> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://gliszen.ghost.io/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # We Need Buffy Summers. And We Need Her Now. - URL: https://gliszen.ghost.io/we-need-buffy-summers-and-we-need/ - Published: 2026-03-15T00:28:35.000Z - Updated: 2026-07-24T21:19:36.000Z - Description: ... a gen x girl gets to nerd out every once in a while on her Substack - and Buffy being nixed made me..... well made me write. xoxo Buffy, she saved the world, a lot. #GenX - Author: Rachelle P. Goldenberg, LCSW - Tags: Genx, Substack-Moved, Human, Television, BVS, Quirky, ethics, Kitch, Morals, Newsletter, #Migrated-1784927624346, #Import 2026-07-24 21:18 Let me set the scene. Nuclear arms treaties are dissolving. The U.S. and Russia are sitting on nearly 90% of the world’s nuclear weapons with no legally binding restrictions and, apparently, no particular sense of urgency about that. Europe’s most powerful governments are simultaneously under siege from the populist right, the populist left, and the current White House. The global order the U.S. spent 80 years building is being actively dismantled by the U.S. Water is becoming a geopolitical weapon between nuclear-armed rivals. Most experts who study this stuff professionally are now using words like “fragmented” and “tipping point” and “stormy outlook” without irony. I’m not being dramatic. This is just Tuesday now. Some of us have known this feeling our whole lives — the low hum of *something is wrong and no one else seems to notice.* The hypervigilance that comes from growing up in systems that weren’t built for you, that kept telling you your read on the room was off. Turns out your read on the room was fine. The room was the problem. As a Gen Xer, I have been watching this unfold with the particular brand of exhausted, pattern-recognizing clarity our generation has been sharpening since approximately 1987\. We were told the Cold War ended. We were told history was over. We were handed a brief, shining window of relative stability and used it to perfect the art of ironic detachment and extremely good television. And that television — specifically, *Buffy the Vampire Slayer* — is what I keep coming back to. Not as a comfort watch. As a *blueprint.* --- ## The Problem Is Structural No single actor is clearly in charge anymore. Every player is running their own rules. The old institutions that kept things nominally stable are either captured, defunded, or quietly beside the point. Global risk analysts — not conspiracy theorists, actual analysts whose job is to be measured — are now describing the world order as fragmenting in real time. In Sunnydale, they called this the Hellmouth. Same energy. Buffy didn’t wait for the Council of Watchers to get its act together. The Council was a centuries-old institution full of people who believed their authority was self-evident, their methods beyond question, and their framework the only legitimate one. They were slow, rigid, condescending, and frequently wrong about the very thing they claimed to specialize in. Neurodivergent people have been navigating institutions like this since birth. The IEP committee that couldn’t see past the test scores. The doctor who heard the chief complaint and stopped listening. The workplace that kept measuring competence in the wrong units. We know what it looks like to be assessed by a system that wasn’t designed for you — and to keep showing up anyway, because the work still needs doing. Buffy worked around the Council. She built her own team. She addressed the actual problem while the official bodies argued about protocol. This is, not coincidentally, exactly what functional ND adults have been doing our entire lives. --- ## The Villain Problem Every season had a Big Bad. And here’s what the writers understood: the most dangerous ones weren’t the most powerful. They were the most *destabilizing.* Glory wasn’t scary because she was strong. She was scary because she was erratic, impulsive, and genuinely didn’t care about consequences. She’d level a building mid-conversation because something annoyed her. She also couldn’t hold a coherent thought for long — which made her unpredictable in ways brute force couldn’t solve. The Mayor wasn’t scary because he was evil. He was scary because he was *organized*, smiled pleasantly, followed the rules he’d written himself, and had been quietly working his plan for a hundred years while everyone assumed he was just a quirky local politician doing his best. I’ll let you sit with that for a moment. The point is: Buffy understood that the nature of the threat mattered. You couldn’t fight Glory the way you fought the Master. Different kinds of chaos require different responses, different coalitions, different tactics. Pattern recognition isn’t paranoia — it’s the skill that saves the world. Season after season, the Scoobies survived because someone paid attention when everyone else normalized the warning signs. Some of us have been called “too sensitive” or “too intense” for noticing things early. Those are just field notes from a lifetime of hypervigilance and pattern recognition. Turns out that’s called *accurate.