I don't really know how to write this properly, so I'm just going to write it the way it actually happened in my head.
For a long time I didn't see much point in anything. Not in some big dramatic sad way, just this weird flat feeling where I'd do my day and go to bed and not really know why I did any of it. I wasn't depressed or anything, at least I don't think so, I just felt like life was happening somewhere else and I was watching it from behind glass. Then COVID happened and everyone got stuck at home, and my brother started making me watch movies with him. Honestly at first it was just something to do because there was literally nothing else to do. We'd just sit there every few days and watch whatever he picked. For context, my brother was completing his PG in film-making.
I don't even remember exactly when it stopped feeling like just "watching movies" and started feeling like something else. It just slowly turned into that. There were a lot of movies and shows in that stretch, way too many to even list, but a few really stuck with me. Not because they're the greatest movies ever made or whatever, just because of how they hit me at that specific time in my life. Like the Batman movies. There's that one line, something like "I'll rebuild it, brick by brick, exactly like it was," and I don't know why but that just sat in my head for days after. It's such a simple idea when you actually think about it. Things break, and you don't need some big miracle to fix them, you just start putting it back together piece by piece and you keep going.
Then there was Whiplash. That movie made me uncomfortable honestly, it's not a nice film to sit through, but there was something about how obsessed Andrew Neiman was with getting better at drumming that made me think about my own life and how I never really cared about anything that much. There were a bunch of other movies and shows in that mix that did something to me in their own way too, I'm not trying to make a list here, I just wanted to mention these because they're the ones I keep thinking back to.
Something Clicked
And here's the thing I keep coming back to. I don't think these movies gave me anything new. I don't think I watched Batman and suddenly became disciplined out of nowhere. I think all of that stuff, the wanting to rebuild, the wanting to care about something enough to obsess over it, the wanting to just be honest even when it's inconvenient, I think that was already in me somewhere. It was just buried under a bunch of scrolling and comparing myself to random people online and just... noise. So much noise that I never actually sat down and thought about anything real. My inner voice got louder after that, I guess is the best way I can explain it. Not louder like more chaotic, louder like I could finally hear it properly instead of it being drowned out by everything else. And I started actually wanting to do something with myself instead of just floating through my days.
I guess the actual reason I'm telling you this is because two years ago, if someone had sat me down and said "hey, a few movies are going to quietly rearrange something in your head," I would've just nodded and gone back to scrolling. I wouldn't have believed them. So I'm not writing this because I think my story is special or because I want anyone to think I figured something out. I'm writing it because maybe someone reading this is exactly where I was, stuck in that same flat nothing, and doesn't know that the way out isn't some big dramatic moment. Sometimes it really is just sitting still with something, anything, long enough for it to start talking back to you. That's it. That's the whole reason.
If I hadn't sat through those movies during that time, I genuinely don't think I'd be the person typing this right now. I'm not saying that lightly. I mean it in the most literal way I can, some version of me just never gets built without those months. I lived inside those characters for a while. Not in some fanboy way, but like I borrowed pieces of them and quietly kept the pieces that fit.
There's a version of me that stayed flat forever, that never rebuilt anything, that never cared enough about anything to obsess over it, and the only reason that's not the version sitting here writing this is because of what I watched during that time. I owe whatever fire I have right now to a bunch of fictional people who never even knew I existed.
Some people find their turning point in a person, or a book, or a moment that actually happened to them. Mine came from watching other people's stories so closely that they stopped feeling fictional and started feeling like blueprints.
"Movies touch our hearts and awaken our vision, and change the way we see things." — Martin Scorsese