My colleague Mr. M and I went and saw Revolutionary Road on Thursday. Being a fan of American Beauty (I know, it’s a bit of a cliché), my expectations were high before going to see Sam Mendes latest. And I was not disappointed. Not at all. But God was I depressed when we left the cinema. I have not read the book so I did not know what to expect really, but I think I thought it would be slightly more uplifting. Instead, it was heavy, heavy, heavy. It was too easy to recognize too many of the sources of their unhappiness for me to distance myself from it properly. But I really recommend it!

For you who have not seen it, the movie is about a couple who when they meet in the 1950s have the idea to just live their lives away from conventions and according to their own wishes. The eternal wish to suck the marrow out of life – to really live and not just let life pass by while adapting to rules that no-one knows who made up. But they get pregnant and end up in Suburbia – she as a housewife and he at job he resents. Many years later, on her initiative, they try to get out of it. They want to go to Paris and just see where life takes them. But their surrounding is sceptical and in the end, breaking up seems too difficult. Because as someone says in the film: Staying in the comfy life is easy, breaking up requires courage. More and more excuses are made up: the children, a good job offer, the necessity of having a nice house to raise a family… They are told that giving up on the stable life just to have time and live is just childish nonsense and not really realistic.   

It might be that the movie got to me because this topic of it is basicly the only thing I have thought about since I move over here to Washington. That is, trying to figure out if this life really is for me. Before I came over to DC, I was determined to give it a chance. I felt like it was time to settle down somewhere, like it was the right thing to do at my age. Stop moving around, getting my own place, and getting a normal, adult life. But I had my doubts already on my way over here. I texted Maria S from the business launch at the Vienna airport, expressing my doubts, and she reminded me that Starbucks and Sephora were waiting for me here in DC. But as I wrote back to her, am wondering if I am not more of a 3:rd class train through Siberia-person than Sephora and Starbucks.

So settling in here in the U.S. capital has been surprisingly difficult. I love my apartment but during my first days here, I physically felt like I someone put a rope around my neck every time I walked in through the door. (A symptom of an anxiety attack?) I had an overwhelming feeling of: “This is it. Now the adventure is over!” I hope I am wrong and I am still determined to give DC and the stable life a chance. But if you think that my blog posts have been a bit uninteresting since I moved here, this is the reason. I simply lost some of my inspiration. Fortunately, I really enjoy my job (even though DC sometimes seem very far away from the clients that I work with), and I hope that the more I get into it, the clearer things will get. I also notice that I am less eager to get to know new people now than I was when I moved to Rome and to Chisinau, so from that point of view, it is probably time to stay in one place for a while. I am just not so sure that career-driven Washington DC, the capital of the most consumer-focused country in the world is the right place for me. But I am trying to figure out how to best live my life here. And it was good for me to watch Revolutionary Road and see that I am not the only one questioning these things, even if it sometimes seems like it.