Twin flames hurdlers: Carmy, Sydney and Grief
Thinking about this post from @freedelusionshere and what they posit we could get in season 5 with Syd (i.e. Syd being just as messy, complicated and imperfect as Carmy, which I am sat and ready for).
Carmy's grief
That post got me thinking about another similarity between Syd and Carmy: how they've both processed and put "hurdles" in front of their grief. We know Carmy has done this because he tells us straight up in 4x10 that he did:
Carmy: I put a lot of things in the way of-of dealing with very real things and I am aware of that, okay? I think I-I-I was trying to, like, put...put hurdles in the way.
In their convo, Syd lists things like changing the menu everyday, not communicating, not apologising to people, and being a fucking menace in general (lol) as examples of how Carmy avoided real issues (his grief, his past). Carmy agrees and then immediately changes the subject to Syd leaving The Bear for Adam Shapiro's restaurant. Deflecting in this way is one indication of how avoidant Carmy is about the deep wounds he carries (and really, I don't judge him for this. Its completely understandable. Who enjoys looking squarely at their vulnerabilities?).
But the avoidance ratchets up later in the conversation when Syd directly addresses the "fucking elephant in the fucking restaurant" and tells Carmy that she's sorry for what he, Nat and Richie have been through:
Carmy means so much to Syd and she, being the emotionally intelligent person she is, is tuned into him and the rest of her work-family-family. Syd understands that the loss of Mikey - and not just the Mikey-sized hole left in the hearts of his loved ones, but also the suffering likely associated with his addiction and the horrendous violence of how he died; i.e. the "nightmare" of it all - has coloured everything at The Beef/The Bear since his passing. That writing was on the wall (along with the passata, donut and Sharpie that Carmy variously threw at it during grief-induced rage spirals in season 1).
But when Syd acknowledges this for Carmy and says that she's sorry, his instinctual reaction is to recoil. He actually begs her to stop:
Carmy: You don't have to do that! [...] Please! Please! [...] Stop. Stop, Syd. Please stop. You don't have to do that. Please stop it. Please stop it!
And then Syd says:
Syd: I'm not gonna fucking stop it. I'm sorry.
As I and others like @emmasdelusions and @yannaryartside have said on here, Syd forces Carmy to confront his grief. By 4x10, she doesn't stop when he tells her to. She doesn't give him an out. And because of this, Carmy is able to see his experience and that of others more clearly. Its only after Syd pushes him in this way that Carmy has his breakthrough in understanding that Richie also lost a loved one when Mikey died.
Sydney's grief
But while Syd pushes Carmy to work through his grief, she has also indicated throughout the show that this might be something she struggles with doing herself.
Recall 2x09 when Carmy asks Syd about her relationship with her mother. She tells him its not great because her mother is dead:
Syd: Well, to answer your question, I-I don't really have a great relationship with my...um...she's dead. She died. I could have probably said that a bit smoother. Yeah, she died when I was, like, four. Lupus.
Carmy then tries to tell Syd that he's sorry she lost her mother and what does Syd do? Like Carmy in 4x10, she tells him to stop, repeatedly. Like Carmy, she deflects (though in Syd's case, she relies on humour to keep things moving):
Carmy: I feel...I'm sorry I feel like I should have known that or something.
Sydney: No. Don't, don't, don't, don't. Don't do the...that thing. The, like...
Carmy: What?
Sydney: "I'm sorry for your loss" thing. Its okay, it happened a while ago, and, you know, I don't know.
Carmy: Alright, well-
Sydney: I was young. Whatever.
Carmy: -I'm sorry.
Sydney: *inhales* Thank you.
Carmy: Yeah. *clears throat*
Sydney: Yeah, so we don't really have the best relationship just cos of the whole, like, dead thing.
Carmy: That'll do it. *nods*
Sydney: *nods* That'll really do it. *laughs* Yeah.
Carmy: Yeah.
We'll see Sydney do this again in season 4 with Cicero:
Cicero: What's [your mother] doing now?
Sydney: Oh, uh...Nothing. She's been passed away for some time now. Yeah.
Cicero: Oh. When she, uh...? When'd she pass?
Sydney: I was five. Its...
Cicero: Oh, fuck. Syd, I'm sorry. No. Apologies.
Sydney: Its okay. Its fine. Thank you. Um, I should probably get back inside though.
