What You Can Learn From ‘Maid’ (Netflix)

Don’t Let Your Circumstances Define You

I was watching the Netflix film called Maid. It has inspired and both shocked me, and I felt the need to write about it.

Spoiler Alert: If you haven’t watched it and are planning to watch it, then do that before you read on.

The film is about a young woman, Alex who found herself in an abusive relationship, with a child and a maniac mother who had also been through the same cyclic abuse.

As Alex sat in a room one day, she said to herself “I need to figure out how I got here”.

You see, she was supposed to have gone on a writing degree course. She even had a scholarship. Instead, she had found herself in a trailer park with an emotionally abusive alcoholic partner.

She escapes once. Finds opportunities put in front of her. Then by a range of unfortunate events finds herself back in the same cycle of abuse sinking deeper into herself.

The moment of realization comes when she finds her young daughter hiding in a cupboard whilst she and her partner had been arguing. She connects herself to her inner child and remembers doing that exact thing.

She knows that she wants better for her daughter. So she leaves again.

This time knowing that she is not coming back.

It is a story of hardship and homelessness.

But also of strength and hope.

Hope that one day, any situation can become better.

It is a story of kindness that is around us each day. That is if we take time to stop and allow it to enter no matter what is happening in our own lives.

MAID is how she earns her living. Cleaning for others. Unskilled it is the only thing she can think of to do.

She then uses that experience, she tells the stories of the people she cleans for. This re-ignites her passion for writing. Her yearning to return to college and become a writer.

She was a writer. She is a writer. She becomes a writer by writing.

I am a writer because I write. I have course-corrected after my life took me on a different path.

Have your circumstances changed the life choices that you had? Are you back on track?