pretty, odd & confused

LADY BIRD & MY ENDLESS GROWING PAINS

“You didn't know how to raise me any more than I know how to grow up. And childhood is over, and it wasn't enough.” — Goodbye Rocketship by Maya Hawke

I grew up in the Christian faith, which mostly meant that every Sunday I would sit with a bunch of other kids and listen to stories I found incredibly boring.

But mostly, I remember the beginning. I remember being told that everything I knew had come to be by God's hand. Even then, I knew they were giving me a watered-down version of something much bigger, but I didn't care. That was the story I connected with. "Let there be light" He said, and so there was. And He saw that it was good.

I remember being fascinated by what the adults were being told inside the actual church. I wondered why I wasn't allowed in. What separated them from me?

A few times I managed to make my way inside, and I would take any chance I got to listen to the sermons. I couldn't have been older than five or seven, and I understood almost none of it. Still, I fell in love with the words. With the emotion and the tears. With the pages of the Bible, so thin and white, handled with such reverence.

I was so excited to learn how to read because I wanted to read the Bible myself. I wanted to know what was inside it. I wanted more than whatever the little box they had put me in could give me. I was hungry for answers.

So I read and I talked, and I used big words and gave big speeches about what I read, but none of it was ever really known to me. I was chasing the feeling I saw in other people.

For the longest time I didn't know how to reconcile religion with wanting more than what it seemed to offer. Or with depression, or identity, or addiction and some days I still don't know. Of course I've grown since then. I've learned and I've changed for the better. I can't sit here and pretend that I haven't met the God I was preached about as a child. I have. But I also can't pretend I didn't meet Him in places the church told me not to look.

I have found my faith in many things (music, in art, in films, in poetry) and so many places (drunk at a party, sitting on a bench beside strangers, laughing with my friends) I've found it in people out in the world, far away from the pews. And this is the one thing I have come to believe most strongly: God will meet those hated by the church somewhere better than that.

My point is that whatever type of religion, faith, belief you have or lack thereof, it will become a big part of who you are and your relationship to others.

Lady Bird does an excellent job at portraying this, both through its characters and through the film itself. There is something deeply comforting about it being the voice for so many girls who have felt this way. Something important about hearing it by someone else first, a deep approval that says: you are allowed to want more. And not only are you allowed to want it, but sometimes you must. You must run and run and run if you want to survive.

It's almost radical to realize that sometimes survival is movement. Sometimes to grow you have to go through the door, get on the road, buy that plane ticket. Sometimes you have to go.

This film is part of what I've wanted to say for such a long time. The first time I saw it, I was fifteen, and that little girl didn't have the words or the guts to say any of this but I do now. I turned nineteen last month, and I have done nothing but look back. As I'm granted the blessing to do so, I call back to memory my last year of high school.

The big moments and the little ones. I call back my friends and my ex-friends, the way we fell out as I pushed them all away, and how everything I knew to be safe seemed to disappear with them. Call back applying to college. Call back the smell of wet dirt and playing games in the rain. The person I was and am not anymore. I call back the prom I didn't attend because of how crushed my world was.

Call back to how that day my mother took me to the mall and was so gentle and kind to me. The pity in her apologetic eyes for what I was going through.

I remember how small the world felt, how everything was closing in on itself. How so many things were ending, coming to a stop, becoming bygone days, things that would no longer be mine. Everything was getting smaller and meaner and I had nowhere to go, so of course the only place I wanted was out. Anywhere but that house and that town.

Anywhere. But where exactly?

I have asked my mother countless times if she likes me. “Of course I love you. I want you to be the very best version of yourself that you can be.” But what do we do when this loud, angry and irrevocably naïve girl is all I know how to be? Do you like her, or do you like what she could become? And if you love the person she might become, how much of that is because she might become what you never did?

To be loved by your parents is a privilege that not many get. Privilege against miracle. To be liked by your mother is a miracle.

What can I ever do to just be me and not the pieces of herself that she put into me? Willingly or not, I am a reflection of her, and it terrifies me that it can go both ways.

There are things I will simply never share with her. Parts of me that other people gave me, parts I gave myself. Some of them are beautiful but none of them are for her eyes.

It's like the secrets you have with specific friends. Different people bring out different parts of you, and no one person is ever going to unlock all of you. So you give away little pieces wherever they fit, and you receive pieces of other people in return. And it is beautiful that way.

