In which the author possibly reads too much into a movie. (Heads up: probably an oversharing post, but then that’s what you’ve come to expect from me, right?)

Douglas: Will you keep out all the sadness?
Max: I have a sadness-shield that keeps out all the sadness, and it’s big enough for all of us.

I’ve been feeling very melancholy over the last few days.  Probably being uncomfortable in the heat doesn’t help, but I haven’t been sleeping too well either and when I do sleep, I have strange dreams about past events and running away from people and lots of generally unsettling stuff.  Since seeing my counsellor yesterday I’ve been trying to piece it together and work out how to move through this particular patch.  The type of therapy she does is narrative therapy, which I guess is why I go off into stories about my past so often when I’m trying to work all this stuff out.  But it’s more about seeing what those past stories were and trying to come up with a new story.  More like a choose-your-own-adventure than an entirely predictable plot.

Anyway, where was I?

This week I went to see Where the Wild Things Are at the Moonlight Cinema with Megan and Lachy and greatly enjoyed it but also found it just tipped the melancholy over the edge, the aching lump in my chest melted and I spent the last third of the film with tears running down my face.  While there was a lot of joy - I especially loved Max declaring that they would all sleep in “a real pile!” and how rambunctious they all were - there was just a vein of sadness running through it.  The movie seemed to perfectly capture something of the chaos, powerlessness and confusion of fractured family relationships.  There was the initial set up of Max being frustrated and angry about all the change happening in his life, the pain of being left behind by his sister (and absent father), the feeling of being ignored and then lashing out at his loving mother.  Then there was the terrible sadness in the relationships between the Wild Things, especially between Carol and KW, with Carol’s violent destructiveness as a response to things that hurt him emotionally, and KW’s habit of leaving when things got difficult.

I’m sure most people could watch WTWTA without going into that dimension of it too deeply, but while it is based on Maurice Sendak’s children’s book, it’s not a movie for kids necessarily.  It just happened to hit me hard (and unexpectedly) and to stir up things in me that lie dormant most of the time but occasionally get pulled to the surface.  I suppose I have always had a subconscious fear of change and being left.  I hate it when friends move on without me, or when people go into new phases of life where I can’t follow.  I still haven’t worked out how to navigate family relationships (and I don’t suppose anyone ever really does).

It doesn’t take a trained psychologist to see that the genesis of that is in the events of my childhood; moving overseas and around a lot as a kid, always feeling like I was the new kid at school, seeing my dad go away on business more often than not (there was one year when I was in high school that he was overseas for longer than he was at home).  And then of course, the gradual erosion of our family unit and my parents’ eventual divorce and having to leave the ‘family home’ (not having the physical place of a ‘family home’ to go back to is quite a big ache in my heart, even though I recognise we make our own homes and the one I have with mum at the moment is the closest to that kind of thing I’ve had since I finished high school).  That’s not to say I wasn’t loved, because I knew I was (and still am), but these things all added up to quite a destabilising force in my development.

I wouldn’t have said I was doing it at the time, but once everything fell apart, in the chaos and brokenness of my home life I ran from the only thing that was left intact from all the upheaval - God.  I thought I could make a better job of ruling my life since it had been a disaster up until that point.  But I was a bit like Max, who comes to realise that even when making yourself king of a wild land and trying to build a perfect fort where “only the things you want to happen, would happen”, there is no place where everything and everyone is perfect. Relationships are still hard.  People still hurt one another, even if they don’t mean to (and sometimes they do mean to).  And I discovered that in some very hard ways.

But without a doubt the best discovery from my time in the wild was how much I needed God.  It was a very, very painful thing to finally see how powerless I was, how futile it was to try and fix things that were irreparably broken or to just try and annihilate them further so I didn’t have to face them (I did identify with Carol’s destructiveness!).  Being shown my mess of a life for what it was, and having God say to me “I still love you - I always have” was the most powerful thing that has ever or will ever happen to me.  I cling to that every day.  That’s not to say I still don’t feel the pain of broken relationships, the sadness of loss and loneliness, but the important thing now is that there is more than just oblivion to look forward to.  I live in the light of that truth, that Jesus came to fix everything that couldn’t be fixed, that he forgave me for my wilful, brattish and hurtful behaviour, and that I’m going to be with him in heaven one day.

Every time anyone reads Revelation 21:1-5 I want to stand up and cheer.  This is better than any fort you could build on earth:

Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and there was no longer any sea. I saw the Holy City, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride beautifully dressed for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Now the dwelling of God is with men, and he will live with them. They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God. He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.”

He who was seated on the throne said, “I am making everything new!” Then he said, “Write this down, for these words are trustworthy and true.”

The story of my life has been profoundly changed by knowing God.  For that I am eternally grateful.