I Feel Like I've Been In A Coma For The Past Twenty Years, And I'm Just Now Waking Up

I was fourteen when American Beauty first came out. My mom took me to go see it in the theater at my request. I’m fairly certain that at fourteen, I was more interested in seeing the movie for the involvement of “teen stars” Thora Birch and Mena Suvari, than I was about seeing it for any kind of artistic merit. I don’t think I had yet realized that movies were supposed to be, allowed to be, an art form. I hadn’t yet realized there were threads and layers and meanings within entertainment. I hadn’t yet realized it wasn’t about the cast at all. It was about a deeper significance that resides in each of us. In my ignorance, I missed the point completely.

I watched it again a few days ago for the first time since that day I had wandered into the theater with my mother. It was as though I had never seen it before, and yet, it was so familiar, so comforting, as though I had seen it play over and over again in my head for the past six years. I hadn’t understood it as a child, hadn’t been able to encompass all of the pain and beauty of being grown up, of living an ordinary life. I hadn’t experienced that in my own life yet. As a child, I was still idealistic about growing older. I didn’t understand how people ended up in places they hadn’t expected, in lives they never wanted. I still naively believed that being ordinary was a choice.

Six years later, the movie spoke to me. I understood. I sympathized. I felt the pain and beauty of it all. It made me realize how much I’ve changed, how much I’ve grown. Within the movie, I saw the beauty of the floating bag, the dead bird, the roses. I saw the way the horrible and pathetic and depressing could be made beautiful through open eyes and minds and hearts. I saw the importance of perspective. As I sat thinking about it, I realized the importance of my perspective. The movie hadn’t changed from the story I had originally had no emotional attachment to. I had changed. I had become the kind of person who could relate to seeing beauty in simplicity, to feeling ordinary, to wanting more. It made me realize how relative everything is. The whole world is about perspective.

This morning I picked up my favorite Billy Collins poetry book and began reading. Generally, I read the same ten or so favorites over and over again, but today I started reading the ones I hadn’t looked upon since I first bought it. I had dismissed them after not feeling anything the first few times I read them over, making the decision that I disliked them. Today, for whatever reason, I retrieved these poems from the ambivalent limbo I had sent them to, and began to listen more closely to what they had to say. I found new favorites. Favorites with layers and depths that put my previous favorites to shame. I had misjudged them. I hadn’t been ready to truly understand them. My perspective didn’t enable me to.

It’s strange to think of a time when I saw the world differently than I do now. I’m always amazed at the riches I find in the most ordinary of things simply because my life has changed in some way. I forget that I’ve grown up. I forget that I wasn’t always ready and willing to see the world for what it is, to allow myself to feel things for what they are. There isn’t beauty exclusively in a bag or a rose or a poem. We assign these things beauty. We project our beauty onto them and they reflect it back on us. The beauty comes from somewhere within ourselves, which can be painful and overwhelming and utterly amazing. American Beauty rings true; it hurts to allow yourself to experience the world, but it’s fantastic to feel that kind of anguish. It means that you’re alive. It means that you’re understanding. It means that you’re beautiful.

It’s hard not to feel gratitude for such grandeur. It’s hard to feel ordinary when you truly understand that everything is extraordinary. Our world, our relationships, our lives. Sometimes it seems impossible that I ever lost sight of their beauty, that there was a time in my life when I couldn’t understand it. Yet even now, the road ahead seems so much longer than the road I’ve already traveled, as if I’ve only begun to understand all there is to know. I have a long way to go before I have discovered just how astonishing this crazy existence is. I wonder if I’ll ever know. I wonder what movies I’ll relate to then, what poems I’ll fall in love with. I wonder what treasures I’ll find, buried somewhere within the depths of me.