Just like a movie

There is something so freeing about feeling like a movie character. To embody a fictional persona is to adopt another set of traits and personality, being able to try characters on like those dresses on sale at the mall you’ll never actually buy. For once you’re truly a free spirit, feeling as if you can do anything because you’re not really you.

Sometimes I’m just living my life and I can practically see it playing out as a movie scene. Maybe its because of the people I’m with in that moment, the things I’m doing, or simply how I feel, but it’s like you’re seeing yourself outside of your own body. Like you’re a spectator to your own life.

Recently, I was in Oxford doing a summer program. One day, my friends and I all decided to go down to The Meadow which is just this grassy expansive field where cows and horses roam and people swim (down by river thames). So we all go down to the meadow, and everything is just so perfectly, quintessentially summer. The sunlight softly cracking through the leaves of those tall trees, the faint background noise of the radio coming from another picnic, the splashes of water which followed with everyone jumping into the river from that familiar brown bridge, it was all perfect. Its moments like that where I am taking in all of these different airs of life which feels quite surreal and movie-like. You know when you’re just living in the moment but in the back of your head your mind is telling you, “these are the good old days”? It’s like that, that out-of-body feeling which separates your reality from the illusions of something like a movie. I feel like I’m floating in a bubble or in a cloud, that nothing can touch me and that I’m in a certain state of nirvana. I love it.

friends and strangers jumping at the meadow

I think sometimes you need to pretend you’re in a movie to escape your life or to stay sane in it. I feel like that when my family overwhelms me. I just have to put on my headphones for one quick second and listen to some random song which belongs on the soundtrack of The French Dispatch or some obscure Italian movie from the sixties. That keeps me level-headed and once again, ready to reenter reality, no matter how un-picturesque it can be at times. When I pretend that I’m in a movie at times like that, I can just associate my current struggles with that some protagonist, in some movie, somewhere, probably has too. I’m less alone now, and my problems can be aestheticized in a pretty, film-like, manic pixie dream-girl way. It’s a bad habit I think, but it helps for now.

(here’s my playlist for feeling like a movie character if you want to too: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/2Sa5iuE6FdzOzIeudD58P0?si=3b8045bc9c6b477a&pt=52d9587dc7c04e2b29cd346abee6bfbc )