Lady Bird: The Real Struggle of Finding Yourself
Understanding Christine’s Journey to Identity in Greta Gerwig’s 2017 Film
The Story
Imagine being seventeen years old and hating where you live. Your name is Christine, but you’ve decided to call yourself “Lady Bird.” Everyone in your high school in Sacramento, California knows you by that name. It feels like the real you. But your mother refuses to call you Lady Bird. She only calls you Christine. And every time she does, it feels like she’s rejecting who you actually are.
You live in a small house in Sacramento with your parents. Your family doesn’t have much money. Your dad has been looking for a job for a long time. Your mom works as a nurse. You go to a Catholic high school. Everything about your life feels small and boring and not good enough.
You spend your time thinking about escaping. You imagine yourself going to college on the East Coast — somewhere like New York. You imagine yourself in a different life, with different people, in a different place. You imagine yourself being someone important. Someone interesting. Someone not from Sacramento.
The problem is: you’re still here. You’re still Christine, living in Sacramento, with a mother who won’t call you by the name you chose for yourself. You’re still poor. You’re still stuck.
This is Lady Bird’s story.
The Real Struggles of Being Seventeen
Lady Bird faces struggles that many teenagers understand, even if they experienced them in different ways:
Not fitting in: She feels like she doesn’t belong in her own city. She feels like her town is beneath her. She feels like she’s meant for something bigger and better. But she has no control over where she lives or who her family is.
Wanting to be someone else: She changes her name. She imagines a different version of herself. She pictures herself in a different life. She’s not happy with who she is right now, and she doesn’t know how to become who she wants to be.
Money anxiety: Her family is struggling financially. She knows her parents are stressed about money. She knows they can’t afford nice things. She’s embarrassed by this. She wants to escape the poverty and the shame that comes with it.
Conflict with her mother: Her mother is critical and harsh. She doesn’t support Lady Bird’s dreams. She doesn’t understand why Lady Bird wants to leave Sacramento. She’s disappointed in her daughter. And Lady Bird is angry at her mother for not believing in her.
Searching for love and connection: Lady Bird wants to fall in love. She wants someone to see her and think she’s special. She wants to feel like she matters to someone.
Becoming a woman: She’s navigating her sexuality and her identity as a young woman. She’s figuring out what she wants. She’s dealing with the expectations society has for girls and young women. She’s trying to understand her own body and her own desires.
All of these struggles are happening at the same time, and they’re all tangled together.
Understanding Her Mother Marion
Here’s something important: Lady Bird’s mother Marion is not just a villain in this story. She’s a real person with her own struggles.
Marion works as a nurse. She’s tired. She’s stressed about money. She’s watching her husband struggle to find work, and it’s breaking her heart. She’s dealing with her own disappointment about the life she ended up living. She probably had dreams too, when she was young. Dreams that didn’t come true.
So when Marion criticizes Lady Bird, when she seems harsh and unsupportive, it’s not because she doesn’t love her daughter. It’s because she’s trying to protect her. Marion knows that the world is hard. She knows that having big dreams leads to disappointment. She knows that believing you’re special doesn’t guarantee that life will give you what you want.
Marion is trying to prepare Lady Bird for a harsh world by being harsh herself. She’s trying to lower Lady Bird’s expectations so she won’t be devastated when life doesn’t go the way she imagines.
But Lady Bird doesn’t understand this. She just feels rejected by her mother. She just feels criticized. She doesn’t see the love underneath Marion’s harsh words — not yet.
Her Father’s Quiet Love
Then there’s Lady Bird’s father, Larry. He doesn’t say much. He’s quiet. He’s kind. He tells jokes. He seems gentle.
Larry is looking for work. He’s dealing with his own failure and shame about not being able to provide for his family the way he wants to. But instead of taking that out on Lady Bird, he loves her quietly. He supports her dreams. He listens to her. He’s there for her without demanding anything in return.
Larry’s love is the opposite of Marion’s love. Marion shows love through criticism and protection. Larry shows love through acceptance and kindness. And Lady Bird doesn’t realize how much she needs both kinds of love.
The Weight of Money
Lady Bird is ashamed of her family’s poverty, and this shame is tied to her identity in ways she doesn’t fully understand.
She’s embarrassed that her family can’t afford the nice neighborhood. She’s embarrassed that her dad can’t get a job. She’s embarrassed that her mom has to work so hard. She’s embarrassed that they drive an old car. She’s embarrassed that she goes to Catholic school instead of a fancy private school.
But here’s what’s really happening: she’s not just embarrassed of her family’s situation. She’s embarrassed of herself. She thinks if she has money, if she comes from a wealthy family, if she lives somewhere fancy, then she would be worthy of love. Then she would be special. Then she would matter.
So part of her desire to escape Sacramento and go to college on the East Coast is really about escaping poverty. It’s about finding a life where she doesn’t have to feel ashamed. It’s about finding a place where people think she’s important because of where she comes from, not despite it.
The Complication of Religion
Lady Bird goes to a Catholic school. She’s surrounded by religion. She participates in school plays and religious events. But she’s also questioning faith. She’s figuring out what she believes.
There’s a scene where she confesses to a priest, and it’s awkward and uncomfortable. She’s dealing with guilt and shame about her sexuality, about her actions, about her desires. Religion is both comforting and restrictive for her.
Catholic school is also a place where there’s a certain expectation about who you should be. Good girls. Modest girls. Girls who don’t ask too many questions. Girls who follow the rules. Lady Bird is none of these things. She’s rebellious. She’s curious. She’s sexual. She’s questioning.
Get Stories & Silence’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
So religion is another thing she’s trying to figure out as part of her identity. Is she Catholic? Does she believe? Or is this just something she inherited from her family that she needs to rebel against?
