Due to recent personal events, I’ve had a lot of time to reflect on my life and recall different times, both bad and good, to relay in story form. I have been able to tell stories I haven’t told before and be completely original with someone, and while it has been spectacular, certain stories and memories always make you feel certain ways. With my graduation date quickly approaching in December, this feeling lingers even more so than usual, and being able to tell these stories with the ability of quick reference always leads you down the path of one single question: what grade was I in again?

Having said that, I’d like to introduce the movie of the week for me, Eighth Grade. I’d like to first say I love movies, I am huge into the awards circuit and seeing what the critics deem to be the best films of the year, and rarely am I disappointed each year, and that is why I have chosen to center this blog around movies I watch and the feelings, emotions, and conjured memories each one brings to me and how it relates to my life today. Eighth Grade, written and directed by Bo Burnham, accomplishes exactly what Burnham sets out to do. I’m currently 21 years old, the definite target audience the talented writer and director was going for, and I felt a great deal of empathy and anxiety for the main character, Kayla.

Kayla isn’t the most outgoing student in school, she rarely speaks, doesn’t put herself out there into new situations she hasn’t experienced before, and has very few to no friends. While we as the audience see her in her private time, seeing her act like any other eighth grader with her own passions, there is a disconnect when she goes to school, few people actually understand her. Throughout the film, Kayla creates videos she uploads to YouTube in which she discusses different topics and anxieties that people growing up have to go through and tips on how to deal with these worries. Although she hasn’t experienced the situations she’s describing (something she is fully aware of), it becomes a form of therapy to her creating these videos, trying to sort out these phrases and ideas people say such as “being yourself” and “putting yourself out there” and what those exactly mean. She decides to test the topics she talks about in each of her videos, putting herself in situations she usually wouldn’t, learning through experience, and becoming a stronger person, the person she has always been but has had trouble conveying to everyone else.

A big symbolic item throughout the movie is a time capsule that 6th grade Kayla made for 8th grade Kayla when she graduated from middle school and was on her way to high school. It’s all the things that the 6th grade version of herself thought she would be, longed to be, and she finds herself disappointed with the end product of middle school. On the day before the last day of 8th grade, she decides to burn it in her backyard, symbolism of letting go of the things she didn’t quite accomplish in middle school, and how that’s okay, creating a new time capsule for herself to open at the end of high school. No matter how many times things may not go your way, Kayla proves that there are always new beginnings, even at times when you don’t seem to matter all that much in the world. She goes into the end of middle school knowing better things are to come, a new beginning for our heroine.

This movie I found to be incredibly relevant to my own life, not only from my own experience in eighth grade, but to the challenges I’m facing now. Kayla is a heavier set middle school student, she isn’t exactly comfortable being herself around her classmates, and I recall myself feeling that same feeling. Burnham did an outstanding job putting situations into the movie that any person could take at least one and say they experienced something similar. I was a pretty large middle schooler, I was self conscious about my weight, I had a lot of acquaintances, but had maybe only one or two true friends. I was always anxious to what people thought of me and desired so badly for people to like me. I was quiet, quite the same as Kayla, hoping that one day maybe something would change. Of course that didn’t come quickly, middle school in particular went by incredibly slow, and I could feel the pain she felt as I was watching it.

There are some situations you find yourself in that don’t seem real, that you think there is no way this happens to other people, and I think that’s the huge barrier for people in general. Humans are empathetic creatures, things don’t have to be kept in, I promise someone feels or has felt the same and has experienced something just like it. Kayla had the right idea all along in the movie, what she had been doing (which in her mind she was doing for others) was creating videos suggesting what to do in these situations and tips for how to go about it. She was trying to make the change to become the person she truly wants to be, and she had it in her all along. She just had to decide to make that leap. Now I don’t know how Kayla’s high school experience went, that’s the only problem with movies, characters you care so deeply about are then lost to the imagination and fates to hopefully bring them to the place you wish them to go. But I can say things got better for me, and I saw a lot of me in her, so I hope I can say the same for her.

I want to end this first blog post by saying how while this movie is geared toward reminding you of your eighth grade experience, I can say it also relates well to how I am now. I am on the verge once again from graduating from a school. While it is on a much larger scale and things have a lot more weight than they did then, I found it to be comforting as a reminder to not forget the message the movie conveys. In the past couple months I’m the happiest I’ve been in three years, and I find it only fitting it comes near the end of school. All of the anxiety and sadness I felt at other times in middle school and high school near the end, to have that flip flopped for college is something I’m forever grateful for, and I hope to take that into the world and never look back. Things get better, things get worse, but never forget that you’re capable of anything, you just have to want to make a change and take what you want.

I look back to how I got here, how I felt at 13 years old, at 18, and now graduating at the age of 21, and I know eighth grade me would be so incredibly proud. I hope Kayla is too.