Some nights, I scroll through Netflix for 20 minutes and still end up watching the same movie I’ve already seen a bunch of times. You know exactly what I’m talking about. There’s that familiar music, lines you can quote by heart and the ending you already know.
For me, it’s not that I’m too lazy to find a new movie to watch. It’s because I’m comfortable watching the same movie. It’s like that feeling you get when you’re visiting someone you haven’t seen in awhile.
There’s something healing watching it again and knowing exactly what will happen. When life feels unpredictable and out of your hands, rewatching a familiar story gives you control over something.
Sometimes I put on a comfort movie when I feel anxious, or lonely or even when I’m just tired of thinking (a brain break, if you will). It’s not about escaping reality completely (though I do tend to do that a lot with my books), it’s about taking a breather away from it.
Nostalgia plays an important part too, of course. Old movies have memories of who we were when we first watched them. You could’ve watched it with your grandma or maybe during a date. For example, I can’t watch the movie “Tag” without remembering my first kiss with my husband. I also can’t watch “The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Part 2” without thinking of my grandmother who passed away, specifically the war scene because she’d rewind it over and over and over again to watch it happen (and maybe this was her own form of familiarity and comfort too).
People say you can’t move forward if you keep looking back on the same things. Maybe that’s true from time to time, but maybe growth can also mean you can look back on something and still love it without allowing it to stop you from moving on completely.
So yeah, I’ll keep watching that same movie. Let’s be honest with ourselves here. Sometimes, a familiar story is exactly what your heart needs to handle whatever comes next.
