1 post tagged “survival”

What work of art (film, book, record, whatever) changed your life?
Submitted by bodhibound.

The only book, film, record or whatever that I can truly claim changed my life is the movie of The Hours. 

I went and saw it at a time when I was desperately depressed and suicidal.  I struggled every day with the impulse to kill myself, to end it all.  I knew Virginia Woolf's pain as she weighted herself down with stones and stepped into the river.  I wept with empathy and pain when Julianne Moore's character decided to commit suicide despite being pregnant.

And could not restrain my shock when her character walked into Meryl Streep's party some 40 years after her supposed suicide.

I had never, until that moment, considered the possibility that I could survive being suicidal.  That I might be able to live through the pain I was going through.  That, despite feeling so desperate that death seemed the only option, I could avoid acting on the suicidal feelings and actually make it through.

So in a very real way, The Hours changed my life in such a way that it gave me the option to live.