by Oli Anderson, Transformational Coach for Realness
Your Hollywood Ending Fairytale Isn’t Coming (…and That’s A Good Thing).
Many of us grow up with a subtle expectation that life will eventually give us the kind of closure, clarity, and emotional resolution we see in the movies:
We assume that at some undefined point in adulthood, everything will magically ‘click’ into place after some big epiphany or something and so our relationships will settle, all our questions will be answered, and life will somehow reveal its hidden order.
Fortunately, real life doesn’t work this way and clinging to the Hollywood fantasy only makes us more frustrated, more disconnected, and more trapped inside our heads.
What follows is the real story of why your life will never be a neatly wrapped narrative, why that’s actually a blessing, and how you can step out of the ego’s need for conceptual endings and into the lived process of growing in wholeness towards your own realness.
Let’s dig a little deeper:
Your Life is NOT a Movie: What We’ll Cover in this Article
- Your Hollywood Ending Fairytale Isn’t Coming (…and That’s A Good Thing).
- The Moment Life Shows You the Truth
- The Illusion of the Hollywood Ending That We All Buy Into
- Thought Experiment: Imagine You Died Right Now
- Where Are You Waiting for a Hollywood Ending?
- Why Nobody Can Give You That Big Epiphany Moment
- Realness Begins Where the Hollywood Ending Ends
- Practical Steps to Let Go of the Hollywood Ending
- 1. Identify Where You’re Waiting for Your “Movie Moment”
- 2. Find the Emotional Need Beneath the Fantasy
- 3. Build Tolerance for Loose Threads
- 4. Shift From Seeking Events to Living the Process
- 5. Strengthen Your Nervous System
- 6. Replace Waiting With Action
- 7. Live a Life That Doesn’t Need a Hollywood Ending
- Hollywood Endings: The Final Word
The Moment Life Shows You the Truth
As you get older – and maybe even a little wiser – people around you start to die.
When this starts to happens semi-regularly, something profound and inescapable becomes clear:
No matter how close or distant – ‘good’ or ‘bad’ – your relationship with them was, they always leave loose threads behind.
Some of these threads might be relatively ‘small’:
– Messages they never sent.
– Appointments they didn’t ever show up for.
– Bills they didn’t pay.
On the other hand, some might be pretty huge:
– Conversations you never had despite hoping they’d happen.
– Apologies you never gave or received.
– Questions that now have no answers.
Death exposes a truth that Hollywood never shows which is that human beings lives end abruptly and incompletely.
There is no satisfying final scene where everything makes sense; there’s no big epiphany where somebody has a realisation that allows them to integrate their own shadow and finally see clearly.
Real life leaves jagged edges, open loops, and mysteries that will never be solved.
If you’re still expecting the fairytale or Hollywood ending, then this reality might feel pretty harsh but the harshness just the affront the truth makes to your ego and what you think you want from life.
(The truth will set you free but first it will p*ss you off and make you miserable).
The Illusion of the Hollywood Ending That We All Buy Into
When I was younger, I used to believe – as most of us probably did – that there would come a moment in my life where everything aligned once and for all and so I could live with a kind of animal magnetism (like the characters in your favourite TV show):
I imagined that adulthood came with a kind of internal and external ‘clicking’ together:
A point where my life made sense, my relationships settled, and the pain of past experiences resolved itself into wisdom and clarity; I believed in a grand epiphany, a sweeping revelation that would bring order to all things.
Looking back, I can see that this was nothing more than my ego’s attempt to deny reality because the assumption of lasting and perfect order is just a coping mechanism:
It’s a way to avoid facing the chaos that life already is and a convenient way to avoid stepping into the real work of growing whole by integrating the shadow, dissolving shame, guilt, and/or trauma, and facing our own patterns without flinching.
We’re sold the tidy Hollywood endings because we crave them and we crave them because we’re scared.
Thought Experiment: Imagine You Died Right Now
Let’s get dramatic for a moment (but only to reveal something true):
If you died right now, you would leave behind countless of those “loose threads” we mentioned above:
The “small” ones: Like those unanswered texts, clothes left in the washing machine, and plans you meant to follow up on.
The big ones: like the love you never expressed, the conversations you avoided, misunderstandings you never resolved, and even the real version of yourself you were still in the process of becoming
Your life, just like every life, would ultimately end mid-sentence with so much more left to be expressed and acted on.
The ‘good’ news is that this isn’t meant to be bleak – in fact, it’s liberating because once you see this, you can finally stop chasing the fantasy of the Hollywood ending and everything tidying itself up and instead you can start to focus on your real life.
Where Are You Waiting for a Hollywood Ending?
We all have at least one area where we’re waiting for our own private fairytale finale – that final moment where everything ‘clicks’, heals, and comes together so we can let go of whatever we’ve been holding onto all these years.
Ask yourself honestly:
Where in your life are you secretly waiting for a movie-style fantasy Hollywood ending?
– Are you hoping your parents will finally have a big revelation and become proud of you?
– Are you waiting for an ex to come back with clarity, closure, or reconciliation?
