A Week of Little Thoughts About Life
One of the biggest mistakes I’ve ever made is letting my daughter read and watch the Twilight series the summer before 6th grade. Since then, she’s been a romance maniac. She loves to read and watch anything about romance and I can only hope that I’ve broadened her taste from Twilight and Titanic by adding in Mystic Pizza and Moonstruck. (Oh my God, I had no idea I loved Italians in love until I just wrote that sentence.)
So, it was in the vein of movies about love that she’s been jonesing to see the Bradley Cooper/Lady Gaga remake of A Star Is Born. Which we watched the other night. She loved it — the exquisite tragedy of their romance. I hated it.
It felt like going to work.
Depression, addiction, suicide. For a therapist, this is not what I would call entertainment, this is what I call sad.
I am a big advocate of stories. Stories, movies, song lyrics, fiction and poetry help us understand other people’s point of view and put ourselves in their shoes. It expands our understanding of the human experience and ignites our imagination — what would it have felt like to be second class on the Titanic? What would it feel like to get up on stage and sing a song for the first time in front of a stadium of people?
I spend many hours a week deeply imagining what it would be like to lose a father to suicide or cope with a child’s diagnosis with autism or live with a husband who seemed not to care that I’d been diagnosed with Parkinson’s.
I love my work. My work has made me who I am in so many ways. But in my free time, I don’t want to imagine what it’s like to hurt.
Sometimes, I like to watch very frivolous things like The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills (Camille is the WORST!). I like to be funny and silly as much as possible. I don’t like to borrow tragedy.
Mostly, the stories I find myself drawn to seem to draw out both the comic and the tragic. One of my very favorite movies is Little Miss Sunshine. One reason for this is that I can identify with each member of the family, but mostly the teenage boy.
I have an inner teenage persona who often shows up around the holidays. This angsty version of me is strikingly like the teenage boy in the movie The stress of the holidays, the time commitments, the rushing current from one family gathering to the next, the heightened feelings of family members — I draw on that teenager to be my pal — “Welcome to Hell” he writes on a sign that he holds up to show his uncle when his uncle comes to stay at their house after a failed love affair and suicide attempt. It never fails to both crack me up and comfort me. Do we all feel like this about our family sometimes? I am sure my son feels the same way when I am driving he and his friends to a movie.
But the glory of that movie is that each one of them is pursuing their dreams, showing up totally flawed, and in the end — through failure, death, tears, and laughter, they come together to love and support one another. They embrace their own chaos and foibles… and they dance.
In the 1700s, a philosopher named Horace Walpole wrote, “Life is a comedy to those who think, a tragedy to those who feel.” I get what he is saying — certainly a defense against becoming overwhelmed with suffering is a sense of humor.
So no, I didn’t see Manchester by the Sea. And I didn’t read Room. There are a lot of stories about bad and sad that I will not choose for entertainment.
I don’t see life as a comedy. That is simply insensitive. But I don’t see it as wholly tragic either.
What I see, is that we people are a mess.
We have immense potentials for good and for bad.
We don’t have as much control as we think we have.
There are forces at work far beyond our knowing.
There will always be horror; there will always be light.
I try to laugh, love and dance when I can.
Spoiler Alert: This is the end of Little Miss Sunshine — you have to watch to the end.
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