I’m still deciding how I feel about Tiny Furniture.

One part of me related to Aura too much. Here you’ve got this girl, just graduated from a liberal arts college with a film degree, moving back home with no idea what she’s going to do with her life. Her mother and younger sister aren’t very supportive. She just broke up with her college boyfriend of two years. She has no job and no money, so she can’t move into her own apartment.

Could that be my life at the end of this school year? So needless to say, this movie had me thinking dismal thoughts about my future. I could relate to Aura’s fights with her family, because going back to New Jersey on breaks, I don’t feel like it’s my house anymore, and my sister has moved some of her stuff into my room, and everything feels off. Like Aura and not knowing where the lightbulbs are, things have moved on without you, and that feels odd.

At one point Aura says something like, “you meet all these people at college and you think you’re going to to be best friends forever, but then you aren’t.” That really resonated with me too. It reminded me of the end of high school, when you promise to keep in touch with all these people, and you say you’re all going to make plans. And maybe you do for the first Christmas break. Maybe for the first summer break. But then it gets trimmed down to a select few; I only keep in touch with 2 or 3 people I was friends with in high school. And I can’t imagine how the same thing won’t happen in a year’s time.

Aura’s story is all about figuring out who you are and finding your place in the ‘real world’ as I call it. And that’s scary. I always say I’m not ready to be a real person yet, and I know I’m mostly not. Graduation is the time where you have to do the rest of your growing up, and become a real person. I don’t blame Aura for not wanting that. She makes excuses for backing out on living with her best friend from college, saying her mom needs her at home. She’s not ready yet. She reverts back to one of her childhood friends, even though Charlotte isn’t anything like her childhood self. In the process of finding herself, Aura loses herself to Charlotte’s idea of cool.

Tiny Furniture is all about coming of age, in the most brutally honest and awkward way possible, and for that I both loved and hated it.