– Are you expecting your business, your purpose, or your career to suddenly “make sense” like the big finale in a movie?
– Are you waiting for life to hand you a big epiphany moment that explains everything?
If you dig deeper, you’ll see that what you’re longing for isn’t reality – instead, it’s an emotional need that you simply haven’t yet learned to meet within yourself (because you’re not ready to face reality).
Why Nobody Can Give You That Big Epiphany Moment
Even if you want the Hollywood ending or the moments that lead up to tit, the truth is that other people usually can’t give it to you – not because they’re selfish or broken or whatever, but because they’re caught up attempting to live out their own narrative.
The bottom line is that everyone is lost in their own story, everyone is waiting for their own epiphany, and everyone is hoping their own loose threads might tie themselves together.
People rarely step into the roles we assign and need them to play because of our emotional ‘stuff’ because they’re already overwhelmed playing the roles they’ve assigned themselves because of their emotional ‘stuff’.
Even if everything did (hypothetically) ‘click’ into place for a moment, it wouldn’t last because life would continue and something new would unravel and another thread would appear because – from our vantage point as fragmented creatures on a fragmented planet – chaos is the norm.
For sure, you can have moments where you feel like you’re in a film like falling in love, smashing through your goals, or achieving something big but the chaotic side of life always creeps back in and the threads always loosen again.
This isn’t a tragedy – it’s reality and embracing it can set you free.
Realness Begins Where the Hollywood Ending Ends
If you want to grow real and step into your realness, then you need to give up the search for Hollywood endings, epiphanies, and attempts at perfect clarity because the truth is that nothing ever actually ends.
Even when you die, the world keeps turning and then your story becomes an interpretation others construct from fragments.
And interpretations are just that: interpretations – not truth.
Stories end but life doesn’t.
When you embrace this and stop searching for the big epiphany, you step into something deeper:
The process of living, the process of evolving, and the process of feeding back into the flow of life instead of resisting it.
You may not get the final scene you fantasised about but you can learn to trust yourself and trust life more and that trust leads to realness – not a Hollywood ending, but a real beginning.
Read Trust: A Manual in Becoming the Void, Building Flow, and Finding Peace if you’re ready to take yourself deep into the process of growing in to realness and flow.
Practical Steps to Let Go of the Hollywood Ending
Here are some grounded, usable ways to integrate this shift into your life and forget about the Hollywood endings once and for all:
1. Identify Where You’re Waiting for Your “Movie Moment”
Write out the areas where you’re hoping for a perfect Hollywood ending or grand revelation of some kind – getting honest with yourself and putting your thoughts down on paper helps to start dissolving the fantasy.
2. Find the Emotional Need Beneath the Fantasy
Start to see what’s going on beneath the surface by asking yourself:
“What am I hoping this ending will give me emotionally?”
Validation? Safety? Forgiveness? Recognition? Peace?
These needs are real but they don’t get met through fantasy – they get met by facing and finding your REALNESS.
3. Build Tolerance for Loose Threads
Practice letting things remain unresolved because that means that you’re accepting life instead of trying to wrap it in unreal narratives:
– Don’t chase a solution to every misunderstanding.
– Don’t force closure on situations that will always remain open-ended in some way.
– Don’t demand certainty in an uncertain universe.
By doing this you’re building emotional resilience and strengthening your capacity to flow with life instead of forcing yourself against it.
4. Shift From Seeking Events to Living the Process
Stop imagining a perfect “Big Epiphany” moment that will explain everything and start engaging with your life as it is – imperfect, chaotic, unfolding.
The process is always more real than the events we perceive or seek.
5. Strengthen Your Nervous System
Chaos feels unbearable when your nervous system is dysregulated so use tools that bring you into your body and allow you to ride through life’s uncertainty whilst remaining grounded:
– Somatic grounding
– Breathwork
– Cold exposure
– Meditation
– Journaling
A regulated body doesn’t crave perfect endings because it doesn’t need them to give it a sense of ‘safety’ (as it already feels safe in the uncertainty and chaos).
6. Replace Waiting With Action
Anywhere you’ve been putting life on hold until something ‘clicks’ is an area where you can start taking small meaningful steps forward through real action.
Trust is built through movement.
7. Live a Life That Doesn’t Need a Hollywood Ending
Orient your choices around:
– Truth
– Realness
– Integrity
– Growth
– Service
When your life is grounded in these values (or similar real ones), you don’t need Hollywood endings because you’re already living something far more powerful:
Your real life.
Hollywood Endings: The Final Word
The fact that your life won’t resolve itself into a perfect Hollywood Ending narrative isn’t something to mourn but something to celebrate:
It frees you from waiting, brings you back to reality, and it gives you full permission to live, grow, learn, trust, and feed into the flow of life without needing it to “make sense”.
Hollywood endings aren’t real but you can be so go get it.
Stay real out there,
P.S. If you’re ready to put yourself in the process of living your real life and growing in a real way then book a free coaching session with me and I’ll help you take real action.
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