Young Adult
I wanted to see this movie for the longest time. Before I even knew what it was about, it was the title for me. Young Adult. To use the name of the genre for the title of her script/movie, only Diablo Cody. The way she has with words, synonyms, and double meanings, I’m in awe.
My love affair with Cody is a widely known fact. She feeds me with her work and drags feelings out of me.
The way she writes about life; raw, blatantly, with absolutely no restraint, and more importantly, just stating out loud - this life we’re all trying to figure out is just too damn confusing and it’s ok not to feel the way society is telling us to feel.
I’m an adult. Or I should be, according to my age, so they say. They, who are they that say this? I absolutely have no clue who’s making all these rules of life and how it should be, how we should be. They say you should feel a certain way, act a certain way, be a certain way, wish certain things, have these emotions that are supposed to be mature, calm, and organized; but no one tells you what to do if you don’t feel all, or any of this.
What do you do when you don’t feel like an adult, but you have to be one? Sometimes I wish I can live in my own parallel universe where it’s ok to feel repulsed by the things that make other people happy and content.
Oftentimes, I wish I was them.
It must be so peaceful. To accept things, accept times, accept rules. To be content with what you need to do, how you need to be. I can not seem to reach that point in life where the future, or actually present; could seem anything more than a chore. John Hughes once said, and I repeat this a lot - “When you grow older, your heart dies”.
Depressing?
Think about what you did when you were a teen. The longing, the restraint, the wishing, careless hugs, and 4-hour kissing sessions. Running away from your house lying to your parents so you can get to that boy; a mission more important than life itself, just getting to him, getting into his nook where you’ll daze into his face and imagine the future that will be nothing as you imagined.
That moment right there, have you ever felt more alive? That’s the core of Young Adult. The movie. How far we’re willing to go to feel that feeling again?
Charlize Theron plays this character brilliantly. A thirty-something writer from a small midwest town moving to a bigger city in pursuit of - I’m too cool & way too pretty for a small town dump. Just broken up with her boyfriend/husband; she’s single, bored, spoiled, brutally blatant & ignorant as hell.
Everything is mediocre to her. Everything is - nothing special. Nothing is exciting or grandiose or even remotely engaging. She then reaches for the last good feel, the last good memory she remembers; her first love, high school love, and in the midst of her current life discrepancy, she decides to go back home and find the boy. Find that feel.
The fact he’s happily married with the newborn baby doesn’t even register with her. The scenes of her return to the small town are so relatable, and that’s where Diablo Cody earned that Oscar, much to many people’s dismay; because she shames you with how well she knows you. We all definitely did that, or some of that, at some point in our lives.
That’s a great writer. The one that can creep into your soul without even trying hard. She just is. We are. We all are. And all we actually have in life is; think about it, just this one thing - compassion. Because we most definitely ALL went through the same things in life. And we can relate to one another. And that’s one thing, the only thing that bonds us all, no matter what race, sex, or level of education or intelligence.
The scenes? In the hotel room; doing her make-up, picking her hair, changing her nail polishes, being so utterly miserable, moody, crazy, vulnerable, childish; projecting on this guy, something she thinks she’s missing, does she really, and why her life turned the way it did. Who is she, that kid with that boy that got screwed with life later on, or is she a fuck up who was just too young to realize she fucked up back then?
Or she’s exactly where she needs to be.
What are we, are we what we were, or are we what we are now? What’s the real us? What is even real around us? Can we be certain of anything?
See why I hold on to those hugs and a 4-hour kissing session at an early age? Because that was just about one of the few moments in my life where I was certain I’m where I want to be.
Everything else is just uncertain. The movie made me think about my first. And actually, I don’t think it’s necessarily the first we never forget and always revisit in our minds, it's the first that mattered. Do you ever think why someone mattered in your life and someone else didn’t? What makes someone matter and all others are just numbers in your emotional disconnect chart?
Is it them?
Or is it you?
Is it us who allow someone to matter or not?
I often wonder that. Because there’s absolutely no logic that supports it. My first. I pity people that had bad experiences with the firsts. Mine was just something else. Why did it happen? To know what I know that early in life? To challenge me, to mess up everything else? Because we all come with an error. Mine is that I’m absolutely not capable of seeing the core of things while I’m doing them. Only after. I’m just destined to dwell, to suffer, to be challenged, hey - it all makes a good writer at least.
I annoy myself on a daily basis with how much I analyze and try to correct things in my mind, but then again, my mind wouldn’t be this developed if I didn’t dwell on just about every single thing that a human gauges. Or so I'm trying to convince myself.
In style, I managed to find some irrelevant boyfriend before I met the first. The first that mattered. War was entangled in our lives then, well, not in the stylish 'Atonement' way or anything like that but it was a life-altering backdrop. It was just something that made everything, just more.
When I saw him, I just saw him. I saw just him. And that was just it. It was that face that will set the shape for all faces that will follow his. He saw me before I saw him, it was just - that. No explanation, no words, no nothing, it just was. I remember thinking he was like a God or something, he had almost ethereal beauty for a boy, something so straight and clean and just manly but boyish, with the most perfect set of teeth & lips.
He was also mentally and emotionally different than any boy; troubled but calm, persuasive but in the most passive way, and the way he filled up the room, without even moving or saying a word, in the calmest but inserting himself kind of way.
From that moment I had an almost painful need for my men to fill up the room in the same certainty he did. I arrived, I entered and you will be altered. I was 15 at the time, but every time I think about those times, that’s when I calculate my life began. No, I did not fall into his arms or did, really, anything. It’s as if I knew right then and there he will matter, he will change me, he will alter me, he will shift me, he will hurt me, he has to hurt me, something that pretty simply has to hurt.
Only, I hurt him first.
I used the unassuming boyfriend I left at home as a safety, to prolong the hurt I knew was coming, thus hurting him first. We played sports together for 14 days and I managed to focus on prolonging the hurt for 13 days. He was pushy in the most passive way possible, he violated me without laying finger on me, he just violated me with his eyes and mouth from 5 feet away, I have never seen such a thing to this day.
And he was also only 15, but so calm and secure, coming to my room every single day to check up on me and the level of his being buried in my skin.
The first that mattered? How does that happen? Do we really ever bounce from the first that mattered? And did they matter because back then, we were eager, we were hopeful, and we had a clean slate. We were nothing. So we could get altered. Which means we basically did not get altered. How do you alter nothing?
We were molded, not altered.
The first that mattered molded us for what we'll become. And how can something that made us ever really leave us?
