this, so it’s not a huge surprise that they weren’t interested, but I do think about it a lot, especially at this time of year. It’s about “Noel,” a Christmas episode of The West Wing that aired in 2000, when I was 17 years old.¹ It was the first time I learned about PTSD.

Anyway, here it is. It’s kind of a bummer! Enjoy!

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From “Noel,” The West Wing 2:10

I’ve never understood why I have so many feelings. It seems like I’ve been that way forever. A couple of years ago I found a letter I’d written to my grandma (dictated to my mom). I was excited about Hanukkah, I said. New paragraph: “Sometimes I am very happy and sometimes I am very sad.” I was four. I didn’t know what to do about feeling so much.

No one else knew what to do, either—then or later. I couldn’t tell you why I said “I’m not grateful for anything” and burst into tears when Mrs. D. made us go around naming things we were grateful for in second grade reading class. I don’t remember why my mom came home one day in, I don’t know, 1994, to find me lying silently on the couch after I’d gone glassy-eyed from crying for hours. When I got older, my high school friends were as frustrated as I was. Once, S. told me, “We don’t really know what to do. Sometimes you’re Fun Jacqui and everything is fine, and then suddenly everything is terrible and you’re Not Fun Jacqui.” I felt that way, too.

There were other things. Whenever anyone touched me, I flinched. Once, a teacher laid her hand on my arm after I abruptly lost my shit in the middle of her physics class, and it felt like an electric shock for hours afterward. Everything—and I cannot stress this enough: everything—made me cry, especially when I got mad or made a mistake or was misunderstood in even very small ways. Now the reasons for all of this seem obvious and heartbreaking. I was in so much pain all the time and didn’t know why and didn’t have anyone to help me. That was all. But I just thought there was something really wrong with me, something really terrible.

I’d never been to therapy before—or, I’d been once, when I was a sophomore, after I admitted that I thought about falling off of buildings sometimes (not unrelated to the time I lost my shit in physics class, in a roundabout way!), and I was sent to see my dead dad’s old therapist and when I said I didn’t want to go back my mom sounded relieved and never mentioned it again.

I was also a speech and debate nerd and a very very big fan of The West Wing, a “used an Aaron Sorkin quote about crazy West Wing fans in my senior yearbook” kind of fan. (Everything I know about statuesque femme realness—I’m 5’10”—I learned from CJ Cregg.) I was a senior in high school when the second season aired. Of course I watched the Christmas episode. That’s where I learned about PTSD and something, anyway, about therapy.

In the episode, “Noel,” Josh Lyman’s character, played by Bradley Whitford, is forced to reckon with the trauma of being shot and nearly killed some months before. For several weeks, he’s been acting erratic, freaking out when he hears a brass quintet and a bagpipe trio rehearsing in the lobby, irritated with everyone, raising his voice in the Oval Office. It’s the latter that spurs action: his boss, White House Chief of Staff Leo McGarry, tells him that he’s going to sit down with a therapist from the American Trauma Victims Association the next day. It’s an order, not a request.

That evening is the Congressional Christmas Party; Josh shows up at work the next day with a big bandage on his hand, where the therapist, Stanley (played by Adam Arkin), is waiting for him. Josh is not happy about this. There’s some peacocking, some hostility, some sulking. (The men on this show are truly magnificent sulkers, about which there is likely some gender analysis to be made; we’ll save it for another occasion.) Stanley asks him how he cut his hand. Oh, he says, he cut his hand putting down a glass. Sure, bud.

Over the course of the episode, the trauma unspools in flashbacks. A sharp knock at the door startles him—a staffer is bringing coffee—and for a quick flash we see him standing in his apartment the previous evening, wearing a tuxedo shirt, his hand bloody. Things had started going wrong about three weeks before, he tells the psychologist—after a fighter pilot went rogue during a training exercise, a crisis that ended when he purposely crashed into a mountain and killed himself. Josh had been tasked with looking into the guy’s background. They had the same birthday; the pilot had also been shot and nearly killed during overseas service.

