After deep diving into the depths of my soul, I felt I needed air. However, it’s rainy and gross so instead I needed hours of watching silly movies that only I would ever want to watch. Mary Poppins wasn’t an utter disappointment, after all. Puddin’? Punkin? Dumplin? I don’t know…but it was a cute little movie with Jennifer Anniston as an insufferable mom and it had a sweet message though I cried too many times than I’d like to admit.
The last movie I watched was Up in the air with Anna Kendrick and George Clooney. I remember the previews but never gave it another thought. It was near the bottom of a long list of movie suggestions on my Netflix and I decided to give it a go. It started kind of slow in a way that I wondered if I’d nod off before I finished it, but it was just whitty enough to keep me engaged. The synopsis is that he travels nearly all year with his company who is hired to fire people. Ironical. He loves to travel and hates to be “grounded”. I suspect it’s because his home is in Omaha and nothing ever sounds fun coming from Omaha, but I digress. Insert Anna Kendrick and she’s a young and uber eager girl who jumps in feet first only to realize the job is pretty damn depressing. I mean seriously, you walk in to fire people at a company and they don’t even know you. Screw that.
Part of the job Clooney’s character loves is public speaking. It’s here that he asks the audience to figuratively, in their mind’s eye, start going through their home and put into a backpack all the crap in their homes. Start with the things on the shelves, then move to the bigger things like clothes, and on to the even bigger things like couches and cars and the actual house itself, he says. Then imagine picking up that backpack and lugging it with you when you go to walk away. Laughter breaks out in the crowd because of course, no one can walk with that load of shit on their backs. He then challenges people to start taking out the things that really don’t matter in their day to day life and learn how to unpack and repack this backpack with purpose. All the while the movie follows him firing people who were lifers at their company, engaging in a relationship he didn’t think he could have, and we see him evaluating his own “backpack”. I’m not going to say much more cause you’re probably one of the millions who looked at the previews and didn’t bother to see it, but I think this is an egregious mistake and you should give it a go. It’s thought-provoking and real and it resonates to the deepest depths of someone’s life. Truly.
My backpack is full of a lot of useless shit and I really need to start evaluating what I’ve decided to pack into it. I’ve been battling with myself and my ever present depression and a friend recently asked me how that was the case since I had a job, kids, husband, car, home, health, etc. and I was really taken aback. Just because I have all of these things doesn’t mean I’m not susceptible to depression. It doesn’t mean that it ‘skips’ me. It’s like that one asshole you inevitably run into when you say you’re tired and they want to argue that they are more tired than you are. People fail to realize just because they are going through some tough shit they don’t own the monopoly of shitty situations, other people have their own problems and their own rights to feel a certain kind of way about them. A lot of people are lugging around really heavy backpacks that they don’t realize they need to unpack and evaluate. My backpack is heavy, y’all. Too fucking heavy. It’s time to unload. Baby steps, though, because I don’t want to throw out my good mascara.
