the joy of connection in the perks of being a wildflower

There is so much pain and I don’t know how to not notice it.

Live like Charlie, Laugh like Patrick, Love like Sam. What is the message of The Perks of Being a Wallflower? That life is continuous rather than static, life is a moving picture book with unexpected pop-ups and strange twists, and life creates worlds meant to be lived in. For some people, like for Charlie, these worlds can be mistaken for plastic dioramas, and life can be frozen at the flip of the switch. But no matter what story you carry with you from your past, it’s your responsibility to take control of your story and surround yourself with change. Change is the people we love and who love us most, whose love extends to their influences on us and our influences on them. That way, one may never be alone.

This movie and book touch heavily on the theme of influence, its positive and negative applications, and the impact of this influence. Naturally, it involves discussions of power to do so. People are power, wielding the weapons that turn our lives colorful, or make them unlivable. For Charlie, life-altering experiences cause him to lock himself in a cell at the beginning of the story, as a safety mechanism against being hurt again. Inevitably, this results in a sad, lonely kid who doesn’t “participate,” brainwashed to accept a false stability. It is through the effect that Sam and Patrick have on Charlie that the gates to his soul begin to open, revealing the long-avoided pleasures of company.

To pad his autonomy, Charlie takes a few leaps of faith himself - small but significant - to nudge himself off his path. He sits next to Patrick at the football game, joins Sam center-stage at the prom, offers to tutor her on her SAT’s, and asks his father the money for his secret santa project. Without these small dives into the unknown, Sam and Patrick’s influence would’ve amounted to nothing, and certainly not cooperation. The people around us can spin our life around, but we have to be willing to embrace change first, reject the numbness of our comfort zones and trust the future’s ability to make tomorrow better than today. Because though the world may be packed with pain, and the people too, we are fortunate enough to share tunnel lights, David Bowie and a steering wheel with the people that make us feel the most infinite.