I’m sure we’ve all been told many times that life is not a movie. Of course we all know this, and even though my life can be incomprehensibly strange sometimes, and I’m often just as embarrassing as a girl from a rom-com (this is the main way I know life isn’t a movie––usually in movies if someone is as embarrassing as me a hot guy comes along and finds their weirdness interesting, but, no, Zac Efron has entered my life, yet. *fingers crossed*). The fact is, life just isn’t a movie. As much as we wish our romanticized ideas and hopes would come to fruition just the way we want them to, they won’t.
The thing that makes movies so appealing is that you don’t have to see all the waiting. In real life, you spend about 20 percent of your time doing and 80 percent waiting. (Note: That is not a real statistic. I just made that up.) The point is, we spend a lot of time waiting, but we’re so used to seeing things happen right away that we wonder if in our waiting nothing is actually happening. Especially now that we live in an age where everything is so instant it makes people even more impatient about their lives. We don’t realize that things probably are happening for us and we just aren’t able to see them yet. There are so many things that we don’t even realize are in store for us, but a lot of times we ruin it by being too impatient to wait for the good that’s coming our way.
Another thing about movies is that they make us think that change is instant. Very rarely is that the case in real life, though. Have you ever noticed how, in movies, there’s always the emotional climax? You know, someone has this moment where they’ve had enough of keeping their emotions in, and they just let them out. They cry and they tell everyone how they feel, and they wake up the next morning and everything is different. It’s like they’re living in a whole new world. Like all it took was spilling your feelings and the world suddenly becomes a different place where the sun is brighter and the people are happier. Well, life doesn’t work quite that way. (Trust me, I’ve tried.) Most of the time in the real world what happens is you spill your heart out and then you wake up and things are exactly the same. Sure, you’re not suppressing your emotions anymore but nothing has actually changed. And then after realizing that spilling your heart out didn’t actually do much instead of doing something different to make a change, we bottle up our emotions again and wait for another dramatic climax moment to come along hoping that this time it will change something. Spoiler Alert: It doesn’t.
In movies things just happen so easily, and I think a lot of times we expect things to happen like that for us. But like we’ve all heard a million times, life isn’t a movie. It takes work to make your life the way you want it, and even putting in all the work you can life’s never going to be some cookie-cutter picture on a magazine. Life’s more like the blurry image where no one is looking straight at the camera, and the baby’s crying and your little brother is yawning, and the dog is trying to bite you. It’s a mess, but when you look back on it, it will make you smile.
Life is a messy journey, and it’s completely unpredictable. No one knows what’s going to happen next because in an instant one decision can change your entire life. Of course, you probably won’t realize it changed your life until a few years down the road. The reason life is so different from movies is because we’re not bystanders in it, we’re the main characters, we’re the driving force the moves the story forward. We’re living the best kind of movie there ever will be by just being alive and yet we spend all our time wishing our lives could be different, or more like what we see on the screens. I say it’s time to accept that things are never going to be exactly like we see in the movies or think in our heads, but that’s what makes life so beautiful and exciting. One of my favorite artists Sleeping, at Last, says it best in his song "Saturn:" “How rare and beautiful it truly is that we exist.” So let’s embrace this craziness, and let our lives be as beautiful and rare as the fact that we even exist is.
