Pleasantville is such a nice place. People live the lives they are expected to live. They are polite, neighborly, cardboard cutouts of people. They don’t know this though and to them everything is perfectly pleasant. Their days go on unchanging through the decades, until one day two teenagers from the future pop in and starting telling them how it all turns out. The kids know stuff, and as they pass this stuff on to the people living in the town. It catches on and inevitably the town goes to pieces.
“Up until now everything around here has been, well, pleasant. Recently certain things have become unpleasant. Now, it seems to me that the first thing we have to do is to separate out the things that are pleasant from the things that are unpleasant.”
For me it reminds me of the moment I found out about dear ol’ Santa. I had haunted my mother, I nagged my mother, I pestered my mother and finally I wore her down. She caved and told me the real deal. The minute I heard the words I felt part of myself melt away. The minute after that, I wished I could go back. It wasn’t pleasant. But life only goes one way - forward. Once you know you can pretend like you don’t, but it won’t help.
There are many other unpleasant things I’ve learned over the years. Growing is uncomfortable, messy business, there is no easy way. You’ve got to be prepared for the consequences of what going from clueless to ignorant to “in the know” will look like. And it won’t be pleasant, but it will be worth it.