Get Lost

How the movies I grew up with changed how I felt about life after graduation.

Illustration by Al Short

Written by Sophia Struna

Soft, fawn curls slink down the little girl’s round face, barely touching the tops of her ears. A bright glow brushes her cheeks and holds an unflinching glimmer in her eyes as she looks up at the screen in front of her. The booming of the theater’s surround sound system vibrates in her ribcage. She is gone, completely entranced in the story unfolding in front of her.

Even as a little kid with wispy hair and blueberry-colored eyes, I knew I loved movies.

They have a way of picking us up and sweeping us into another life. They give us a chance to learn from people we would otherwise never know, and they have a way of making us feel seen.

Movies can give viewers a sense of uncertainty, but they can also give them a resolution, a way of knowing if the story is finished, or if there is something that comes next.

That’s what life was like growing up. I always knew I had soccer after school or that I would be seeing my friends at lunch. I always knew what came next. Until I didn’t.

Cut to 21-year-old me.

My fawn-colored curls are darker and have an occasional silver strand poking out. The blueberry eyes have seen more life, and my once-soft face now has freckles and even a few wrinkles here and there.

As I sit, just over a month away from college graduation, I am faced with a new feeling of uncertainty. This time, instead of it being about the ending of a movie, I’m stuck with the uncertainty of what I am going to do next.

I decided I should figure it out.

My best friend since I was five is in her third year of nursing school at Carroll College. We like to confide in each other about our fears for life after school. I figured talking to her would be a good way to get a grasp on what I have been struggling with.

In what might be the best explanation I have heard yet, Gracie pondered that maybe what we are struggling with as we prepare to head into the real world is a loss of control.

“So much of my success has been built off of a letter and I will no longer have that,” Gracie said. “So, then, what is success outside of school?”

Annoyingly, it made sense… A lot of sense.

We grew up side by side. Both of us have always put the pressure to succeed on our own shoulders, thanks to a very spirited sense of competitiveness we held between ourselves and our peers.

The feeling of competition that comes with getting an “adult” career, along with a loss of validation from academic success, has culminated in uncertainty.

Reeling from this breakthrough, I decided I needed to dig even further into my roots. I had to return to my solution growing up whenever I wanted to learn from the world.

A warm glow once again kissed my cheeks as I sat down to watch a seminal 2000s classic: “The Devil Wears Prada.”

Swathed in a blanket and entranced by the iconic Miranda Priestly, I noticed a feeling in my stomach that I remembered having even when I was a young cinephile.

It was an overwhelming sense of gut-tearing anxiety.

As I watched Anne Hathaway’s character torn between her career and personal life I realized, more than anything, that this movie was terrifying me about my post-grad life even more.

I was faced with the possibility that the movies I watched growing up introduced me to exactly what I was afraid of when I thought about life after graduation.

In “The Devil Wears Prada,” the main character is warped by the demands of her job and loses her personal life in the process. Similarly, in “How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days,” she almost loses the man she loves because of what her job required her to do. In “13 Going on 30,” the main character quite literally has to be introduced to magic to see how her life choices, specifically her career, have turned her into a terrible person.

Based on this, it looked like I only had two options moving forward: I would be a horrible person but have the success I always worked for, or I would have friends, a significant other and no career.

It turns out I wasn’t the only one noticing these messages in the films of my youth. In the 2016 analysis by Nikolai Christoffersen, titled, Gender Identities and the Patriarchy in “The Devil Wears Prada,” the author wrote of the different issues at play in a film portraying a woman in the workplace.

“We are led to believe that the prevailing path for women — the patriarchy — is valid and admirable, while the path to feminism is actively dissuaded,” Christoffersen wrote. “This film puts forward ideas that women can pursue a career, but not if it means sacrificing their friends or the men in their lives, and women can be strong, but not masculine.”

Christoffersen went on to add that the film instead fortifies the concept that women shouldn’t go after their dream careers if it takes away from vital patriarchal values, including “family, friends, and partners.”

What on earth was going on with movies in the early 2000s?

Already faced with the loss of control regarding my future success and an overwhelming desire for achievement, I was now reexamining the stories I once looked to for guidance. They had told me there was no way I could ever have it all.

Screw that.

With all of this and a newfound twinge of defiance toward the messages I had taken in since childhood swirling in my brain, I stopped to ask Gracie a question. One that had been on my mind throughout this process of understanding my extreme longing to put life on pause for just one more second.

“When you were a kid and someone asked you what you wanted to be when you grew up, what did you say?” I asked.

“I said a vet or a dentist.”

“What do you think you would have said…if you had been asked who you wanted to be when you grew up, instead of what you wanted to be?” I asked again.

“I still think in my head, I would have said something like successful or rich,” Gracie laughed, taking back the desire to be rich since apparently money doesn’t buy happiness.

After a second, she gave me a final answer.

“Successful and happy.”