What happens when the lie is bigger than our character?

“The Words” one of the most lyrical and beautiful movies I have seen in a long time. Despite the poor reviews the movie received, I am always drawn to movies about writers so I’m glad I got it because both my husband I loved the movie.  Particularly the peeling back of the layers of each character. The ending left for each of us to interpret according to where we are in our lives allowing us to understand its ending in the way that suits us best.

 It was the last movie my husband and I watched on our day of indulgence and being together to celebrate his birthday. A day of nothingness wrapped in everything. A day chosen because it was a celebration for my husband’s birthday at a time of the ending of his father’s life bringing us closer together and encouraging us to enjoy our time together. To live because we don’t know what moment will be our last.

The Words was a wonderful love story teaching us that the choices we make determine whether our lives will be lived as a lie or as the truth. That we are all capable of making choices.  Reminding us making the choice is the easy part but living with the choices we make is the difficult and most challenging part.

One of the lines that stuck with me and there were several but this one was especially true, “The lie was bigger than his character.” A very sad and poignant statement. Imagine being so unsure about yourself that the lie becomes bigger than you. That the lie makes you into something you could never be but society allows you to become that person. Until slowly but surely the truth seeks you out and there is nowhere to run. Nowhere to hide.

Life truly is about the choices we make. Living with those choices and remembering that at any point, we can change the choices we make by making other choices particularly if we know the choices are drowning us, suffocating us. Stopping us from being who we are meant to be. We always know. Always feel it deep down in our souls. When we desperately try to become something we are not to meet other people’s expectations, we are never satisfied because we can never be content in our skin. We are constantly looking over our shoulder for the true us to emerge or the false us to be found out. We can never truly accept the image staring back at us in the mirror because we know it’s not true.

So what I picked up from the movie is to be wary of allowing the lie to become bigger than our character. Because at the end of the day we will always have to face the character that is crumbling beneath the façade. And the outcome may be far worse than the lie.