It kills me how your mind can make you feel so worthless, so before you go…..
The girl who tried to figure out her life from the movies. Who tried to learn about healthy versus unhealthy. I’ve been teased my whole life about a variety of things. I’ve often wondered what has made me such a target for that. Do I wear a sign?
“The music you listen to is always so sad.” Teased about my romantic comedies or watching movies, listening to songs, on repeat.
The truth is those were my friends. That’s how pathologically lonely I was. Those were the closest things I had to connection. Just another 80’s kid raised by the boob tube. That was my most innocuous “parent”.
So this morning I’m thinking of how certain movies shaped periods of time in my life and how they represented what I wanted most and many aspects of who I was, that I didn’t yet know. Like an archaeologist trying to discover myself and create myself.
And with the movies came the music, Pink, Lewis Capaldi, Andy Grammar, Calum Scott, XX Ambassadors (I can’t tell how many times I’ve listened to Unsteady) Kelly Clarkson Piece by Piece and so many more…..
2016 was characterized by a few main movies. Stuck in Love. The Vow. Julie and Julia. The Holiday. And Me Before you. These movies represented what I wanted that I didn’t feel I had, and who I was that I didn’t know as well. Meryl Streep and Stanley Tucci, graceful in their love through thick and thin. I wanted to have that and I wanted to be it.
“We don’t talk to each other like that”, the Vow. So much in there… a woman who left her family for its toxicity and found healing in love and then tragedy hits them anyway, and can they find their way back to each other. After a traumatic brain injury she forgets why she left her family and that’s of course what she seeks comfort in, what she goes back to, and why she left and her love with her husband is lost with the accident. Will she find her way back? He has to watch her knowing why she left in the first place and his only choice is to watch her have to figure it out herself, as he stands there having lost everything.
Stuck in love, a young writer feels everything so much. He’s sensitive and different and falls in love for the first time with an addict and the pain that is involved in that. While his writer father and sister navigate their own stuff.
Me Before You. Can a person with a special spirit and zest for living even while having very little, help a quadriplegic who never wanted for anything reclaim his will to live when he can’t live the way he used to. Can he help convince her there is more to life outside her little bubble. Live bravely Clark.
The Holiday. Cameron Diaz tries to be able to cry (this was me at one point) to be anything but a workaholic, while across the world Rose McGowan travels the perils of unrequited love and her brother tries to navigate being a single dad and feeling if anyone could ever love all of them as a package. They cross paths and learn and try for love amidst the wreckage. People finding themselves.
So much pain inherent in the human experience.
I watched from the outside, nose pressed to the glass of the proverbial fish tank. The screen of a television. Are the answers in there somewhere? How could the answers for my life be in someone else’s? But where else was I supposed to learn from.
So considering I patched together an identity loosely from anything I could get my hands on. Tv, watching people, my thoughts, but never anything consistent. There was never anything consistent except fear. Anxiety was my other companion. Movies, television, and anxiety. And I watched everyone and everything to try to crack some code. How to survive?
Looking back I did it well I think. But in it, in it I was always wrong or bad. Always running from the bad inside me that must have been to not have connections like other people did. Why did they have them and I didn’t? I was bad by default. I begged to be seen and loved, and then the world came along and asked me why I tried so hard. And told me I was too intense, too this, too sensitive. Too little of this and too much of that. I was always wrong.
Always trying to prove I was good, I wasn’t a burden, I was worth loving. God it hurts and then shamed on top for every behavior I ever used to survive. I think that’s the worst part.
So my movies of 2020 (the end of 2020 most of it I didn’t watch anything). Five Feet Apart. The Greatest Showman. The Secret Life of Pets. Silver Linings Playbook. Mermaids. And Life Itself.
The 2016 movies were what I wanted to create for myself, what I longed for. What I tried to make. And when that all fell apart without my own solid identity, the 2020 movies were part what I needed…
Touch, to believe in what I was capable of accomplishing, to accept myself the way I am as is (“can you say the same fucker, can you love all your dirty parts”), to be adopted to belong, and that when life brings you to your knees, when you’re lower than you think you can ever go, if you stand back up, you’ll always find love.
I needed to find mine. Because I was just existing to be useful, and I was never going to create my own destiny or write my story unless I could be connected to myself.
I didn’t even know anything about that. But the world expected me to. It’s a given right? It wasn’t for me, and rarely does anyone truly see that about me.
And when you try to figure out your life from the movies that feels insane and bad and wrong. I was supposed to have my own identity and since I didn’t I must be fucked up right ? Missing some important thing that other people just seemed to have. So much shame.
How could I do that to myself for the things I developed to make it out alive.
Also when you try to figure out your life from the movies as it turns out you can act like you’re in one and live in short snippets characterized by dramatic changes and never realize the full impact.
I figured that out this past year. I figured out a lot of things besides just how to not chew spearmint gum while wearing a mask and sunglasses, and how to survive the apocalypse. After my life it’s going to take a lot more to do me in.
I’ve been searching my whole life for consistency in connection outside myself, when it was there with me all along. This blog post is probably incredibly disjointed just like my mind. When I think it it’s beautiful and organized and poetic, when it comes out through my shattered parts, you’ll have to make a mosaic…. just like I have.
Click your heels three times Christina, there’s no place like home.