The show makes this point so beautifully, that it almost seems repetitive to discuss it, but I still loved the parallels created in the episode in which both Rebecca and Paula tried to power and/or positive outlook their way through their differing health needs. In many ways this season, and even the series has looked at the circumstances that allowed Rebecca to get to this part of her life, with plenty of success and sure some failures behind her and not have fully recognized her brain and her were at odds. Paula got married young ended up adjacent to the life she truly wanted and is so, so close to getting it. In the way of many of us of a certain age, it won't be everything she dreamed, but it's a dream about to be realized, and having had to give up so many dreams she is not willing to listen to people who tell her she looks bad, and she might need to take a rest, and she could take the bar next time. Paula has seen success come to her when she powers through, so she keeps powering through the sweat, through the fatigue, through the pain, until finally she admits she might need a teeny tiny bit of help and goes to her gynecologist assuming she's experiencing menopause, to discover she is actually having a heart attack.
Similarly, Rebecca has been doing all the work - going to therapy, having changed her job, and now having done a new thing, entered into a relationship with someone who already knows all the worst things she has done. So, yes, romance has been a crutch for her before, but not this time, because she has done the work. And she doesn't need medication because she has done the work. And yes, also, because she let her mom drug her and it ended badly, so medication is wrapped up in some really bad baggage for her. And so she gets Greg to go to a water park. And while Greg looks like a totally different person, he is still Greg. Water parks and Greg are not going to be a happy joint outing. And so it doesn't go the way Rebecca had envisioned and so she reverts to alcohol and bad behavior and in a way that was super real to life but less so to TV, the folks she tries to throw her self into realize this is Rebecca in pain not Rebecca in love with them again and they send her on her way.
Both Rebecca and Paula are forced to realize that sometimes pushing your body and your brain and trying to power through your illness doesn't work. Sometimes you have to stop, or let the drugs get your brain chemistry closer to where it needs to be, and that's not cheating or slacking, it's just what you need at the moment.
And I think it's a lesson we all need sometimes.
