Healing Isn’t Linear: Conrad Fisher Reminded Me of That

What a fictional character taught me about safety, loss, and love

I’ve procrastinated long enough about writing this piece. But as I do something this weekend that I have now come to recognise as tiresome but necessary — the dreaded “sitting with yourself” — I have decided that I will succumb to making my wild connections and theories, and find joy in it.

Like many Millennial women across the globe, I too have found myself drawn deeply into the allure of Conrad Fisher’s character from The Summer I Turned Pretty. Like Conrad, I was a very different person when the show started — far removed from the woman writing these words here today. I operated from what I now refer to as the baby pool of life — one that I had paddled around in, carefree and oblivious to the pull of the depths that would soon threaten to drown me. I looked to the mercy of people who I believed would save me if I encountered true pain or danger — surely I would be shielded and I lived life ensconced in that comfort, and in that safety. And here’s where my first bit of wild connection making and theorising takes root — what is it about this fictional character that piques my interest almost subconsciously (and okay, if we’re being honest: what is it beyond his obvious attractiveness and sharp wardrobe choices).

In the show, much of Conrad’s character development comes after the loss of his mother (Susannah Fisher) to cancer and the plot of Season 2 & Season 3 continues to explore the impact of her death on all principal characters including her older son. But I want to first turn the lens back to young Conrad in Season 1. We see him struggling. Not just with his feelings for Belly, but as we later find out, we see him battle to straddle the role of protector & secret keeper and with his barely-developed sense of self. Conrad believes it is his responsibility to hold everything together — it’s almost like he believes it is his duty, without really understanding that in the process, he ices himself out of his ring of warmth and strength of protection. Season 1 Conrad does not recognise that he needs to be the first recipient of the feeling of safety that he so deftly creates for the people he loves the most without them even knowing. He probably just assumes that someone will have his back, or that he will eventually get around to taking care of himself. It can’t be that hard, can it? But if he were to focus on himself and his own grief, who would step up for the others? And surely everyone understands that grief looks different for each one of us. The people who truly love him will most certainly support his healing journey — he doesn’t need to ask, they will just know. Surely they will carry him when his resolve weakens.
And so we see him crumble in Season 2. We watch the weight of unresolved grief manifest in the life of this boy-man. We watch him lose his mother and lose himself in the depths of his sadness.

I suspect that I saw Season 1 & Season 2 Conrad to be a lot like baby pool me. Until I lost my father when I was in my early 20s, I didn’t know anything about death. I had never been to a funeral or entertained the thought of loss. I distinctly remember the first moment of confronting what a world without my father would even feel like: it was the day I walked into his hospital room in March 2013 and found a pamphlet on palliative care services. I was filled with rage and anger — now I know those were the first moments of my own sense of self seeking out to protect me from grief and pain. But I chose to reject it, by choosing not to process. And nobody could have helped in that moment, even though I was so sure that someone would “if it got too bad”.

What we don’t know about the loss of a parent — or the loss of someone close — is that it unmoors us beyond recognition. It sweeps you away from a path of safety and throws you into a whirlwind that leaves you in a different place: literally like those helpless cows that get swung about and displaced in every tornado movie you’ve ever watched. In my case, I believed that the people closest to me in my life cushioned my fall. And to be fair, almost every single person did and I am so eternally grateful. But I learned a lasting lesson almost 11 years later: that your grief can also be weaponised against you by those who are incapable of seeing beyond what you “should have done for them” even when you are broken and depleted (but that’s a subject for another day).

What I want to stress on here is the danger of believing that you can or should be saved by those who claim to love you, simply because it is what you would do for them. That is where both Season 2 Conrad & baby pool me both faltered: we failed to offer a safety net to ourselves; we failed to follow the thing we hear (and tune out) each time we buckle our seatbelts on an aircraft — to put on our own oxygen mask before helping someone else. Conrad delayed his grieving to the point where he blew up his relationship with Belly. I went in the other direction — I believed that love that would protect, cherish, respect and reciprocate. I channeled my grief and every part of my fledgling sense of self into this belief. Neither approach is wrong or right. Both are simply human, but both have lasting consequences.

When my journey with therapy started, I went in expecting to be told I was broken beyond repair because that was what was echoed to me. But again, I want to be clear — no voice in this respect was stronger than my own. Over the next few years, I learned to listen to myself and my body (I’m still learning). Ironic because I know I present as confident and assertive, but they are not mutually exclusive. I began to learn how to center myself in moments of emotional absence in my environment. I started to learn how to differentiate between what is my responsibility to fix and what isn’t. I began to find the emotional vocabulary to describe to myself that I wasn’t meant to decipher and solve for vacuums that were not of my making. The hardest thing about learning to ask for accountability is to know that you cannot control the outcome. You can simply do what is in your power, and you must learn to sit the consequences, whatever they may be.

I assume this was the case with fictional Conrad. We see him at his appointments, uncomfortable but brave. Finding the words to articulate what he’s up against as he continues to find his place in his world beyond ideal son, protective brother, good friend, perfect student and emotionally regulated partner. And he does this not just within the four walls of his therapist’s office but in multiple episodes throughout Season 3. We watch him verbalise his feelings, which always difficult, but more importantly, we watch him create moments of safety for himself after having the courage to face his own demons, and often, demons that were not his to confront.

But this is not all perfect, linear and in an orderly fashion. It never is. Because none of it would be believable or real if it was. At the time of writing this, we are a few days away from the alleged series finale. And while the last few episodes have been dubbed by fans as filler episodes (and honestly, I also feel the same in some ways), I think they’ve done a lot to show us more of Conrad’s healing journey. That it’s messy, misunderstood, spontaneous but irrevocable. That everything is a step forward, whether someone else understands it or not. That healing is complex — loudest in moments of silence, present in moments of joy and the most important form of love you can show yourself once you recognise that your journey has its own language — one that only you can choose tell once you learn to speak it.