In the 2017 film, Lady Bird, we met Lady Bird or Christine, a senior in high school who is desperate to escape her hometown of Sacramento for a place “full of culture, like New York” as she puts it.
The A24 film explores one’s relationship with self at a core times of our lives full of new beginnings, growth and mistakes through Lady Bird’s story. Like many of our experiences at the confusing age of 17, Lady Bird too is faced with the challenges that come with the next stage of our lives: learning what love is and how to view the minute yet impactful details of our lives that paints the greater picture.
Throughout the film, Lady Bird is faced with acts of betrayal, an emotionally overbearing mother simply trying to show her love and the struggles of coming of age. In the end, Lady Bird embraces Christine, her legal name. This comes alongside her realization of what love truly meant to her: the relationship she shared with herself, her mother and with Sacramento.
In many ways, as a barely 20-something myself, I relate to her struggles. Wanting to escape that godforsaken town we called home in search of something bigger and more meaningful. But then having been hit with the subsequent yearning for comfort of that same place we were so desperate to leave and the feeling of losing the people you trusted the most. And most importantly the experience and acceptance of the shift in the relationship you hold with yourself.
Having always embraced her pseudonym, Lady Bird, the clear shift in her character development occurs at the end of the film when she refers to herself as Christine in the voicemail to her mother. As young adults, we learn in different ways to develop a healthy relationship with ourselves. For Lady Bird, it was reclaiming the name Christine. She was learning that her burning desire for a change but somehow still holding on to that damned town in Sacramento, was still a way of being true to herself but in a different format encapsulated with more knowledge than before ; that she could want both change and familiarity without betraying the relationship she has created with herself.
As we continue to grow as college students, we learn more about the values we cherish and that ultimately the relationship we have with ourselves will change. But it will all stem from who we were at our coming of age. There’s still pieces of us rooted in ourselves from the age of 17. Something that Lady Bird embraced in a time of changes, was herself. And that is a valuable trait I’ve learned from her.
The relationship with self is a key player in my life and probably for many other people my age. It’s definitely something Christine discovered as she realized how to truly love both herself and the suburban town she grew up in. We all know that having a healthy relationship with ourselves is a key factor in adulthood but my point here is not how to form it but acknowledging that it’s something we’ll be continually learning to do in these next few years. For now, we should simply identify this journey as a recipe we’ll be continuing to “perfect” alongside Christine.