AS A SUBURBAN teenage girl possessing the sub-average social skills of a character in a Murakami novel, I was initially drawn to the faux-indie film Garden State in a way I believed was totally original. I loved it so much I went to see it four times in theaters—two of which were by myself—and even pre-ordered the soundtrack off of Amazon. In my 16-year-old mind, it was an “indie” film, because I couldn’t see it at the local movie megaplex and instead had to take the train into Philadelphia to catch a screening at one of the independent movie houses. This made me feel special, because it guaranteed that almost no one in my high school would see it, and it crystallized the notion that I would be unique in my obsession.

The next spring, when we got our .edu e-mail addresses and joined our college Facebook networks, I’d come to find that everyone who considered themselves even slightly ‘unique’—which, of course, was everyone at NYU—also connected with Garden State so deeply that they even listed it on their profiles. This was significant because before you got to college and actually met all of your fellow students IRL, your profile was the only indication they had of what kind of person you were. Every box was scrutinized and judged. Once everyone saw you liked Garden State, it became a static part of your personality, along with the fact that your favorite band was Bright Eyes and your favorite book was Catcher in the Rye.

As incoming freshmen, we hadn’t developed the sense of snark and self-deprecation critical to surviving in New York City, so our love of self-serious works like Garden State was refreshingly genuine and lacked even a wisp of irony. We didn’t know yet that liking something so mainstreamly alternative was incredibly “uncool,” and that taking Facebook Interests and Activities seriously was equivalent to online dating in terms of Embarrassing Internet Activities. About halfway through freshman year, when it finally dawned on me that the cool kids left their profiles sparse, pithy and mysterious, I worked so hard at making mine appear hip that some of the meaner girls in my dorm created a Facebook group devoted entirely to mocking my wannabe-pretentious profile. It was one of the more hurtful things that happened to me in college, if only because the experience caused me to begin to develop the hardened exterior and vigilant self-awareness characteristic of young, disaffected New Yorkers—these were qualities the effortlessly cool toted proudly, but ones I would find later to be completely antithetical to both me as a person and as a writer.

That I genuinely liked Garden State seemed to be the biggest indication of my inherent lack of coolness. It became quite evident that the ugly duckling does not always grow into a swan in college, and rarely does she develop the confident cool mastered by Natalie Portman’s character Sam in Garden State: I would’ve never lent my headphones to a cute guy in the waiting room, for example.

Of all the things I loved about it, perhaps what I liked most about Garden State was how it made life in the suburbs seem kitschy, fascinating, even enviable. At 16 I didn’t know any accidental millionaires or epileptic pixies, but there was a quarry near my house, and sometimes I would drive there on ink black roads and bellow into its vastness. Often the act in itself would jolt me out of a depressive stupor I frequently fell into back then. There was something about shouting until your throat went raw that made me feel alive in a way I assumed Sam and Andrew felt when they kissed in the rain. Whether they were drinking tea with the quarry couple or burying beloved dead pets, the characters seemed to value originality in a way to which I could relate. Growing up in a place, in a family, where fitting in was held supreme, I tried my damnedest to stand out. It was my trying so hard that belied that inorganicness: I had no clue who I was, except that I was different. Me and Sam and Andrew, we were unique snowflakes, individuals, reared to appreciate each other’s complexities. But in Sam and Andrew’s world those complexities united them; in mine, they only seemed to drive me further away from everyone.

THE SUMMER before I went off to college, a series of unfortunate events led to me being put on antidepressants for the first time. I could write about those months here, but honestly I was such a robot I don’t remember them very well. I didn’t feel empty anymore, but I didn’t feel full either: the truth is that I didn’t feel anything at all. Often Garden State’s opening scene would come to me in hallucinatory flashes,  Andrew hollowly staring at himself in the mirror, rows upon rows of pills stacked in the cabinet behind it. I understood that desolate disposition, the unique experience of going from feeling too much to feeling absolutely nothing. The trouble was that it was Sam who pulled Andrew out of the dark, who drew him a map towards feeling again; life doesn’t really work like that–broken people who seek solace or salvation in each other always separate more broken than before. Zonked out on meds, I stayed alone, and lonely, until my moods evened out. There would be no teary airport hug for me, no romantic bathtub heart-to-heart. I knew this intellectually, but it didn’t keep me from hoping for a Sam of my own, someone who’d teach me to take myself less seriously, someone whose magnetism could extract me from the mire.

Six years after its release, the dominant theory purports that it’s still pretty lame to like Garden State. When people admit to enjoying it as teens, it’s always in a sarcastic manner, with the same dismissive tone of voice they might adopt to talk about being a theater geek as a child, or crying over a breakup that happened in 7th grade. Declaring your love for it on Facebook now would be seen either as a nostalgic nod to the past or an ironic reference to how lame it actually was. I don’t really understand either of those methods, because people like what they like and that should transcend irony, at least occasionally. Sure Zach Braff is super annoying and Natalie Portman’s character is one-sided and sexist, but teens in the suburbs loved that movie, and now that we have migrated to cities we shouldn’t pretend we didn’t. I like plenty of things that are uncool, like Taylor Swift and Scattergories and flavored beer. I’ll never be Sam and I’ll probably never find a male equivalent to balance out my crazy, but it was nice to think about at 16. Sometimes it’s nice to think about at 22, too.

Jessica Roy demands you acknowledge that there’s beauty in the breakdown.