Manchester By The Sea

The world is not yours.

As a person who does not like the overly acted melodramas where everything is being overobvious, Manchester by the Sea was the movie that I was looking for. And it sincerely tore my heart out.

The way Lee coped with his past is quite relatable if you look into it through the expectations of an individual and the lasting effects of traumatic events where every emotion was used and the outcome led him to emotionally shut himself down. His repression serves as a coping mechanism to go on with his life but he does isolate himself and prevents his and others’ emotions from getting into another kind of pain again.

Life is simply going with the flow even after the most tragic event that happens to you. Life does not stop for you because it does not revolve around you. You make mistakes, you do make the mistakes of your life, you feel the guilt, you feel that this is the end but you just simply live with the glimpses of the guilt while carrying the loss and struggle in the monotony and mundane standards of life. 

Misery can never be overcome, however the silence that it creates makes it even more intolerable. The more you silence your emotions, the more you brutally hurt yourself. Yet sometimes there is no other way out rather than just carrying the burden all by yourself.

Manchester by the Sea reminded me of the core of nature for humans, and it's a hard to swallow pill that you have to digest to the bone.

When you stand in front of me and look at me, what do you know of the griefs that are in me and what do I know of yours?

- Franz Kafka, from a letter to Oskar Pollak, November 8, 1903