* --- ## The Scooby Model as Foreign Policy The Scoobies were not supposed to save the world. Buffy was the Slayer. One girl, chosen, trained, operating within a rigid institutional framework. And then she died — twice — the framework cracked, and it became clear the actual work was always being done by a scrappy, underfunded, deeply weird coalition of people who showed up because they gave a damn. Willow was self-taught and working on a dial-up connection. Xander had no powers whatsoever and kept showing up anyway. Giles had been fired. Anya had centuries of unprocessed trauma and zero social filter. They communicated in ways that didn’t always make sense to outsiders. They had sensory issues, regulation issues, attachment issues. They were, if we’re being honest, a pretty solid representation of a neurodivergent friend group trying to hold the world together on not enough sleep and worse snacks. They should not have worked. They absolutely worked. The coalition didn’t have to be pretty or institutionally sanctioned. It just had to be real. Gen X has been quietly forming Scooby gangs our entire adult lives — at work, in our communities, in the spaces where official systems failed us. We know how to find the other weird, competent, deeply committed people in the room. We’ve been doing it since middle school. It’s actually one of our best skills. --- ## What Buffy Actually Understood She understood that the apocalypse was not a metaphor. That every generation thinks they’re living in the end times because, for some of them, they are. That being the one who has to handle it is not heroic so much as it is *necessary.* That you don’t get to opt out because the stakes feel too large, or because you’re tired, or because you didn’t sign up for this particular species of catastrophe. She also understood something the Watchers Council never did: that power shared doesn’t diminish. The finale of the entire series is built on this. Stop making the Slayer singular. Stop concentrating all the power in one place, in one person, in one institution that can be controlled and contained and destroyed. Distribute it. Trust people with it. Yes, some of them will use it badly. Distribute it anyway. That’s not just good television. It’s the whole argument for democratic governance, multilateral cooperation, and not letting any single actor accumulate so much power that the rest of the world is just waiting to see what they’ll break next. Neurodivergent people understand this instinctively. We’ve rarely been the ones with centralized power. We’ve survived by building lateral networks, by trusting the right people, by finding our Scoobies. We know that the formal power structure and the actual functioning system are often two completely different things — and that the second one is usually where the real work gets done. --- ## The Part That Isn’t Funny Buffy lost people she loved. A lot of them. She burned out, broke down, came back. She spent an entire season severely depressed after being pulled out of what she described as heaven and dropped back into a world that needed saving. She kept going not because she felt okay — she absolutely did not feel okay — but because she understood that her capacity for care was not contingent on her circumstances being manageable. That season is uncomfortable to watch. It’s also the most honest the show ever got. A lot of us are in that season right now. Watching the news cycle with the flat affect of someone who has been in crisis mode long enough that it stopped feeling like crisis and started feeling like atmosphere. Doing the next right thing while quietly not being fine. That’s real. That’s not weakness. That’s what it looks like to stay functional under conditions that are not, in fact, fine. --- ## So Here We Are Gen X was raised on the tail end of one Cold War and is watching the beginning of something that doesn’t have a clean name yet. We were teenagers when the Berlin Wall came down. We are middle-aged while people in official positions openly speculate about tactical nuclear weapons like this is a normal thing to speculate about. We have been holding steady through a lot. We are still holding. We were also shaped by a story about a teenage girl in a cemetery who looked at something ancient and terrifying and said: *I’m the thing that monsters have nightmares about.* Not because she had the most power. Because she refused to pretend the monsters weren’t real. The ND community, more than most, does not get the luxury of pretending. We have spent our lives being told that what we perceive isn’t real, that we’re overreacting, that the system works fine and the problem is us. We’ve had to learn to trust our own read on things even when no one validated it. That skill — hard-won, expensive, ours — is exactly what this moment requires. So: find your Scoobies. Trust your pattern recognition. Share what power you have. Show up even when, especially when, you didn’t sign up for this. And someone please greenlight the Buffy reboot. The timing has never been more obvious.