We live in a world without Carrie Fisher, there’s no way around that. It’s a fact that I’ve been trying to cope with since 2016. Looking to Fisher for advice and how to cope with the world at large was something that I constantly did, and it’s been a weird adjustment period. She’s been my hero for as long as I can remember, and the only saving grace about all this is that we’ve been getting more stories, from those who knew Carrie, about how she’d constantly drop little pearls of wisdom that are still poignant.
For Kevin Smith, he talked about how Star Wars was always important to him growing up, because it felt like his fandom for the first time (he was 6 years old when A New Hope premiered) and how that, eventually, led to him working with Carrie Fisher in Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back.
Smith’s Carrie story started with something he saw online, the star recounts, pointing out that it hurt him because it seemed as if Carrie Fisher was trashing the film that they worked on together:
A piece of wisdom, wizened piece of Carrie Fisher’s brain sugary mind was this. She read my email, I guess she wrote back to me in a relatively timely fashion and she said ‘Oh Kevin, did you fall prey to the internet?’ And then she wrote about how like ‘You’re like me, you get up on stages, you tell stories, you try to be funny. When you’re up there you say anything if the audience attaches to it and laughs, you go with it. I was just being funny.’ She’s going ‘You and I are friends, you know how I feel about you, you know what I think about your movie, Why would you let something somebody on the internet said, change all of that?’
But that’s not all Carrie Fisher left him with. The advice that we should all follow comes with Fisher pointing out that, sometimes, the issues we think are so big and upsetting are not that important in the grand scheme of things:
And then she dropped this truth bomb right in my lap, and I still use this today, this is a piece of knowledge that changed my life and it wouldn’t have happened without Star Wars; because without Star Wars I wouldn’t have known Carrie Fisher and she wouldn’t have been in Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, here you go. Carrie Fisher goes: ‘Sometimes you have to spin that microscope around, because the thing you’re looking at isn’t as big as you think it is.’ That came from Carrie Fisher herself. Now she may have just been like ‘F***, he caught me,’ but regardless that is a piece of advice that I still adhere to today.
To be quite honest, that is great advice. So often, we get bogged down in what’s happening to us, and we micro-analyze it and panic, when sometimes, we just need to stop and look at the bigger picture. Carrie Fisher was the kind of person who always tried to help everyone around her, was there for them to push them in the right direction for their own wellbeing, and I truly miss her and her words most of all.
Thank you, Kevin Smith. Sharing this story did more for me than you probably know, but taking a deep breath and thinking about turning that microscope around is a great thing to remember right now, and we have you (and, of course, Carrie Fisher) to thank for that.
(via ComicBook.com, image: Lucasfilm)
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