Posted by Laura
I hated the movie 50 First Dates. Soon after it came out on DVD, my sister and I tried to watch it, but we turned it off half an hour in because we just thought it wasn't worth the raunch. I think I saw a TV edited version years later, and I still wasn't impressed. I didn't like the whole premise of the short term memory loss thing. I thought it was cheesy, and I struggled to commit to the characters emotionally.
I spend a lot of time watching YouTube, movies, and TV shows now because of my therapy - it's one of the few things I can do while practicing standing or stretching. I was scrolling through Netflix tonight to do some epic multitasking, and I saw a title with Zachary Levi and Alexis Bledel. I petered out in season three or four of Gilmore Girls, but I did love Tangled and Chuck, so I clicked play. It didn't take me long to realize it was a less raunchy version of the 50 First Dates premise. Zachary Levi has a file next to his bed that says, "Read every morning," which recounts his brain injury that prevents him from converting short term memory into long while sleeping. I decided to stick it out because of my love for the adorable smolder.
There's a scene about halfway through the film where Zachary Levi and his sister are at the doctor's office, and the poor guy loses it in front of the doctor. He shouts that he needs the doctor to fix him because this is consuming his life; he wakes up every morning unsure of where he is or how he got there, and it's just not fair. I started tearing up - not because it's a particularly emotional movie, but because I felt an unexpected empathy for the character.
Sometimes I want to shout at a doctor to fix me. I'm broken, and it's messing up my life. I didn't choose to lose function below my waist, but that's where I'm at right now. It super complicates life. I wake up every morning unsure of my future and haunted by the last year of struggling through these crappy circumstances. I totally connect with the frustration of the character because sometimes life throws you a curve ball, and you swing hard but miss even harder. Sometimes you don't get to choose your adventure.
My life sucks on the surface - but don't stop at the surface.
Anyone who's followed my story can see that the Lord has made an amazing thing come from awful circumstances. Don't get me wrong, there are plenty of crappy side effects of paralysis. However, also hear me that while I didn't choose this particular adventure, I did have lots of choices along the way that made me who I am and how I responded. When I said I was going to write a post about how we don't always choose our traumatic adventures, Rachel wisely reminded me that often times we do. We can make really stupid choices that lead us into trauma. We can also make really wonderful choices that still lead us into trauma (for example, moving to Germany to teach missionary kids and getting paralyzed in a freak accident). The real adventure is in the response. You can only control so much of what happens in your life. What kind of adventure will you choose when life throws the unexpected at you?
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