To state the obvious, movies are all Hollywood glam. People devote their entire lives to creating story lines and movie sets, spending millions for every production. The actors spend hours in costume and makeup, making sure every blemish is concealed correctly, and that every hair is in place.

Reality is nothing like that. There’s no clear direction in which your life is going, you have very little people that will be there with you every step of the way, and no one is going to prep you to look your best every morning.

But you already knew that, didn’t you? As soon as we emerge from the idealistic period of childhood, we’ll have a little less faith in the truth claims of movies. We’ll learn to be more skeptical of perfect couples and happy endings, and of flawless skin and thigh gaps.

I figured today that especially for high schoolers, a lot of drama and change takes place inside of the head. Of course, we go out and have fun, and we spend time with people we enjoy. But rarely are our lives entirely partying and action; more often than not, we do homework and write papers and stress about college. The majority of that stress and personal change happens inside of the head, and movies just have a hard time depicting that.

Even if they could, that would be a really boring movie, because the main character would just sit on their computer or lie in bed with a strained look on their face, and go out only on weekends, like the average kid does.

There is no compromise. Once we deviate from the norm of reality, we sacrifice its authentic element. That’s essential to differentiating real life from the movies.

That’s my little epiphany of the day.