Leave Excuses, Start Living!
In life, you will either have excuses or successes. In order to get what we want, we will either put excuses aside or witness the death of our dreams while we are alive. The story of Edward in the movie A Different Man (2024) gives important messages to all of us. Especially for those who spend their lives with excuses.
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A Different Man Analysis
One day, Edward volunteers for an experimental treatment to remove the deformation on his face. Edward, who begins to recover miraculously in a short time, turns into an extremely enterprising and attractive person. He leaves his old identity behind and steps into a brand new life. In this new form, he makes a successful career in sales.
Everything is working out for Edward. He even starts to take a role in a theater play that is exactly about him. Of course, it is not difficult for him to play the role of a person he knows very well-that is, his past self. However, one day, a man he meets will take him back to the past. When Oswald comes to the theatre during rehearsals, his life starts to take a weird turn.
Oswald has the same kind of deformation on his face. On the other hand, Oswald is an extremely talkative, loveable, and friendly character. This man is a vivid person despite all the handicaps that he has. He embraces life with all of his hands. Oswald also finds a place for himself in the play when he was accepted so easily into the theatre. However this situation starts to have a bad influence on Edward's psychology.
Every time Edward sees Oswald, he reminds him of his past self. All the excuses he used to make in the past gave meaning to his bad life and consoled him. However, he realizes that these excuses he clung onto in the past do not apply to Oswald. This situation depresses Edward day by day. While he thought he had left his past behind, Oswald brings all the fears and victimization inside him into light. The rest of the movie is a complete black comedy.
Leave Excuses and Start Living!
All of us, in our life, have things which we hold onto tightly and call it an excuse. And many of these are actually genuine excuses. Again, there are those who move on, try to achieve something in spite of all these, because instead of finding excuses for it, they choose to make solutions, blame people instead into being the hero of their stories, not at the mercy of circumstance.
His experiences in the movie remind not only him but also us about our lives. If I didn't have all these excuses in my life, what could I do, what kind of person would I be? Do these excuses really exist, or are they all things I create in my own mind? What if someone else, instead of me, had passed through the situation, would something different have come out?
The victim mentality is when we are at our most helpless. This way, one cannot live a valuable life at all. We have to take responsibility for our own life, put all the excuses aside, and become willing to act toward what we really want. In order to be capable of doing that, first we need to get rid of all those thoughts and beliefs that limit us.
That there will be difficult times and problems in life, everyone knows. Well, most of them are made by ourselves, at any rate. However, with these, a living given to a victim consciousness changes all these into the most beatific stories of excuses, and all into ladders to success for those who are the leading players of their own lives.
In other words, the only things that come between us and our objectives are these excuses we manufacture. They are the most powerful pointers to our insecurity. And they deny our true potentials and condemn us to an ordinary life.
Now is the time to dare ask them. Do you want to reach your goals? Can you do everything to get what you want? And above all, what would you be as a person without excuses?
In each of us, there is one Edward and an Oswald. The time is now to choose which one will win.
Leave excuses and start living!