Note: Sydney gives Carmy and Cicero two different ages for how old she was when her mother died. I don't think there's anything nefarious in this but rather an illustration of how trauma affects memory, particularly when it was experienced as young as Syd was.
This is Sydney doing her best to move Cicero along with his condolences ("Its okay. Its fine."). But Cicero pushes with Syd. He doesn't let her off the hook so easily to go box spoons. He tells her all the ways that he appreciates her and then says something I imagine she's wanted to hear for a long time: that if her mother was still alive, Syd would make her proud:
Cicero: Your mother would be very happy with the way you turned out.
Sydney: Thanks, Unc. *hugs Cicero*
Similar to Syd pushing Carmy past the scary prospect of reckoning with his grief, Cicero gently pushes Sydney a little beyond her comfort zone in discussing some of the loss she's experienced in her life. Both Carm and Syd exhibit emotional revelations in the course of these conversations. Carmy has a number during 4x10 including as described above. Syd's revelation is much more subdued. She refers to Cicero as "Unc" like the rest of the Berzattos do and hugs him. Outside of Carmy and her father, this is first time Syd has initiated a hug on this show. Its also the first time she's referred to Cicero as "Unc", a familial term of endearment. Its almost as if at this point in the show, Syd has turned a corner in accepting The Bear and the Berzattos as family, as people she might come to depend on and love (a breakthrough for her, as avoidant as she is). In my view, what ends up happening for both Carmy and Syd is that they feel seen (to differing degrees) in their grief and loss by those pushing them to look closer at those things.
For Syd, the loss in her life and her grief are pushed into frame when folks like Carmy and Cicero offer their condolences to her, but unlike Carmy in 4x10, Syd is able to move them along pretty quickly. After all, the condolences are given in comparatively calmer circumstances than the alley fight in 4x10. But by the end of 4x05, Syd has been confronted with an event that throws her past and her grief into sharp relief: Emmanuel's heart attack and hospitalisation.
I suspect, like @freedelusionshere, that next season we'll be witness to Syd reckoning with her past as a result of being pushed well beyond her comfort zone in a few ways: in running The Bear as EC, in Carmy's increased desire to push and explore his relationship with her outside of the restaurant (because we know that it is Carmy who will have to make the first move while Syd's avoidance kicks into gear), and also because of the scare of losing her father in S4. I suspect this reckoning will be deeply uncomfortable for Syd but also for the audience who has largely been witness to her character as the super high-functioning, incredibly capable, glue holding The Bear together. I suspect that misogynoir will undoubtedly rear its head as audiences are faced with a Black woman in her wholeness on their screens.
We’ve already gotten a taste of the storm raging inside Syd in S4: her babbling disclosures to her niece TJ in 4x04, her tearful confession about the fear of losing her father in 4x06 and that Barefoot Contessa and Red Shoes-fuelled nightmare in 4x08. These glimpses are like cracks in the facade, a look past the very hurdles that Syd has put up to protect her heart: her hyper-independence and her avoidant nature, as @jlogical writes so beautifully about here.
These hurdles are actually trauma responses and its likely that Syd first developed them as a result of seeing her mother unwell with lupus, before losing her to the disease, and then subsequently witnessing the fallout of that loss on her father.
Syd is SO SO dear to me - and to many others in the fandom - precisely because of her history and how her trauma manifests (hyper-independent daughters/BIPOC women working in industries dominated by white men, stand up /sob).
For me, Syd's minimising of her grief in order to keep things moving and not be a burden is incredibly triggering (I actually held off writing meta about it because of how close it is to my own lived experience). In the show, we see Syd minimising her grief when she tries to move Carmy and Cicero off topic after they express their condolences to her in S2 and S4. We also see it in 4x06, when Syd speaks to Claire:
Sydney: [...] my mom passed when I was really young and, like, its fine. Like, you know, its obviously, like...I know that and I knew then. I understood it, but, like, I don't think I ever thought like...Like, if my dad, like...Just like...*trails off as she begins to cry*
Worthy
And I wonder if, on top of not wanting to be a burden, Syd feels that she didn't and still doesn't deserve to grieve her mother's death. I wonder this because of how she minimises her experience ("its fine", "it was a while ago"), her reluctance to accept condolences, and her admission to Claire that she thinks its unfair that Emmanuel has to worry about her. Coupling all of this with how hard it would have been as a child to see her mother die of lupus - a disease that can be so painful and debilitating - and watch her father likely caring for and then mourning her mother, I can imagine Syd deprioritising her grief because it might have felt self-indulgent or burdensome on others.
