Show us your heart
Thoughts on movies & death
“Show us your heart.”
This was the advice a friend gave me this week about my script.
Seems easy enough, straightforward. But anyone in a human body who’s tried to do that knows it means to (metaphorically) crack open your own chest, reach in to grab the slippery, blood-soaked, beating muscle, and pull it out of your own body like a cesarean section in order to say, “There.”
Not exactly easy. Not exactly clean.
Heart’s are messy and sad. Heart’s are unforgiving and unforgiven. The great mystery is how they keep beating, despite all that.
They are unrelenting, until of course they do relent, finally and completely.
And perhaps it’s knowing this, that we are caught in the gap between our beating hearts and our stopped ones, that drives me to make movies despite it being a very bad idea.
When I think of all the choices I could make with my beating heart, there are of course better ways for me to make money or feel a sense of material stability. I could have gone into hedge funds or money laundering or politics, which are much more efficient ways to get ahead.
So why did my heart lead me here? What need, undefined in the ethers of my childhood, am I now trying to fulfill? What great message did I send myself from the beyond, before I got here, that I am spending my life to decode?
Why is my heart telling me to do these difficult, messy, complicated things without an assured return on investment?
The worried part of me wants to answer that question. She desperately wants to put the pieces together like I did in my 20s, cobbling together “final resolutions” to life’s biggest questions from quotes I heard in yoga, or from a book I read on mindfulness, or from good advice my neighbor gave me, or from any of the thousands of ways I attempted to organize my life into an ignorant coherence.
But I’m not in my 20s anymore, so the worried part of me knows I’m not going to clear all this up with one Pema Chödrön book.
The worried part of me has now moved onto other concerns: what if I don’t show my heart? What if I can’t understand myself fast enough to make something beautiful out of it? What if it stays locked away, polished and contained, fully intact but alone forever? What then?
The days before I lost my dad, I made a secret promise with myself to be fully present, to not look away in those final days, and to meet the moment wherever it took all of us. I’m very good at smoothing things over. I’m very good at making things easier for everyone at my own expense. And while sometimes that’s an adaptive trait, like everything else, it’s also maladaptive. I can smooth the rough edges to the degree that I disappear completely.
But I knew my dad was leaving and I didn’t want to miss it. So I promised myself I’d psychologically stay, no matter how unbearable it was.
I didn’t like the cards we were dealt, but I didn’t want to sit this one out.
Even if I couldn’t win this hand, I at least wanted to play.
And maybe in some sort of way, that’s also why I want to make my movies. Perhaps that’s why I want to make them non-dependently. Because I know the hand I’ve been dealt, and I want to play it anyway.
While I’m here, my heart relentlessly beating, I want to try to make something beautiful.
Yesterday, I stood in my backyard watering the grass, tears streaming down my face thinking about my dad and my heart and my movie and I tried to stay again. I planted my bare feet in the unbearableness of it. The grass and my face, soaked through.
And I share this to say, again staying did something.
Something small moved a little bit around my heart. A tiny doorway rattled, as if to say, you could try going this way.
I know my movies won’t answer any questions, but maybe they can ask better ones.
Maybe they can make small places for people to stay a little longer.
Maybe they can rattle the door to someone else’s heart.
Then again, maybe they can’t.
But I’m going to try.
Because while I’m here, I don’t want to miss it.
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This is so gorgeous. I'm glad this is how you choose to use your beating heart.