How Star Wars Made Me the Woman that I Am
By: Yael Wolfe
Tags: Childhood, Life, Movies, This Happened To Me, Growing Up

It’s May 4th, 2020 and I just watched The Last Skywalker. I was shocked by how much it affected me. I’ll admit, I hated the prequel movies (except for Ewan McGregor as Obi Wan Kenobi), so I didn’t have much hope for these new three. But the first two weren’t bad. I enjoyed them, though mostly because I loved seeing the old characters return.

But this time…all the ways the movie revisits those original three films, all the ways it circles back to the beginning… It got me right in the heart.

I felt like a little girl again. Hearing Lando Calrissian’s laugh. Watching lightsabers collide. Seeing Han and Luke and Leia again.

When it was over, I literally had to go outside, sit under the light of the moon, and cry.

I could still smell and hear those little moments of my childhood. I remembered the feeling of that hair piece on my head, the way the bobby pins poked at my scalp and I just smiled through the pain, because I thought I looked just like Leia. I remembered my uncle chasing me up and down the hall, and pretending to have a light saber battle with my three-year-old brother.

I remembered being a little girl who wanted to be able to move things with her mind and to fly an X-wing and wield a green lightsaber.

In later years, I came to particularly love movies like these — epic tales of good versus evil, battles that span generations, journeys that cause heroes and heroines to risk their lives. But they always ended in disappointment for me. I remember walking out of the theater after watching The Fellowship of the Ring and pausing in front of the theater, watching people go in and out of The Gap, Victoria’s Secret, and Black and White Market. I experienced such an intense feeling of despair, I still remember it to this day.

It wasn’t the life that I wanted. I mean, don’t get me wrong — I love clothes and fashion and design and style. But…it just wasn’t the world I wanted to live in. I would rather climb the slopes of Mount Doom than face a world in which an exciting afternoon culminated in a trip to Victoria’s Secret. I would rather face a night on Hoth huddled up inside a dead Tauntaun than spend an evening burning through my credit line at the downtown shops.

Where is that world that George Lucas made, that world that I fell so in love with as a child? A world in which everything is so simple, so black and white. A world in which it was so easy to know who was good and who was bad. A world in which it was impossible to spend a moment in the mundane because every moment was life or death.

As I sat there under the moon tonight, crying over the ending of these movies that have meant so much to me, I realized it was also, in many ways, the end of my youth. I know that might seem like a silly thing to say at almost 44, but I feel myself crossing over into middle age. My childhood is gone and my young womanhood, too.

But even now, at this age, I still long for a world that feels more meaningful to me. I still long to feel like something matters. I still long to connect to the little girl within me who was ready to take on the Empire.

But Earth is the strange planet in this strange universe on which I have found myself. And I still don’t have quite the right color hair and I still can’t move things with my mind. And the Empire still seems to be winning.

But I will try to keep the Rebellion alive. I will keep trying to hone my Jedi skills. And I will do this for the little girl who couldn’t decide whether she wanted to marry Luke Skywalker or be him.

For her, I will keep dreaming of flying an X-wing and saving the world.

© Yael Wolfe 2020