But there things I don't know if I'll ever have the courage to speak about to anyone I share blood with, or to anyone who truly matters.

All my life I've been suffocated by the reality in which I live, love for me can be something to carry. And I find magic in sharing some of my truths with people who don't live in my heart. Seeing in the face of strangers how meaningless it is to them what, to me, is sacred. It is freeing and it is light.

Greta Gerwig achieved a level of honesty that feels like that too. I know myself in Lady Bird in almost every aspect of who she is, because I am exactly the same.

I have lived on the wrong side of the tracks all my life. I’ve outgrown the home my mother worked so hard to give me, and I scramble to find one anywhere but at her side.

And she has a big heart, warm and scary. Her good traits can be true without erasing the ways in which she can be cruel, and given the choice, I would rather build a life in another country than ever sit across a table from her again

And she knows that I want more. She knows what I am won't grow well at home. I am starving for freedom. For snow and wind. I want green trees and breakfasts and peace and a life where I am not being judged all the time. I want to feel like I can come as I am and be enough, without begging.

Doesn't it account for something? That I want more.

“Try not to mistake what you have with what you hate, it could leave. It could leave come the morning.”

My ex-best friend's name is Celeste. She meant the world to me, and we knew each other in a way I hadn't known any of my other friends. But she was so angry and I got angry too, and eventually we were just at war. I miss her every day, but when I had her, I wanted more. More from her. More from my hometown. More from my family. More and more and more.

And I'd like to say I'm sorry — to anyone who might be reading this — that I was so shitty to you when we were supposed to be friends. I was too worried about myself. I was so desperate to shed this skin, to tear it off and find another one that fit over my own bones. Well, you should know that in doing so, I left myself naked and unprotected.

Yeah, he wasn't the one. And what I gave will never mean to him what it meant for me.

And I wasn't sorry that I wanted more then, but I am now. Mom I’m sorry for wanting more. I'm so bad, I know I am, but please just talk to me.

I thought the world was getting too small for me to fit all my dreams and ambitions, but it was me that was getting bigger. And there is nothing wrong with the biology of it. You will grow and evolve. It happens. It happened.

Congratulations, you were right.

Growing up is glorious, but now you know it can also be lonely and scary. So what now? What do we do when we're just so sorry and grateful? How do we move forward?

Maybe you go to church again one day. Maybe you finally call back your father because you realize it is only in the absence, in missing someone, that you finally find enough room to forgive them. And then you're not just sorry, but you're also forgiving.

You forgive your ex-friends. You forgive yourself.

What I'm trying to say with all of this is that I know one day I will be able to look my mother in the eyes again. Today is not that day and it won't be for a long time, but I know it will come.

That is part of what faith has given me: the ability to believe in what I cannot see yet. I found my faith in my people and in the beauty of the world around me. I've seen God as I get in the shower to try and rinse the alcohol and the vomit off me. I've seen Him in the places where I thought I was furthest away. I know there is more out there, and I know it is out there for me to grab.

I know we can create and give back, and Thank God We Do.

It is in creation that we find identity and light within ourselves, and when you know your identity then you can share your truth and have intimacy with someone else. That intimacy is what gives us a community.

But when you cannot have that kind of intimacy with the streets of Sacramento, with its old buildings and bends you've known your whole life. Or with its people, people you can no longer share a room with, then all that's left to do is leave. So you leave.

And it is only in the wake of devastation and loneliness, in that deafening clarity that comes with silence when you're finally alone, that you realize that's just what you want.

Gotta do more. Gotta be more.

Faith is something you don't always find at an altar, or in your mother's arms. Sometimes it is simply the thing that gives you enough courage to pick up the phone, punch in the digits, and give it one last try.

It lets you look at your life and say: this was good. All the blood and sweat, all this disaster. It is mine. It allows you to love the littler things.

“You write about Sacramento so affectionately, and with such care.”
“Well, I was just describing it.”
“Well, it comes across as love,”
“Sure. I guess I pay attention.”
“Don’t you think maybe they are the same thing— love and attention?”

I hope that one day when I am far enough away to see the whole thing, I will look back at this life the way Marion looks at Sacramento on that drive, the screen moving back and forth between her and her daughter.

Because at the end of the day, we are not so different, are we?

I hope one day you finally understand that leaving did not mean I hated you. I just had to get far enough away to forgive you.

I'm sorry and I love you. All we can do is try