10/10
My fifth watch.
What struck me the most this time around is what differentiates it from other coming-of-age movies. It's not about Lady Bird having to find her identity, it's about her attempts to run away from it until she finally realizes that it was right in front of her. She pushes away her name, her family, her city, just trying to be herself, only to find that the things like her name, her family, and her city are the things that define her.

My last day of high school was on Wednesday and I have a graduation ceremony of sorts on Monday. I don't really know what's getting under my skin about graduating. I'm staying local for college so I'm not going to be saying goodbye to very many people, I'm not going to miss my school especially either, and the experience of high school is something that I'm all kinds of ready to be done with. So I really should be okay with moving on. The only real reason I can think of to explain what I'm feeling is that it wasn't what I wanted it to be. When I think back to where I wanted to be in life when graduating high school, pretty much everything I imagined opposes the reality of it. I'm confused, I've gone through a lot of depression, I'm anxious in most situations, I've gotten mostly mediocre and occasionally bad grades for over a year now, I don't have a job, I don't have a girlfriend (I've never even kissed anyone, which isn't something I usually share. Most of my friends don't even know that), and I have no sense of responsibility or adulthood. I still feel like a kid trying to act grown up. It took me ten minutes to back out of my driveway the other day. And I never went to a single high school dance - I was planning to go to prom this year but school just had to go and get canceled. None of this is to say that there aren't good things - I love my friends indescribably and I'm looking forward to college a decent amount. But it's just so deeply not what I expected. I should be used to disappointment by now but I thought that maybe it'd finally go right this time.

But maybe it never "goes right." And I'm not saying that in a depressing way, just in that there isn't any "right." Sometimes we want to be an adult but we just aren't quite ready yet. Sometimes we want to get good grades but we don't know how to focus our efforts or find the motivation. Sometimes we want to back out of the driveway in twenty seconds but we just haven't practiced enough. Sometimes we want a new mom, or to live in a different city, or to fuck Timothée Chalamet (fellas...don't we all?), or to change our name, but those things just aren't real. Sometimes we wish we lived a little more but we spend too much time watching movies (like three per day sometimes), imagining how we could live, or yearning to make something as good as our favorites, or seeking an emotional connection, without realizing the bitter irony that those movies might in fact be contributing to our failures to achieve those things. And sometimes we watch Lady Bird with our families and cry over our laptops as we type up a long, overly personal review on a site we use to feel some sense of professionalism and belonging. But maybe none of it has to be the way we wanted. Maybe we are who we are, maybe our identities are right in front of us, maybe we make some vague attempt at tying a depressed tangent to a movie's central theme to try to understand why that's the movie that makes us cry or self-reflect or go on depressed tangents. But that's okay, because that's beautiful.