Been having a lot of "the real world" conversations recently and it's beginning to bug me. The phrase "the real world" is so casually tossed about these days, without thinking, without considering who we are speaking with. What's the point in telling a child suffering from poverty that the real world expects him to find a good job and buy a condo? "The" should really be changed to "My". My real world. Everybody has a different take on their real world. It should be expected, since we are all born into different families, different bodies, different challenges. But if it's a given, then why is everyone obsessing with following up with "the real world"? Just because our reality is different doesn't mean it is less real, nor is it less important. It doesn't mean ours is more difficult either. When we tell our friends that we are all grown up and part of this world now, what do we mean? Are we implying that we weren't part of the world when we were five years old? But our imaginary friends were real to us and that was our world. We lived for play time and we surrounded ourselves with family because we had few friends then. All that is still real. To say that the real world is something we enter once we reach one of our many phases in life is like saying we have been ghosts all the other times. Are we so exclusive to reject people who have a different reality from ours? That doesn't really make our world a world does it? It's just our little social circle, bigger, but still just our circle.
I just caught Requiem for a Dream after trying very hard to read the novel. Hubert Selby Jr. really doesn't let you off easy. It's the story of four individuals and their own destruction due to drugs. A girl prostitutes herself, a man lands up in jail, and another man gets his arm cut off. But the one that strikes me the most is the mother, the fragile old lady whose mind spiraled out of control. She gets addicted to food and diet pills. It's not because she's vain or because she's keeping up with what she's watching on the telly, but because it's a reason for her to wake up in the morning, it is her motivation to live. She has a goal, and she gets up in the morning to do something about it. Of course soon she gets addicted to the pills and she ends up in an asylum. She goes crazy and starts seeing her refrigerator as a monster trying to eat her up. There's chaos in her kitchen and she flips out. There's no use telling her that it's not real. There's no use telling her that it's all in her head. Because what's real in her head is real to her. And despite all that chaos, that's what she wakes up for. She wakes up for her diet pills even though it drives her looney. She wakes up for her pills because if not she wouldn't wake up at all.
What we wake up for in the morning tells us about our own worlds. Do we wake up to make up and try to look pretty? Do we wake up to read the bible? Do we wake up to mug all day? It's not just what we do when we wake up, but why we wake up. If we wake up just because we feel like we have to or because there's work or school, it makes waking up unbearable doesn't it. If we don't find our hope, our goal, we're going to end up hating to wake up and falling into another person's reality. We will be easily swayed by what people tell us is the real world and we take it as our own.
So when my friends were talking about careers and relationships in the real world, I kinda spaced out and thought of Sara, the lady in Requiem for a Dream. We choose our own worlds. But isn't there one truth that transcends our choices? Isn't there ONE truth that is not just for the rich or poor, but for every single person? ONE truth that is outside our heads?
One truth is this: Everybody dies.
But then what?
But then what?
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Ellen Burstyn's monologue in Requiem for a Dream
Ellen Burstyn's monologue in Requiem for a Dream