Montage

Before I get going, I want to offer a post-father's day observation: Dads are just the boys they were in grown up bodies. We see them as these adults when we're little, adults who maybe make fart jokes but adults nonetheless. But I gave my dad a t-shirt for father's day and for a hot second he thought it was glow-in-the-dark and was kinda disappointed when it wasn't. Dads, man. Tiny male humans in adult male bodies. Gotta love 'em.

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Caveat: I wrote this post on my like tenth plane in two weeks.

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I think that your twenties are typically the montage state of your life. 

Let me explain. 

See, in a movie, there’s the pre-montage character, there’s the montage-inciting incident, there’s montage, and there’s the post-montage character. There’s usually a lot of stair-running in the montage. It’s the symbolic transition from shapeless sack of uselessness to action-ready sack of usefulness. Or there’s a stack of rejections until the main character lands the job or, in my favorite montage, a bunch of wacky characters go on adventures fighting Nazis while forging unbreakable bonds of friendship (looking at you, Cap and the Howling Commandos). But the montage is there for a reason. We need to see the transition but we don’t need to live the transition. 

At the beginning of your twenties, you’re just out of college or you’re just beginning your life as an adult and you’re pre-montage. You’re figuring out your goals, you’re deciding what your priorities are, and you’re trying to see where you fit. Maybe you’re not useless, but you’re still a little bit shapeless. You feel like you’re you, but you’re not the person you will settle into with the comfortable weight gain of middle age. You’re malleable. 

Then the inciting incident happens. It might be college graduation, it might be getting married, it might be some flash of inspiration and purpose, but something happens in your life that sets you off on your montage-state. 

Now, it might not be a positive montage. It could be very neutral- you might not be working to be a person different from what you are. Maybe you’ve already gained the skills you need and your montage is day after day putting in the work you need to do to be financially secure, slowing refining your friend circle, living out the years in relative peace. Your montage-inciting incident would probably be a sigh as you settled into your desk. 

Or it could be a negative montage. Most of us passively ruin our lives, but a few bright stars actively self-destruct. 

All the same, there’s a repetition of days and activities in your twenties that builds you into who you will be. The same could be true of every segment of your life, I guess, but I find that for most of us who get to go on past thirty, this is where the building happens, a process so complex and involved that it takes a decade to make it happen. 

What I want to emphasize, though, is that things happen in montages. For those that are positive, those that make us into people we want to be rather than people we’ll accept becoming, we have to do something. We have to have a goal. We have to be willing to change our stars and to dive into the work that is remaking a human. We have to edit resumes and search for jobs and challenge our work schedules and stand up for ourselves and for others. We have to find the strength to stay in a system that needs us, every day noticing something or someone new that will help us move forward. We have to learn and grow through the experiences laid before us and through the ones that we find for ourselves. 

It is exhausting, this living, if we’re doing it right. It’s exhausting until the day that it isn’t, until we find ourselves at the end of the montage, having transformed into the post-montage character at last. I’m not in love with life in the montage. There’s a reason movies skip past those months and years. There are days and nights of relentless activity, of questioning and assurance, of dreams or nightmares calcifying into reality. But in them is the becoming of a person and we have to live into that. 

Go get to work.