How it Ends

We were driving the wrong way down a one-way street at night. Rain hammered the windshield, headlights cut through the darkness, and a horn screamed - every sound feeding the knot of stress twisting inside me. My mom and I were meant to fly home after a college visit to the school I’d eventually attend. The weather canceled our flight so we found a hotel to stay in overnight. With nothing else to do, we scrolled through Pay Per View and found the movie, Little Miss Sunshine. “I heard this was supposed to be good,” said my mom. She was always a savant when it came to movies and TV. Little did either of us know it was the exact thing we needed to feel like we could breathe again.

 

I didn’t expect Little Miss Sunshine to so profoundly affect me the way it did. On the surface, it’s about a road trip with a family of misfits trying to get their youngest to a beauty pageant. Beneath that, it's about the quiet chaos of a family trying to hold it all together when everything was falling apart. Each character carried their own quiet ache, yet they kept showing up for each other in small, imperfect ways. The film reminded me that sometimes, just continuing forward - together - is enough.

 

At the time, I was deep in my first of many “existential crises”. Everything around me felt uncertain, and I was just beginning to understand what it meant to carry love, loss, and grief all at once. So I stayed away from home as much as I could, lingering with friends late at night, or driving aimlessly through empty streets with my music on full blast, trying to feel everything and nothing at once. Those drives became a kind of ritual, a soft escape, a way to make sense of what I couldn’t name. 

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When Little Miss Sunshine came out on DVD (for the kids, these are hand-sized silver discs we used to watch movies), I watched and cried to it every night for two months straight. It felt like compulsion. But now I understand it was the only way I knew how to process what I was going through. That movie held the weight of what I couldn’t say out loud and gave shape to the sadness, the overwhelm, and the fragile hope I was clinging to. It helped me survive one day at a time, until eventually, those feelings loosened their grip, and I was able to move on to whatever was meant for me next.

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The feature song of this film is “How it Ends” by Devotchka. It plays during the last scene of the movie as the family drives off into the sunset in their VW Bus. How It Ends is about death. But it’s also about hope. And failure. And all of the moments in between. This song transports me to these moments when I was a teen, feeling those emotions all over again. But it also reminds me that there’s a depth of emotion in these hard moments that amplifies when you have lived through and seen the other side. Surviving is no small death - it is the breath that gives life to hope.