When Summer Ends: A Reflection on Gravity Falls and How It Helped Me

I used to joke about how much of my journal, the one documenting my senior year of high school, is filled with Gravity Falls. Half way through the book, on a page marked for October 1st, I had written one small entry: "I really love Gravity Falls." From there, page after page is filled with thoughts related to the show. I could imagine someone picking up my journal and trying to figure out why an eighteen year old girl was so consumed by a piece of children's media. Why did she relate the plotline back to her own existential crisis, or why did she spend so much time plotting a fanfiction based in the same universe?

I'm not going to sit here and tell you that it's because Gravity Falls is the greatest piece of work that has ever walked this planet. That's not true. It's a flawed story with its fair share of problems. But it's a story that entered my life at the exact right time, and inevitably changed it for the long run.

Let's scroll back a year.

I am eighteen years old, starting my senior year of high school. The summer had been stressful for me—a double mastectomy for my mother's second round against breast cancer coupled with the looming shadows of the upcoming college applications. The ongoing existential crisis of my life, one based in a cocktail mixture of anxiety and insecurities, was raging on inside my head. At the time, writing was my only release. It gave me the escape I needed without having to resort to other unsafe means. I was wholly dedicated to writing and improving my art, but I also knew that writing wasn't going to give me a stable career. That summer, while on a college tour, I made the firm decision to study international business. I could make a living while doing writing on the side. It seemed like it was going to be a fairly sweet deal.

Everything started to change over the course of one late September weekend.

My sister was heading back upstate for college, and my parents saw it fit to take a mini-vacation for themselves while they were at it. This left my twin brother and me alone from Friday morning until Monday evening. I didn't have many plans that weekend. My AP Lit class had just finished reading Blindness by José Saramago, and I had to write a partnered essay about it. On Saturday morning, I sat at my kitchen table and wrote my half within two hours. It was quite a feat, if I do say so myself. However, any attempts of contacting my partner about her half resulted only in static. Frustrated, I sought for something to keep my mind occupied until she got back to me.

Sitting there in my kitchen, the glow of the sun illuminating the cherry stain of the table before dying in the dark slate flooring, I remembered seeing tumblr posts talking about the intricacies of a certain cartoon. I didn't know much about it; it just suddenly appeared on my dash from nowhere. I knew nothing about the show, beyond the audience's amazement of a priest-like character walking with triangular steps, but it seemed like a pleasant way to past time. Figuring out the name, I sat down and watching the first episode.

I can't quite explain what watching the series for the first time was like. I knew within the first few minutes of the first episode that I was going to watch the whole thing, a decision I usually reserve until I had a better idea of the plot. This time, I didn't need to make the logical decision. This time, it was like there was a new emotion in my chest, one that guided my actions. For the longest time, I never knew what to call this feeling. After having a year to think about it, I think I know what it is: nostalgia.

Fifth grade was not a good year for me. Neither was sixth grade, nor the entirety of junior high. Four years of my life was spent in the constant need of escapism. I hated the life I was living and I wanted out. During those years, I fantasized of discovering a different world. The locket hanging off my neck could take me to a different universe. One day, a group of mysterious vigilantes were going to recruit me to help them defeat an underground, paranormal villain that only I could defeat. I didn't want to discover Hogwarts. I wanted to know that behind the curtains of the life I loathed was a fantastical universe where I was in control and I was the hero.

All of my daydreams aligned with the basic plot of Gravity Falls—Dipper, discontent with his life, one day discovers a journal that holds secrets of a hidden world just beyond his yard. Sure enough, he begins to discover monsters and mermaids and an evil only he can defeat.

The story of Dipper and Mabel was the perfect replication of my escapist wants. Twelve year old Mia would have loved to discover a journal in the backyard of her suburban Californian home. I was never a mystery solver, but the very prospect of discovering who the author of the journals is would be enough to convert me into a genuine Nancy Drew. Watching Gravity Falls is like seeing my childhood fantasies come to life right before my eyes. Considering the pressures of college applications and life decisions, it would be hard to find a reason why I wouldn't love this cartoon so much.

I caught up with the season and a half show in under a weekend. Then, when my twin brother asked what I was so obsessed with, I sat down and watched it with him again. We talked during the episodes, occasionally pausing to laugh or discuss the mechanics. It was the first time in years that he and I shared a common interest.

I clearly remember an episode in the second season—number four, "Sock Opera"—that featured Dipper and Mabel slapping each other's hands in a twin-exclusive hand shake. My own twin brother looked at me and asked "Why can't we have a relationship like them?" A switch was flicked in the back of our heads and, in a way that mirror Gravity Falls' main characters, we grew closer. We shared everything with each other, passing along jokes and television shows. Car rides previously spent in silence were now ten minute interludes about any topic that came to our heads. For the first time in our lives, my brother and I felt like actual twins.