He doesn’t care about the pilot, he tells Stanley, but he couldn’t let it go. Weeks after the incident, on the day of the Christmas party, he’s practically vibrating with anxiety and rage. He’s angry that C.J. doesn’t have any more information about the pilot or why he killed himself. “I can hear the damn sirens all over the building—the, the bagpipes,” he says to Toby, irritated with the bagpipe ensemble in the lobby. He goes into a meeting in the Oval Office—it’s dumb, it’s about the Strategic Petroleum Reserve—and yells at the president to listen to him. We return to the moment we saw at the top of the episode: in Leo’s office immediately after, Josh attempts to explain what he meant. “I’m not sure you were fully conscious when you were saying it,” Leo says. Josh is going to have to see the trauma therapist the next day at work: “You’re gonna sit with the guy.”

Then the party: the men in white-tie, Donna and CJ in gowns, everyone intently listening to Yo-Yo Ma play the Prelude to Cello Suite No. 1 in G Major.² The camera moves across the rapt faces of his friends. But something’s happening to Josh. Suddenly he feels like he can’t breathe. His head fills with noise: screaming, sirens, gunfire. His expression goes slack and glassy-eyed: he’s remembering the bullet ripping through him. I couldn’t make it stop, he says.

At home, wound up, he can’t calm down. This, he tells Stanley, is where he cut his hand—he made a drink, dropped the glass while putting it down. “Yeah,” Stanley says, “I don’t think you did.” Yo-Yo Ma’s music has followed him from one scene into the next, scoring a dance of confusion and terror, his body vibrating with a propulsive violence that seems to have no source, and these flashes are wound around the present moment in the White House with the therapist. Josh, the therapist asks again, how did you hurt your hand? As the cello suite reaches its crescendo, he slams his hand through a window. Stunned, Josh gingerly withdraws his bloody hand and, as the music resolves, looks at it with blank astonishment, like he’s never seen it before. The building super is knocking on the door, calling his name.

This is the scene I remember best, maybe as well as any deeply imprinted trauma of my own, because I recognized something. There are no words for what is happening, but there is so much pain inside him that he thinks it might kill him, and it feels urgent and agonizing, slow and fast all at once, a helpless movement toward something, until it breaks him and he breaks something and it’s over.

I didn’t punch through windows, but I recognized all of this: he was Fun Josh, and then he wasn’t.

“That’s that,” the psychologist says. He’s gotten Josh to remember the trauma, to name the source of the pain. He was shot. Months later, the pilot’s life and death have activated him. Music—the brass quintet, the bagpipes, the cello—begins triggering flashbacks. It reminds him of sirens. He has PTSD. “So that’s going to be my reaction every time I hear music?” Josh asks Stanley, who’s in the middle of putting on his jacket to leave. No. “Why not?” “Because we get better, Josh.”

I’d never heard of PTSD and I’d never been shot. It took a really long time to figure out what all of that had to do with whatever it was that had happened to me. But I could see now that it wasn’t just me, I wasn’t the only person who suffered like this, other people walked around like this, raw and alert, wounded by things no one else could see. This happened to other people, too, and there ways to explain it, and it wasn’t their fault.

I didn’t tell anyone about any of this. But I used my employee discount at Barnes & Noble (where, let’s just say, Not Fun Jacqui often showed up for work), to buy the CD set of Yo-Yo Ma performing the Bach cello suites, and when “Noel” aired as a rerun sometime later, I taped it. I only watched it when no one was home.

We get better. I’d never heard that before, but I liked it. I’ve kept it in my pocket ever since. It’s true: I have gotten better. I am.

1. It’s, incidentally, in the top ten West Wing episodes according to a Vulture ranking from September!

2. This is not why I learned to play the cello—though lots of adult learners decide to start because they love the Prelude. I wanted to learn to play the cello the first time I heard Max Bruch’s “Kol Nidre.” Anyway, did you know I play the cello? I’M NOT GOOD, don’t get excited. I have a recital on Saturday if you want to come! My best friend Terri is coming!!!