My life. The movie. Rated Whatever.


Here I am, just a character in my own movie, with no pre-written scenario or script, just improvising and learning as I go through every scene. I have limited control over the film's concept and some grasp of the general direction I want it to go. But it's the other essential elements that I have complete control over, such as my dialogue, character arc and responses, and most importantly, the editing.


From the many scenes, I have accumulated throughout my forty-something years. I can edit a happy family movie filled with birds and sunshine with clips from my parents, sisters, wife, son, and others. Or I can make a romantic comedy, highlighting the weird and funny encounters I had before finally connecting with my one true love on Tinder, of all places, and finding her on another continent.


I can also cut out a thrilling drama, filled with all the hard times and challenges I've faced, getting divorced, depression, being broke and jobless, and spice things up with cut scenes of me crying in pain on my bed or on the floor under the pouring shower, then add to it my many encounters and disappointments with the doctors and the surgeries.


Some recommend that I be the star of a great superhero movie, showing how I stood against the evil sickness, rose up after each extreme challenge, and continued fighting and moving on repeatedly.


Horror? That would be a piece of cake. I would make a montage of my surgeries and how I'm being cut open and stitched repeatedly to give that Frankenstein monster effect. The money shot would be the scene where I wake up drowning in a pool of my blood as it keeps pumping out of me with every heartbeat, only to faint and hit the floor moments after, then hearing my wife desperately pleading and praying to god.


Independently, none of these movies is real. Yet all of them are true.


That is life; it's not all flowers, roses, or doom and gloom. I'm not always the hero; I often don't even want to be or try! I'm not always positive and smiling; sometimes, it's quite the opposite.

I control and decide how I tell my story and narrate it. How I add all these pieces together makes all the difference. 


Nevertheless, I understand that everything that happened and is happening had to be. It's up to me to decide what I'm going to do with it and how I will face it and cut through it. Because I don't see another option. There is no scene where I fall over and surrender, where I give in to the hardships and pain. That's not the character that I'm deciding to be. I would get exhausted, but that's expected and a part of the journey, so I accept it; I rest and take a break knowing that whatever this is, it's just temporary and shall pass.


Make your own story.



#live #life #challenges #wri


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