Indeed, Gravity Falls has a mystical quality to it. The intrigue came from more than the ciphers littered throughout the end credits and backgrounds. It was the conscious knowledge that Alex Hirsch attended school not five blocks from my house, that there was a slight chance I may have ran into him. It was the discovery of McBean Parkway at the corner of Gideon's fake check, and the similarities between Lazy Susan's diner and our very own Saugus Café. I felt like I was living life alongside the show, that simply watching it gave my own existence its own flair of the fictional.

As October faded to November, and the deadline for college applications loomed closer, my life started a new shift. My schemes of pursuing international business suddenly didn't seem as lovely as I previously thought. My mind kept on flitting back to the image of me hunched over in a cubicle, bags under eyes as I labored over dry financial reports. As I delved deeper into the world of contemporary Western animation, the more discontented I felt with the prospects of my future. I played around with the idea of taking an off year, or even joining the Peace Corps. Anything to delay a destiny made of dread.

My breaking point was the opening night of my play. I was an actress in it, and I was driving my underclassman friend to her house to wait out the hours before call time. I complained to her about my unfinished applications, sparking a conversation about my life plans. I strained enthusiasm for business, talking animatedly about economics and all the free time I would have to write. "I just can't imagine myself doing something that wasn't creative, you know?" I said with a laugh.

But after I dropped her off and drove away, I realized how true the words were. They bounced around my cranium, cracking bone and ricocheting their message in rapid spurts. I thought back to the creative minds of Alex Hirsch and Patrick McHale, trying to imagine what it would be like to have your stories out there for the world to see.

I remember this next part quite clearly—at three-thirty in the afternoon, two hours before call time, I sat in my car and waited for the light to change. I was at the intersection of Lyons and Peachland, my old therapy office somewhere behind me. The sun blared down at my skin from the left, blinding me as I broke down into an indescribable sob. For the first time in my life, I knew for sure what I wanted. I didn't want to be a successful business woman, or any other profession. All I wanted to do was create. I wanted to tell stories.

That night, two weeks before UC applications were due, I changed my major from international business to film. I was going to write for television, maybe even cartoons if I was lucky. I knew what I wanted to do with my life and, for the first time ever, I had the conviction to pursue it. That spring, I was accepted to Emerson College as a Visual Media Arts major.

And life never stopped from there. For the next year, I was slowly peeled away from my adolescence and into the world of the adult. I graduated from high school. I held three jobs over the course of the summer. I turned nineteen. I moved cross-country for school. The cycle of time demanded that I grew up.

For the most part, I did.

I aged. I've learned more about myself in the past year than I have ever known before. I cannot say that I'm adult. Through all of these changes in my life, I've clung to Gravity Falls like a life-line. Dipper and Mabel became the symbols of the childhood I always wanted to have—one in which I was never bullied, where my family relationship never waned, one that I can look back upon and say that I was happy. In the year in which I was forced to transform into an adult, Gravity Falls allowed me to be a kid again. Once ever few weeks, I would get a twenty-minute episode in which I could be twelve and innocent, and happy.

And, in a bizarre way, it helped me to grow-up. Dipper and Mabel grew up over the course of the summer, and I feel like I grew up with them. I remember watching the premiere of "A Tale of Two Stans" with my brother. We watched Stanford and Stanley face with the fork in the road of the childhood, knowing that I would soon be leaving California while he would be enrolled in community college. I remember listening to Brad Breeck's theme song while I waited for my flight at the airport. I found so much courage to start over my life in Boston from a show made for children.

That is why Gravity Falls is art. It has touched me in a way no other piece of media has. Alex Hirsch—I am sure that you or the rest of the GF team will never read this. But I will address this last part to you anyways:

I am in Boston, pursuing television because of you. My brother and I have a true relationship again because of you. I have the courage and determination to pursue my dream because of you. I want to give the kids and lost teenagers of the future the same hope you have given me. I want to one day shake your hand and tell you face to face everything that your show has done for me. I want to tell this to you as both your admirer and your equal in this industry.

Right now, it is two o'clock in the morning. I am completing the essay I first started back in September when the preview for "Dipper and Mabel vs the Future" was released. I am crying. I'm sobbing because I do not want this summer to end. I am afraid that once that final episode premieres, the remains of my childhood will be gone. I will have to turn my face to horizon and face the fact that I am grown up.

I am terrified to face the future.

But this is not the way my world will end. I will not go out with a bang or a whisper. Once Gravity Falls is gone, I will live on different from when it first found me.

Alex Hirsch, GF Team, Dipper, Mabel, Stan, everyone else—thank you.

Thank you for everything.