I've been looking over my backlog of films I ought to watch - I say ought because of the references slid casually into the pages of pop culture, friends' inside jokes and perhaps also, if you haven't figured it out already, I am that person who likes to be in the know and sit smugly in the velvet-lined seats and preferential balcony views of The Cool Kids.
And I've realized how many of them I skip over during my nightly Netflix sessions or what have you because of one reason: I'm afraid.
It's like when you're at the dentist. I do not fear the dentist, really (and doesn't that look as grim to state as "I do not fear the reaper")...but I do worry about what that drill can do to me, how close and crowding it can be against a nerve that will thrum and throb for hours afterward. I worry about tossing and turning for days, weeks, months, years after that close contact.
I worry about my heart never being quite the same afterward.
Persuasion is one you would think I shouldn't be afraid of - at least, not in the way that I've been prolonging my exposure to It or The Conjuring or even finishing the end of The Exorcist (which, after an unfortunate incident that occurred RIGHT AT THE POINT OF EXORCISM in the film, this will probably be NEVER EVER THANK YOU GOD FOR YOUR DELIVERANCE).
After all, I'm a proper Janeite. I've read Persuasion and loved it too. I'm well used to the tropes of ill-behaved family, almost doomed love and the cursed conventions of a hypocritical society and surrounding ton.
But it's different to read it and set it aside than it is to watch it and have every expression and stray sentence reverberate through my rib cage. When I read Persuasion, I was probably about fifteen or sixteen. Life was not perfect, but I did not feel my age yet and the word "spinster" didn't have the dreadful twang of frequent use.
(You never realize how cruel the phrase 'old maid' is until it is used, directly, at you and haunts you for years and years afterward.
And then you realize that it has been years and years afterward.)
Now, though, that scene that I laboriously paused and played back in order to get the most accurate screencaps...it jars me. Life is not perfect, and I feel my age. Life is not perfect, and I worry that I wear rose-tinted glasses and am too easily persuaded away from what my heart wishes, or toward what it most fears: settling, and not in the good way, not in the grounded way.
Settling because everyone expects it to.
Because I'm in my mid-twenties with no way to reverse.
Regret, regret, regret. It is a hard and weighty word. And it is one of my biggest fears.
In any case, this is a less than cheery post and I'm looking forward to reaching the end so that my heart can feel that all's well that ends well and get back its hopelessly romantic cheer and expect better, brighter tomorrows for itself.
But that nerve's been struck hard, and strangely.
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