If I Stay by Gayle Forman - Book, Movie, and Life Wisdom

Last night I decided that I had enough guts to sit down and watch If I Stay again and after the crap I've been dealing with the last month or so, it kind of hit home in a way. First off, I read the book last year and loved it, almost shed a few tears while at work but I made it through. Second, I saw the movie when it came out and was SO unprepared it wasn't even funny. Read the book, was fine, the movie? BLUBBERING MESS! I didn't even bring any tissues because I figured since I didn't bawl through the book that I probably wouldn't through the movie but boy was I wrong. Either way I think the overall message that I personally received from it didn't really occur or hit me until last night. I've been going through a lot lately and I can definitely relate to all the relationship happenings in general that Mia and Adam went through. I think that's why it hit me so hard because I know what feeling like someone ripped your heart out feels like and it's not a good feeling. Also, the actor who played Adam..DAMN..okay moving on!

“I have a feeling that once you live through something like this, you become a little bit invincible.”

So onto my message right? I sat there thinking to myself that one snow day going out with your family and then out of nowhere your entire life changes. When you think about it we all go out every single day to go to work, school, a movie, the mall, dinner, whatever it is. And every single day we get up and take the risk of something happening to us and it could be something so awful we thought it would never happen to us. Doesn't thinking about that just make you wanna go "DAMN"? I'll admit that I've been one of those people who thinks something won't ever happen to them and then it does. It's a horrible feeling let me tell you. To me it always feel like every day gets a little worse where people are too busy being busy and not paying attention to notice things. I know I've been like that where I'm too caught up in all the work for school I have to do and making sure I get up and go to work on time or make sure I'm being somewhere when I'm supposed to. There have been more times than I care to admit that I've been so mindless and careless about myself and the other people around me to notice that anything is even going wrong. There have been so many times that I've just reacted and acted on my emotions rather than making myself stop to think about the situation beforehand.

"Sometimes you make choices in life, and sometimes choices make you."

The movie really made me look at life, the relationships that are involved in it, and all the things that we really have no control over. Honestly that's a scary thing for me to think about it. I know that I'm nowhere near perfect nor will I ever be but that doesn't mean that there aren't a million things that I'm good for or good at or that I'm worth much more than I think I am. If I Stay makes you look at life and see all the things that we've taken for granted and how it all can be taken away from us at any point of time whether or not we expect. That's the thing about life sometimes, it doesn't care about what your future plans are, what you're doing, who you love and care about, how something will effect you or the ones around you....it chooses to just happen. This movie has so many good quotes and I know I put a couple up on my Facebook last night because they make sense and I think that it's something part of life, things that happen.

"Isn't it amazing how life is one thing then, in an instant it becomes something else."

If you looked back on all the choices you've made, do you think if you had a chance to redo those choices, that you would make the same ones? I've thought about this one before and I've always said that I wouldn't because everything I've gone through has made me who I am today. But in reality and when I think about it now, there's so many things I wish I could go back and change where I wonder how my life would be now. Would it be better than it is? Worse? Would I be alive or would I be dead? There are many things in which I wish I had the chance to go back and change so I could have fixed a problem before it became so big that it became something irreversible. But that's life I suppose, right? You live and you learn and thankfully there are many of us who are given that chance to learn from our mistakes but sometimes, some people don't get that chance.