Tag: personal growth

My movie reviews

My Movie Review: Love Of Your Life

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I watched Love of My Life on Prime Video last night. I thought the movie was good, and the acting was good, too. However, later in the movie, something happened that made me angry.

What bothered me most was the character’s decision to leave and end relationships without telling anyone. I believe that when you are married or have a longtime friendship that goes all the way back to childhood, you owe people some sort of explanation. You don’t necessarily have to stay in a relationship, but I think the people who have shared so much of your life deserve an explanation.

As I thought about why this bothered me so much, I realized it brought up some personal feelings about relationships in my own life.

I had a childhood friendship that eventually ended, and I had questions about how that friendship ended. I felt those questions could have been answered. I still miss that person, and the way our friendship ended makes me sad. However, I don’t think I want the friendship back because I’m not the same person I was back then.

I think I was changing toward the end of our friendship, and the other person may have felt that change. When I look back at my childhood friendships, I realize I was always agreeable and worked hard to maintain them. I wasn’t as comfortable speaking up for myself.

Over time, I began to change. I started saying what I honestly thought, while still trying to be kind.

Today, I don’t feel the need to work so hard to make a friendship happen. It isn’t as important to me as it used to be to try so hard to make a friend.

I can still feel sad about losing a friendship and miss the way things were back then. But I have also realized that just because I’m sad that the relationship is over doesn’t mean I need to go back.

Watching Love of My Life helped me discover these feelings. What started as anger toward a character turned into a reflection on my own life, my friendships, and how much I have changed.

Sometimes a movie can be good, the acting can be good, and yet a character’s choices can bring up feelings we didn’t even realize were still there.

If you decide to watch Love Of My Life let me know if you liked it or not?

Daily Post · writing

I Wasn’t Trying to Be a Writer

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How do you write what people actually want to read?

Honestly, I started journaling when I was younger. I wasn’t aware of what or how I was writing, but I knew writing out my feelings felt good to me. Barely a handful of people read what I wrote and encouraged me to keep writing.

I decided to go to college for nursing and had to take an English class. At the end of the class, my teacher said, “I know you’re going to school to be a nurse but when you have time, I want to encourage you to take a novel-writing class.”

She taught me to describe something in a way that would help the reader feel what I was feeling. For example, instead of just saying it was a dark night and there was a white phone, I might say, “The dark night felt like a spotlight on the white phone.”

In this class, we also read a book. I had maybe only read two or three books, including the one she had us read, which was called Dead End in Norvelt. It was probably meant for ages 11 to 18, if that. Those books were easy for me to read, so if I was going to start writing, I decided I would write about things I understood, like lessons I’ve learned from things I’ve done, and I would keep it easy to read.

I don’t always know what someone else wants to read. I just know what I want to say. I write about things I’ve experienced, things I’ve learned, feelings I’ve had, and sometimes just a thought that gets stuck in my head and won’t leave me alone.

I try to write in a way that is easy for me to understand, because I figure there might be someone else out there who understands it too.

Maybe that’s what my teacher saw in me all those years ago. I wasn’t trying to be a writer. I was just trying to put my feelings into words.

And maybe you don’t have to know exactly what people want to read. Maybe you just have to be willing to tell your story and hope that somewhere in your words, someone finds a little piece of themselves.