Sleepless in Seattle is my spirit movie. There he is, a young and gorgeous Tom Hanks (Sam) all tousled curls and melancholic. That gut-wrenching cemetery scene. Sam’s face at the airport when he sees Meg Ryan (Annie) for the first time. And then on the observation deck of the Empire State Building when Sam and Annie finally meet. I’m getting emotional just thinking about it!
(Do you remember the story? Sam, grieving the death of his wife, relocates from Chicago to Seattle with his son, Jonah, to start a new life, and Jonah plays matchmaker, bringing his Dad and Annie together.)
The movie came out in 1993 when I was, well, much younger than I am now, and along with all the films that followed—You’ve Got Mail, Notting Hill, Bridget Jones’s Diary and Love Actually—pumped me so full of love dreams that I was ready to explode.
I didn’t explode but that love gas has been slowly leaking out of me ever since, like air out of a punctured tire. For me, there was no Tom Hanks/Sam waiting at the top of the Empire State or even in Trader Joe’s frozen-meals-for-one section (insert pensive-face emoji). Things don’t always go as planned. “There’s no such thing as a perfect,” Sam tells Jonah (and then his eyes alight on Ryan, he stops mid-sentence).
I wanted the idealized rom-com happy ending and got, well, something a bit different. My life doesn’t look quite like I dreamed it might. I wanted a guy like Sam and enough kids for a basketball team. I got, well, my dog is just great and she loves to play ball!
None of us find it easy to reveal our vulnerabilities, imperfections and failed hopes but, the fact is, life is imperfect for most of us. Looking over the fence to peer at someone else’s progress will take you nowhere. The grass is rarely greener. “Everyone is screwed up, broken, clingy and scared, even the people who seem to have it most together,” the writer Anne Lamott says. “Try not to compare your insides to other people’s outsides.”
The more time we spend thinking about how our life doesn’t look like we wanted, the less time we have to actually make it look like something amazing—to actually live. To swim in the ocean, to read and paint (or bake, sculpt, knit, draw, weave), to play music, to dig into the earth and see seeds shoot up, to take long walks in forests and sit in silence.
And we could try something radical—we could try falling in love with ourselves. Elizabeth Gilbert has been doing it for 25 years. In her new Substack she reveals, “I have written daily letters to myself from love and it has been the most transformative spiritual practice of my life.”
And it’s worth remembering, even Nora Ephron, the creator of Sleepless in Seattle, didn’t get a rom-com happy ending either. Remember Heartburn, the 1986 movie starring Meryl Streep and Jack Nicholson? Ephron wrote the screenplay, and it’s roughly based on her life and marriage to the journalist Carl Bernstein. She was pregnant with their second child when she discovered he was cheating on her with a mutual friend. “Be the heroine of your life, not the victim,” Ephron would later say.
It takes work to be that heroine. It requires stomping on fear and shouting down the negative voices in our head whenever they try to get in the way of our pursuit of possibilities, dreams, ideas, joy and contentment. But if you just keep at it, you might find you’ve built a happy ending for yourself as good as in any rom-com.
Stephanie Wood is a Sydney writer and author. Find her on Instagram or subscribe to her weekly newsletter.
Photos: Shutterstock and Flickr
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