Garden State of Mind

Yesterday felt like one of those classic “rug pulled out from under my feet” days.

It wasn’t an “end of the world” day.
It wasn’t an “everything is lost” day.
It was more of an “I don’t know what to make of this new information and now I kind of want to crawl into a hole” day.

I won’t get into specifics here, but I’ll say this much—life in middle age? It’s a strange, dark purgatory sometimes. Nobody prepares you for that part.

Anyway, I couldn’t sleep.
So, I did what I often do when my thoughts won’t quiet down…I wandered downstairs and decided to drown myself in a movie.

The problem?
I didn’t want to rewatch something familiar.
But my mood required the perfect movie for the moment—something that would let me escape, but also maybe help me feel… seen.

Like a good book or a great song, I was hoping for words that would resonate.
Something to sit with me for a while.

That’s when I came across Garden State.

I knew nothing about it, other than the fact that I’d heard it mentioned in passing over the years.
I didn’t know who was in it.
I didn’t know what it was about.
All I knew was that it lived somewhere on my mental “movies to watch someday” list.

And tonight? My gut told me it was time.

My gut was right.

Was some of it cliché? Sure.
But there were also those lines—the quiet ones that hit exactly where I needed them to tonight.

Funny how that works.

I turns out I really was in a Garden State of mind.