A Severance Reflection: The Helly in Us
Unpacking Our Inner Lumon
(Quick heads-up: spoilers ahead if you haven't fallen down the rabbit hole of Severance)
That jarring jolt of consciousness on Lumon's sterile table wasn't just Helly waking up. It was a primal eruption of the desire to escape, a feeling that resonated with my own battles against the walls I unknowingly build.
What strikes me is how clearly she sees the hamster wheel of their severed lives. This clarity seems to have fogged over for the Lumon lifers, who are so deep in the routine they're practically married to it. Her desperate need to escape that sterile prison reminds me of our own gut reaction to the invisible boxes we build for ourselves, even if our walls are made of endless to-do lists and draining commutes.
Like Helly’s naive belief in a quick exit – thinking she can just ask to leave – I think what I've often noticed is how we enter draining jobs, those relationships that feel like wearing a mask, or a life path someone else designed for us, with this tiny spark of hope for a fast-forward button to the destination we think we’re after. But surprise, surprise, the walls start closing in, and suddenly "later" feels like "never."
Helly's early attempts to break free are almost sweet in their cluelessness. Her polite requests vanish into thin air, met with empty smiles and protocols that sound like they were written by robots on happy pills. She genuinely thinks the simple logic of wanting her own life back will… you know… work.
I think what I've seen in myself and others is that same initial bewilderment when starting something that feels off, like a wrong note in a song. That little voice whispers, "This isn't my jam." I remember with each promotion, there was this quiet "Are you sure?" inside me, not the voice of self-doubt, but more like the insistent rerouting of a GPS when you've taken a wrong turn. Looking back, I recognize it as my intuition trying to steer me back, but how many other times did I silence that voice, letting practicality win or prioritizing an image others held of me? We tell ourselves it's just a phase, we'll learn the steps, we'll find a way to be us in this new environment. But the days turn into a blur, that initial resistance fades like a cheap tattoo, and the exit sign feels like it's on another planet.
What I found so captivating about Helly in those early episodes was her refusal to just drink the Kool-Aid – or in this case, the weirdly cheerful Lumon juice. Her sharp comebacks, those little sarcastic jabs at the Stepford-level enthusiasm, feel like a tiny rebellion, a mental middle finger. It’s a tactic I think many of us have used, navigating the daily circus of our own lives with a healthy dose of "Can you believe this?" cynicism or dark humor.
In the fluorescent-lit rat race of office life, in the Groundhog Day loop of meetings and emails, a shared eye-roll or a morbid joke can feel like a small victory, a way to hold onto a shred of sanity. But let’s be real…does this humor truly unshackle us, or does it just become another layer of existential duct tape, a way to avoid admitting we’re slowly turning into Mark? Are we laughing our way to freedom, or just numbing the slow creep of complacency? Why is it so easy to settle? Is it the comfort of the familiar, the fear of the unknown, or the weight of external expectations? Or are we so plugged into the matrix that we no longer question anything? What are the subtle ways you might be choosing comfort over your authentic self?
The way Lumon treats the severed workers like overgrown toddlers - the baby talk language, the color-coded feelings, the gold stars, the waffle parties for doing the bare minimum - is deeply unsettling. But isn’t this no different than the free doughnut and pizza parties? And it made me think about the subtle ways we experience that same slow stripping of our adult power in our own lives.
Let not forget the fact that they don't even know what it is they do. They move data, refine numbers, but the why is a void. How often are we grinding away at tasks, the meaning and value of our contribution lost in the daily churn? We feel like cogs in a machine, asking ourselves in the quiet moments, "What is this all for?"
Perhaps the slow erosion of our inner compass stems from becoming too reliant on a system and constantly seeking external approval – that raise, that promotion, that fleeting pat on the back. We get so used to looking outside for validation, for the "right" way to do things, that the quiet wisdom within us gets drowned out by the noise of expectations. Think about it - being written up for being five minutes late, having to wait for an arbitrarily scheduled break to use the bathroom, vacation requests casually declined. The list goes on. In adulthood, are we really that different from kids constantly asking for permission? We become docile, slowly falling back asleep to the quiet tyranny of these systems. Over time our thoughts become numbed as we seek to fit in with the herd. The scary thought of making our own calls, of trusting our own intuition without the safety net of a pre-approved path, becomes paralyzing. We fill the silence with endless scrolling, with the curated realities of social media, with the urgent demands of a world that profits from our distraction – anything to avoid the quiet, sometimes uncomfortable, work of tuning into our own truth, the very source of the answers we're desperately seeking. Inside Lumon, the innies are managed like kids needing constant hand-holding, their independence traded for blindly following tasks that seem designed to suck their souls dry. This feels eerily familiar to those times we let external forces call all the shots, forgetting we have a steering wheel of our own.
Then there is the breakout room and Lumon's brand of mind games, feels like a twisted funhouse mirror reflecting the internal battles we all face and how we gaslight ourselves. That constant pressure to fit in, to swallow the thoughts that rock the boat, can build our own internal "time-out corners" where our true selves get sent to sit and be quiet. No wonder after work you're utterly drained, your own life constantly postponed. All day long, you're performing this heavy internal suppression, "severing" yourself bit by bit. You're constantly selling yourself the lie that a life of quiet complacency is somehow "good" or "enough”.
Perhaps the most chillingly familiar parallel lies in the messed-up dynamic between Helly’s innie and her outtie. That moment Helly watches the video message, her other self coldly declaring "You are not a person", felt like a punch to the gut. It forced me to consider how often do we do that to ourselves? We numb the anxiety with endless scrolling, bury the sadness under comfort food, and chase likes while our inner voice is screaming for attention. We become experts at ignoring our intuition, those gut feelings, effectively telling a part of ourselves, "Shut up, you're not helping". What does that make us, when we become the architects of our own internal silencing? Where do we begin to take accountability?
Ultimately Helly’s journey in Severance's first season is a potent, albeit unsettling, allegory for the subtle ways we perform our own internal severances. We might not have a fancy brain chip, but the compromises we make, the dreams we quietly bury, and the inner critics we let run the show can create just as deep a divide within our own skin. As we watch the Lumon workers being treated like children and Helly's outtie rejecting her inner self, we’re forced to confront the uncomfortable question. Are we, in our own lives, allowing external pressures and internal fears to build our personal version of Lumon, dimming our own damn lights and filing away our authentic selves into a filing cabinet? The big scary question that remains is can we find our own personal override code, a way to break free and reclaim our unsevered existence, to finally acknowledge and fiercely honor the entirety of who the hell we are? The journey back to our unsevered selves begins with the courage to listen to that inner voice, the one we've so often tried to silence.