So I’m watching my usual Sunday night noir movie channel on my archaic-don’t-judge-me regular cable, and the movie “Leave Her to Heaven” is on. The lead actress is Gene Tierney. She’s strikingly beautiful.
I’ve seen many beautiful people before in these old movies and not known who they are. For some strange reason, I decided to google her.
And to my complete and utter unsurprise, she had a fucked up life. She was even once on the “brink of suicide” per this article on bestmoviesbyfarr.com.
Of course the actress I decide to research has the word “suicide” in her biography. Call it a weird sixth sense thing, call it coincidence. I call it like finds like, an inexplicable compulsion to gravitate toward that which you know, even if you don’t know you know. And I know a thing or two about the effects of suicide.
I didn’t know that this actress had a fucked up life. I didn’t know anything about her at all. I learned she had been through the shit though. Due to contracting rubella while pregnant, she gave birth to a deaf, partially blind and mentally handicapped daughter. Depression obviously ensued and she was horrifyingly treated with shock therapy which ruined her memory. Hard to be an actress when you can’t remember your lines.
All that trauma and pain pushed her to the edge, literally. She once had to be talked off the ledge of a high-rise apartment building.
Besides the shock therapy (which a few ex-boyfriends might have wished I’d had), my life has been profoundly effected by suicide and mental health. My own experiences I think subconsciously compelled me to google this trauma-filled actress.
When a movie, book, tv show, or anything really, particularly strikes me, I always go “you watch, this will have something to do with mental illness or suicide” and bam! it fucking does. Sometimes I hate that I’m right. Reading about others’ trauma obviously makes me think of my own, and there’s many days when I just don’t want to go there.
A friend recently said to me, “I don’t believe in coincidences.” I don’t either. Googling Gene Tierney and finding out she had a troubled life wasn’t a coincidence. Why was I nudged to read her biography? Why was my interest piqued in the first place?
Ever wonder why you’re drawn to certain things and not others?
Because like finds like and we naturally lean toward that which we know, consciously or not. I think your soul, consciousness, past life or whatever knows even before you do that something or someone is similar to you, so it pushes you towards it – like it or not.
But what’s the point? Well, in this case it led me here writing this article that you’re now reading hasn’t it?
I haven’t written in quite a while. Journaling yeah, but that’s just verbal vomit. A health scare this summer kind of put my motivation to write on the backburner. No worries, all good now, but it was an anxiety-inducing several weeks. Something had to give, and it was writing on my blog that went.
But it’s Fall now, new season, new me – officially healthy me.
In a weird way I have to thank all of the difficult life experiences I’ve endured because they indirectly brought me to read about this fascinating actress who died at the age of 71, from emphysema of all things. (She had taken up smoking in the hopes it would make her voice more alluring for her acting career.)
And her colorful story brought me back to doing this thing I love.
I certainly wasn’t intending to do a deep dive into my feels tonight, but the law of like got me, even when I wasn’t looking.
I wasn’t looking eight years ago either when I met my best friend. Turns out he had certainly been through the ringer and back in his 24 years, something I could relate to. Something I couldn’t explain at the time propelled me to start talking to him and here we are now, best buds planning our annual Halloween camping trip.
I now know that that something was like finds like which helped me find my way back to writing and found me my dear friend.
Me and my friend have both had abnormal, the road less traveled (and not necessarily in the good way) kind of pasts. “Trying to make order out of my life was like trying to pick up a jellyfish.” A Gene Tierney quote that perfectly fits us.
Photo by Michaela Zuzula on Unsplash
The law of like brought us together.
And brought me here finally finishing a long-overdue post.
Now time for my overdue glass of wine.
I like that.
CM