In this, Syd mirrors Carmy, who we find out in 4x07, felt that he did not deserve to be at Mikey's funeral:
Carmy: I wasn't around.
Lee: Whats that mean?
Carmy: I think I mean that I left. Um. I left everybody else to deal with everything.
Lee: So, uh, you, uh didn't deserve to be there? Is that what you're saying?
Carmy: Yeah. Something like that.
I can see a path that both Syd and Carmy have taken, beginning with neither feeling that they deserved to grieve and ending a short while later in feeling like they need to be worthy of love. This road might not seem like a logical one but let me try to explain:
Denying one's grief because you do not think your feelings are "important" enough to be felt, particularly when compared to the pain of others, is a slippery slope to feeling that you need to earn your right to feel anything, including love.
Syd's fear of failure (and corresponding need for approval) that she tells us about in 4x07, is immediately tied to her need to be seen as worthy of love. Because failing at running a restaurant means failing at not being a burden means failing at being someone who is worthy of being loved. And its this catastrophising belief that we hear a wild-eyed, Ina-Gartenified Syd squeak at us during her nightmare in 4x08:
Sydney: And then, you're gonna take a perfect little sliver of chive, put that all on top, and it'll be great. And of course, if your dish fails, its no worry at all, no trouble, really. You'll just be a complete waste of space and a failure and a disappointment to anybody who's devoted any time or energy to you.
There's someone else that we've met on The Bear that shares Syd's fear of failure and need for approval: Genie Kwon, baker extraordinaire of Chicago's Kasama (yes that Kasama of S2).
Despite Carmy standing Syd up at Kasama in S2, we only meet Genie in the last episode of season 3 at the Ever funeral, where she shares her reason for getting into cooking:
Genie Kwon: And then, growing up, you know, my parents were never in a good place, but I always knew that I could make something so specific that would bring them joy, you know? And that was the thing I got addicted to and I think that I seek approval out of people every single day.
Notably, when Genie tells us that she seeks approval out of people every day, the camera pans to Syd, and only Syd:
Given all of the above, I don't think this camera choice was an accident (it never is on this show).
In the Nick Cavalier documentary Kasama (available to watch here on YouTube - highly recommend. Shoutout to @thoughtfulchaos773 and @currymanganese for putting me onto this film), Genie Kwon provides more context for her brief observations in 3x10. She tells us that her parents survived war, emigrated to America and built a life from nothing. Genie also says the following in the doco which made me think of Sydney, and also of Carmy:
There's a lot of guilt which I had never heard of until I saw an Anthony Bourdain episode where he went to Korea and there was a word for it. They call it 'Han' and its this word for like 'the sorrow and hopelessness of every generation that's come before you that's embedded in your DNA' [...] I heard- I heard it and I was watching it and my brain- well yeah, I had a flashback of every- my entire life like in this montage when I saw that episode. [...] There were just so so many things I think were out of my control. [Cooking] was the one thing that I could do. If it came out right in the way that I wanted to have an end result that [...] I was happy with. [...] There's probably like some deep skeletons down there that kind of turned itself into this craft that I do but it can either go one way or it could go another way and you know luckily, hopefully it turned into something positive.
Hearing the above excerpt from Genie reminded me of the themes of chaos and consistency in The Bear and how by 4x10, it is canon that Carmy became a chef in order to not deal with other aspects of his life, or put another way, to process other aspects of his life. This confirmed my suspicion (which I wrote about last year in this meta) that Carmy became a chef to assert control and master consistency after having grown up amongst so much chaos.
I think the same is likely true for Sydney in that there was so much about her childhood beyond her control and cooking might have been a way for her to take some of that control back. In fact, Syd tells Carmy in 4x10 that she too is part of the club of people who became cooks so as not to address other things in their lives.
Given the inclusion of Kasama in S2 and S3 of this show, I reckon S5 (or S6 if we get it) is going to logically lead to Syd and Carmy joining another club: chefs loving one another, feeding their community and sharing a life, together. Just like Genie Kwon and her partner Tim Flores.
You are enough
Next season, I hope we get to see Syd and Carmy realise that they are both worthy of love not because of what they do but because of who they are - that each and every one of us deserves to love and be loved and deserves to mourn - to grieve - lest our love disappear deep into our being and get stuck in our ribs, in our hearts, and in our lungs, trapped there by our own hurdles.
