There was a time when I first watched The Breakfast Club and felt a rather embarrassing level of empathy with the five characters. Sure, they may have been exaggerations and simplifications of real life and yes, they may have looked suspiciously like thirty year olds but it was impossible to not draw connections between the lives those high school kids were living and what my friends and myself were going through.
I would never risk calling the film believable or the characters accurate but there is a lot in their stories that can lend itself to real life. There is something in the characters' fears of each other and attempts to hide their intentions that resounds with my experience of school and even university.
A few months later I watch another film. St. Elmo's Fire. The characters were six years older (while the cast were exactly the same age) and they were done with high school. They were even done with university and they were finding their way into a grown up life.
At the time, it all seemed so far away from me. The fears of discovering what you wanted to do and holding yourselves together while moving forward seemed so distant. I couldn't imagine the idea of careers or relationships stealing my friends away when I was seeing them everyday at school. I couldn't picture the stress of finding a career when I still thought what I chose to do for A-Levels had any relevance to the rest of my life.
However, things change. The other week I found myself looking at the two DVD cases realising something. The days of living the lives of The Breakfast Club characters was over. My friends and I had hit the St. Elmo's Fire days.
My first thought was that this is a testament to my friends. In the first film, there's no hint that the group of people will be together even a day later, let alone years, and in the second, the friendships were made at university. The group we exist in managed to continue on from those angst filled teenage days to reach this next stage and face it together and I feel that deserves some celebration.
My second thought was something along the lines of swearing in an over the top and expletive manner. The main plot of the film that now depicts our time was the characters failures to adapt to life after university. Some distracted themselves by spending money, others lied, one became obsessed with someone they just met and only a few characters were really honest about what they were trying to do.
I didn't want to become like this. I didn't want to be trapped, missing the amazing times from my life before or during university and unable to fit into my new world. It was a real fear and something that almost stopped me making any progress. But then I remembered one of my favourite phrases... "It's time to nut up or shut up."
After all, the basic premise of the film is the characters learning to overcome the issues they picked up over their Breakfast Club years and dealing with their futures. I believe I've done the first of those two objectives and would like to believe I'm working on the second.
The time when we could let ourselves be defined by the things we liked and the people we spent time with is long gone. It's time to move on to the next stage. I'll be honest, it is a scary one even when you do feel like you're doing pretty well but my final thought on the matter made it all feel better. After the St Elmo's Fire (troubled and confusing but ultimately very exciting) years have been survived, you can sit back and enjoy the How I Met Your Mother years. And we all know those are going to be awesome.
