Call Me by Your Name

“We rip out so much of ourselves to be cured of things faster that we go bankrupt by the age of thirty and have less to offer each time we start with someone new, but to make yourself feel nothing so as not to feel anything - what a waste…Right now there is sorrow, pain. Don’t kill it and with it the joy you’ve felt” Trauma, big or small, changes us. We rebuild ourselves in new ways, often with walls to protect the scars. It took me most of my life to this point to realize how my coping mechanisms were closing me off to deeper joys in life; feeling doesn't get to exist only in the ways I want. Vulnerability relinquishes us to a deeper level of emotion, high and low. Our capacity for love is only as deep as our capacity for heartbreak. Joy and disappointment are two sides of the same coin. Who isn’t guilty of this? Any life is full of emotional blows: heartbreaks, deaths, divorces, betrayals, failures, circumstance, misfortune, crushed dreams, harsh realities, the list is endless. How can we not want to cushion the fall that follows these moments? But can we find the strength in our hardest moments to see the viciousness of emotion not as a regrettable gamble that needs amending, but a trophy of how much of ourself we were able to find and invest into something or someone. It’s an impossible task, but one worth working towards. What can stand alone as a wonderful coming of age film is knocked out of the park with one of my favorite monologues. Even in the film’s melancholic ending, would we not all wish to have an experience like Elio did? A transformative summer love - no matter the outcome, an experience like that is so rare and should cherished, just as his dad tells him. A film that reaffirms life is for chasing beautiful experiences, not becoming emotionally callous until it ends.