Your Wounds Know What Matters to You

Years ago, a former student called me before directing his first horror film.

He wanted advice.

What should he be thinking about?

What should he concentrate on?

I gave him an answer he wasn't expecting.

"Watch The Silence of the Lambs again."

He laughed.

"Miguel, that's not really a horror movie."

Exactly.

That's why I wanted him to watch it.

Because underneath Hannibal Lecter...

Underneath Buffalo Bill...

Underneath the basement, the violence, the darkness, and everything else we remember about that movie...

There's a little girl who couldn't save some lambs.

That's the story.

Everything else is the costume.

Find the Lamb

Clarice Starling isn't simply an ambitious FBI trainee chasing a serial killer.

She's chasing something much older.

As a child, she heard lambs screaming on her relatives' farm as they were being slaughtered.

She tried to save one.

She couldn't.

Years later, she's still trying.

Different victim.

Different monster.

Same wound.

That's what gives the film its extraordinary emotional power.

The monsters give Clarice something to fight.

The lamb gives her something to save.

There's an enormous difference between the two.

When I explained this to my student, I told him:

Don't build your horror movie around the monster.

Find the lamb.

Find the one beautiful, vulnerable, deeply human thing underneath all that darkness.

Then make the audience desperately want you to protect it.

That's the story.

I've thought about that idea a lot since then.

Because eventually I realized it had almost nothing to do with horror movies.

The Wound Points Toward the Value

Every one of us carries wounds.

Some are enormous.

Others are small enough that we barely acknowledge them.

A relationship that ended.

A career that didn't become what we imagined.

Someone we couldn't save.

Someone who left.

A version of ourselves that disappeared somewhere along the way.

We tend to concentrate on what hurt us.

That's understandable.

The monster demands attention.

But there's another question I've learned to ask:

Why did this hurt so much?

Not as an accusation.

As an investigation.

Because often, underneath the pain, there's something else.

Something mattered.

You loved someone.

You believed in something.

You wanted something.

You trusted someone.

You allowed yourself to hope.

The wound doesn't only tell you where you've been hurt.

It tells you what you value.

That's the lamb.

Pain Is Not the Point

I want to be careful here.

I don't believe everything happens for a reason.

I don't believe every tragedy contains a hidden gift.

And I certainly don't believe suffering automatically makes us stronger.

Sometimes terrible things are simply terrible.

Sometimes loss is just loss.

Sometimes the monster is a monster.

But that doesn't mean our pain has nothing to tell us.

There's a difference between giving suffering a justification and finding meaning in our response to it.

The first asks us to pretend something terrible was somehow necessary.

The second asks:

What does my pain reveal about what matters to me?

Those are very different questions.

One minimizes the wound.

The other takes it seriously.

The Stories We Tell About Ourselves

This is where storytelling and life begin to overlap for me.

A filmmaker decides what a story means by deciding what to emphasize.

We choose where to put the camera.

What to reveal.

What to leave out.

What moment begins the story.

What moment ends it.

We do exactly the same thing with our lives.

Something painful happens and, over time, we begin constructing a story around it.

"This is where everything went wrong."

"This is why I don't trust people anymore."

"This is proof I wasn't good enough."

"This is the dream that failed."

Those stories become powerful because we repeat them.

Eventually, they stop feeling like interpretations.

They feel like facts.

But they're still stories.

The event is real.

The pain is real.

The meaning we assign to it is something else.

And meaning can change.

That's one of the most powerful things storytelling has taught me.

You cannot always change what happened.

But you can continue directing what it means.

What Were You Trying to Save?

Maybe that's one of the most important questions we can ask about the difficult chapters of our lives.

Not:

"Why did this happen to me?"

Sometimes there isn't an answer.

Not:

"How do I make this hurt less?"

Sometimes you can't.

Instead:

"What was I trying to protect?"

Maybe it was your family.

Your career.

Your dignity.

Your independence.

Your dream.

Your sense of who you thought you were.

Maybe the answer surprises you.

Because sometimes what we're mourning isn't what we lost.

It's what the loss represented.

And once you understand that, you understand something important about yourself.

You discover what matters.

The Director Within

This is becoming central to the way I think about The Director Within.

For most of my life, I thought directing meant imposing meaning onto something.

Now I'm not so sure.

Sometimes directing means discovering the meaning that's already there.

You look beneath the surface.

Past the dialogue.

Past the action.

Past the monster.

And you ask:

What is this really about?

That's one of the first questions I teach filmmakers to ask about their stories.

Increasingly, I think it's also a question worth asking about ourselves.

Because we're constantly constructing the story of who we are.

Our victories become scenes.

Our failures become scenes.

Our wounds become scenes.

But no single scene gets to decide what the entire movie means.

You do.

Perhaps that's one of the great responsibilities we have as we get older.

To revisit the stories we've been telling ourselves and ask whether they're still true.

Not to erase the monsters.

Not to pretend the horror didn't happen.

But to make sure we've noticed the lamb.

Because years from now, when you look back at the difficult chapters of your life, I hope you don't only remember what hurt you.

I hope you also remember what mattered enough to hurt.

Sometimes the wound is simply pointing toward the thing you loved all along.

And maybe that's where the real story begins.

If you'd like to explore the filmmaking side of this idea, watch my video "Cinephiles Don't Realize They're Revealing This About Themselves" where I talk about the moment I realized I was a filmmaker.

And if you'd like to go deeper into the way I approach storytelling, download my free Storytelling Starter Kit. It's an introduction to the ideas about Core, meaning, and connection that are growing into The Director Within.