Truth...

"Truth like a blanket that always leaves your feet cold. You push it. You stretch it, it'll never be enough. You kick at it, beat it, it'll never cover any of us. From the moment we enter crying to the moment we leave dying, it'll cover just your face as you wail and cry and scream."
-Todd Anderson, DPS

First of all, Dead Poets Society is my all time favorite movie. It's what inspired me to want to work with teenagers. So last night I watched it with my best friend, which I love because she's someone I can actually discuss the movie with and a philosophical and deep level. She gets it, she understands. She's the Neil to my Todd/Dalton (minus the whole dying thing).

Anyway, that quote is something we discussed last night and it also happened to be a topic for a free-write paper I had to do for Comp II and I would like to discuss that here because I think it is something that should be shared, for lack of a better word.

Whenever I read this quote I visualize a small child, a toddler, with their security blanket. When we're small we're scared and so we have this security blanket that covers our entire body and hides us from the things we're scared of. But as we grow and experience more we're scared of less and the blanket shrinks. We don't need it anymore. But somewhere along the lines we realize our own mortality. Somewhere we get scared again, but we can no longer hide underneath our security blanket. We know too much, we've experienced too much and we can't hide from what it is that is scaring us. It doesn't matter how much we cry, or how much we resist we have to face the truth.

And sometimes the truth hurts. Sometimes it makes us cry and scream, sometimes it makes us want to curl up in a ball and ignore the rest of the world for a while. But in the end we have to accept it as the truth and learn to deal with it. It sucks, to put it bluntly. But sometimes, the truth doesn't hurt. It leads to great things and happy moments. But you're never really sure which is going to happen, and that's what makes us scared. It's those painful moments that make us stronger, it's those hurting truths that make the good times that much better.

So yes, truth is like a blanket, because somehow the truth will always get through and sometimes it's good and sometimes it's bad, but no matter what it will always be the truth.