I want to tell little story about adulthood, iron walls, and Chewbacca.
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Chewie immediately smiled put his hand on my shoulder with such outrageous kindness and suddenly I felt this intense wave of relief. My eyes started watering... I looked down at my friend and saw her on edge of tears and, well, there I went also crying.
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And so we hugged and hugged and Chewie and I found myself having this intensely emotional moment. I have no idea how long it lasted. Probably a few seconds. But it was intense,my body went flush, I was sweating, and it was surreal.
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But please understand. This is not about me rekindling my connection to Star Wars. Nor is this about how The Last Jedi also recaptured some of these same feelings (note: if you try to turn this into an argument of that movie i will block you) It's not even really about Star Wars.
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It was the realization that I had been walking around wearing 100 pounds of emotional armor and suddenly they just slinked off for a second. It was the realization that in that moment, in this place in my life, I really, really needed a hug and somehow Chewbacca "knew" that.
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Which means this is really about the push-pull of our emotional selves. For there are many who would take this story and make an argument of how it's proof that we need to hold onto our sense of childlike glee and seek out the experiences that make us feel that way.
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Which is really just part and parcel of our deeply troubling preoccupation with nostalgia and escapism. The reason grown adults NEED to live vicariously through movies in really gross ways... But no, this about the other end of the spectrum.
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This is about people who go in the other direction. This is about how men, in an effort to transcend the bounds of perceived childlike naivety, get "serious" and built new fronts out of fear, and how we build fences to mitigate our suffering. And thus lose something crucial.
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This is about how we teach boys to worship this mentality, and blame outward, to hit, and shoot, and kill - all to to just steels themselves against emotion and pain. And so those fences turn into iron walls from the mountains and mountains of pain that come with life and grief.
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And so this is ultimately a story about breaking those walls. It's the ability to let things effect you. To undo all that is toxic about yourself. To realize that to call those things "child-like" is an outrageous disservice to selfhood, because they are "human-like."
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And they are critical to our sanity and becoming a balanced person capable of expressing the entire range of emotions without fear, especially when expressing fear itself. Because the alternative is the true misery of pushing yourself away from yourself.
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So yeah, I could tell have told you this whole story and just said "hardee har har, a guy in a Chewbacca outfit gave me a hug and it made me cry."
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The key is I actually let myself for once. Because deep-down I really needed to. And an old friend was there to let me know it was okay.
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End of conversation
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