growing up is living through: Boyhood

The whole idea of the future is poisonous. Years seem to come with the expectation of growth but never really with much assurance of it. I mean, at least, for me. I seem to think of growing up as akin to going to sleep. That I'd close my eyes at 16 - angsty and hateful and insecure - and then wake up at 19 - magically cured.

I've come home for the midyear break recently. My house is full of reflective surfaces. Windows took almost half of the walls in at least one side of every room, the cupboards in the kitchen for all the utensils were made of glass, there was a big mirror in the living room, a half-body mirror in my sister's room, a smaller one in the bathroom in the hallway, another one in the master's bathroom, and finally in my room the size of a palm.

You know that part in Mulan after she goes to the matchmaker and realizes that practically no one is ever gonna want to be her husband? I had that Mulan moment, but upside down. I wasn't conflicted that my reflection was, so to speak, "someone I don't know", I was taken aback that since I left the house at 16 -  angsty and hateful and insecure - the girl I see "staring straight back at me" (for the lack of the better term) was unmistakably the same. As it appeared, I was every bit as uncertain of what my life is becoming at 19 as I did at 16.

I don't seem to have grown.

"Boyhood" was shot for over 12 years; it's about one boy's - Mason's - life from elementary right up to the time he leaves for college. It's about growth. But not in the way they market it in leadership seminars and religious sermons. It's about growth in the way that people grow up, and people grow up both in the sense that they get facial hair and start drinking and grow a mullet, and also in the sense that they go through years and years of things happening.

See I think my qualms about the future stems from the fact that you can't really describe the growth of a human like you could describe the growth of a tumor. "How bad is it doc?" "Oh man you've grown more suicidal by about 2mm this week, Des!"

Although, we try our best - we measure how much we've grown in inches and in pounds and in awards and in birthdays and in educational attainment - but we have and probably never will come up with a standard of measure for how much we've grown mentally, emotionally, spiritually. We can only measure the things that have happened in the years that have passed and from it hope to draw conclusions.

So Boyhood shows the things that happened to Mason in the span of 12 years, and from it extracts some definition of some kind of growing up. And it baffled me. Because I sat through probably a hundred talks about growing up and all of them seem to define growth with the premise that you are in full control of it. Sure, maybe, if you're like 50 and financially stable. But this movie is about a boy - from six to eighteen. He doesn't make things happen nearly as much as things happen to him. He is victimized by circumstances he never had the capacity to control. Normally, I'd call this bad writing. But right now I guess I'll just call it life.

It's easy to tell yourself not to expect for things to happen but I think expectations are the nonnegotiable side effect of waking up everyday. Naturally, because you are and continue to be alive, you will expect for things to happen today, tomorrow, in three or forty years. I expect for wrinkles at 40, and osteoporosis maybe. I expect to have my life figured out at some point, as I always have. I think I'm far from disbelieving that.

So to cope I'm here redefining growth with Linklater's masterpiece "Boyhood" as the foundation. Shit happen to you. You can't control them sometimes. You will live on whether you like it or not, whether as how you expected it or the complete opposite, whether with broken limbs or a whole in-tact skeleton. You are conscious in the middle of the fortunate and unfortunate happenings in your life. You are growing.

The future still scares me to hell. But in my many fantasies of the life I'm going to lead, one thing is consistent: I just want to have changed. To have grown up. That means that no matter how many unexpected and terrible things come my way, I have to live through them. No skips. No stops. No giving up. Growing up is living through.

In an interview with The Guardian, director Richard Linklater said: "Humans in general are pretty resilient. Kids in particular. I’m amazed how quickly you adapt. I think outside of the trauma and abuse, we become who we’re meant to be."





Till next Sunday,

Des