What Happens
During her senior year of high school, Lady Bird falls in love with a boy named Danny. She thinks Danny is special. She thinks Danny sees her in the way she wants to be seen. But Danny is dealing with his own struggles — he’s trying to figure out his sexuality, he’s confused about who he is. And when he breaks up with her, it breaks her heart.
Then she meets another boy named Kyle. Kyle seems cool and artistic and different. He seems like he’s not trapped in Sacramento the way everyone else is. So she falls for him too. But Kyle is selfish and doesn’t really care about her. He’s just using her.
Her experiences with boys are tied to her identity struggles too. She’s trying to figure out who she is as a young woman. She’s trying to understand her sexuality. She’s trying to find someone who sees her and loves her for who she is. But she’s also trying to escape into a different version of herself through these relationships.
Julie: What Lady Bird Doesn’t See
At the same time all of this is happening, her best friend Julie is dealing with her parents’ divorce. Julie is struggling. She’s hurting. She needs her best friend.
But Lady Bird is so caught up in her own pain, her own dreams, her own need to escape, that sometimes she’s not there for Julie the way she should be. She’s self-centered. She’s focused on her own problems. She hurts Julie without meaning to.
This is an important part of Lady Bird’s journey: realizing that while she’s busy trying to figure out who she is, she’s affecting other people. While she’s busy running away, she’s leaving people behind. The people who love her are affected by her choices.
Julie loves Lady Bird. But Lady Bird sometimes takes that love for granted. She’s so focused on becoming someone different that she doesn’t appreciate the people who already love her.
The Bigger Picture: Class and Gender
What Lady Bird doesn’t fully understand is how class and gender are connected to her identity struggle.
She’s a young woman from a working-class family. Society tells her that her value comes from her beauty, her sexuality, her ability to attract men. Society tells her that she should want certain things — marriage, family, security. But society also tells her that she should want to be more than just a wife and mother.
She’s getting messages from every direction about who she should be. From her mother, from the Catholic church, from her culture, from her friends, from the boys she likes. And she’s trying to figure out which messages to listen to and which ones to reject.
Lady Bird wants to escape not just Sacramento, but also the limitations she feels as a young woman from a poor family. She wants to be free. She wants to make her own choices. She wants to matter.
Looking Backward: Coming Home
Here’s the crucial moment in the film: when Lady Bird comes home for Christmas break after her first semester at college.
Something has shifted. She looks at Sacramento with different eyes. She sees things she never noticed before. The way the light hits her street. The way people in Sacramento are trying their best. The small kindnesses. The beauty that was always there but she was too desperate to escape to see it.
She realizes something painful: she spent so much time trying to leave that she didn’t actually appreciate being there. She spent so much time imagining a different version of herself in a different place that she didn’t actually get to know the person she was.
And when she sees her mother, something shifts between them too. She starts to understand that Marion’s criticism came from love. She starts to understand that her mother was trying to protect her. She starts to see her mother as a real person, not just an obstacle in her way.
This is the real turning point. Not arriving in New York. Not escaping Sacramento. But coming back and seeing it differently.
The Real Truth About Identity
Here’s what Lady Bird learns, and what we can all learn from her:
Your identity isn’t something you find in a different city. It’s not something you find by changing your name or getting the perfect boyfriend or escaping your hometown.
Your identity is something you build. Slowly. Over time. By making choices. By failing. By hurting people and learning to apologize. By accepting the people who love you even when they don’t understand you. By coming home and seeing your hometown with new eyes. By realizing that your mother’s harsh words came from love. By understanding that your name — even if it’s Christine instead of Lady Bird — is still yours. By accepting your family’s poverty as part of your story, not something to be ashamed of. By figuring out what you believe about religion and faith and god. By learning to see your friends and love them even when you’re struggling. By understanding what it means to be a young woman in this world. By realizing that the life you’re living right now, the boring Sacramento life, is actually a life worth living.
Why This Matters
We all do what Lady Bird does. We all imagine different versions of ourselves. We all think “if I just moved to a different city” or “if I just had more money” or “if I just found the right person” then I would finally be happy. Then I would finally be myself. Then my family would be proud of me. Then I would matter.
But that’s not how it works. You bring yourself with you wherever you go. The struggles you’re running from will follow you. The people you leave behind will still be part of your story. Your family — with all their flaws and struggles — will still be your family.
The real work is accepting who you are right now. Not who you want to be. Not who you think you should be. But who you actually are. With your flaws. With your insecurities. With your limitations. With your hometown that you hate and your family that doesn’t understand you and your name that doesn’t feel right. With your poverty and your shame and your dreams that feel too big for the life you’re living.
That’s the journey Lady Bird goes on. And it’s a journey that never really ends. Even at the end of the film, she’s still figuring it out. She’s still learning. She’s still becoming.
Why The Film Is So Honest
What makes Lady Bird such a powerful film is that it doesn’t pretend this journey is easy or simple. Lady Bird is selfish sometimes. She hurts people. She’s ungrateful. She’s arrogant. She thinks she’s better than everyone in Sacramento. She’s not a perfect person.
But the film loves her anyway. Greta Gerwig, the director, shows us Lady Bird’s flaws without judgment. She shows us that being seventeen is messy and confusing and sometimes you’re going to be a terrible person and sometimes you’re going to be a good person and most of the time you’re going to be both at the same time.
And she shows us that even when you escape, even when you get to the place you dreamed about, you’re still yourself. You’re still dealing with the same feelings of not being good enough. You’re still missing home. You’re still missing your mother. You’re still trying to figure out who you are.
Because identity isn’t a destination. It’s a journey. And that journey begins not by running away from yourself, but by turning around and looking at where you came from with love and understanding.
Lady Bird finally calls home and cries. She’s finally ready to accept who she is. And maybe that’s the most important discovery of all.
