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Saudade: an emotional state of longing, nostalgia, or melancholic yearning for something or someone that is absent, lost, and may never return…
A reflection on longing, loss, and the films that bring us back
Tonight, Dad and I watched Stuck in Love.
This film always makes me cry. There’s something about it that reminds me of the optimism I had so strongly when I was younger. An optimism that technically is still here, but now battles more frequently with the chronic cynicism and exhaustion of adulthood.
Despite having lived a somewhat adventurous life across many countries and countless cities, I have a deep-seated fear of waking up one day and regretting my entire existence, that I will somehow rise on some unknown and unremarkable future morning and feel a state of life-altering regret and shame, a feeling that I have somehow spent all my life on the wrong things or the wrong people, or worst of all, in the wrong state of mind, that I’d missed everything good, that I’d been so preoccupied with success, that I forgot to really live entirely.
Does anyone else have this same persistent fear of wrongness?
Or rather, a fear of future fear? What is the fear of fear exactly? Apparently, those who are afraid of…
