How Greta Gerwig’s Little Women Taught Me to Reframe My Past
A personal reflection on creative healing, memory, and the quiet strength that comes from seeing your old stories through a gentler lens.
I have been thinking about Little Women a lot lately. Not the book, although Louisa May Alcott will always have a place on my shelf. What I keep returning to is Greta Gerwig’s 2019 film, which has followed me through this years-long process of softening my life and rebuilding my creative rhythm. I did not choose it as a metaphor for healing. It chose me. It came back the same way certain memories do, quietly and without asking permission.
Gerwig’s Little Women moves through time the way my mind does when I am trying to make sense of who I’ve been. It circles instead of marching forward. It lets the past interrupt the present in fragments that feel more like emotion than chronology. Her structure is not in the novel. It is her own creation, a nonlinear frame that treats memory like something alive.
I relate to this more than I expected.
When you are creatively healing, old versions of yourself start visiting again. Some arrive with warmth. Others bring questions you thought you had outgrown.
I have been meeting these earlier selves lately, sometimes with tenderness and sometimes with discomfort. And in returning to them, I keep coming back to one moment in the film: Jo stands at the top of the stairs, confessing that she wishes she did not feel so lonely. She has spent so much time fighting to be independent, but she wants to be loved, too.
That scene’s honesty has stayed with me, because creative healing often feels like that revelation.
You change your life. You slow down. You give yourself room to breathe. And somewhere in that silence, the loneliness you outran for years finally catches up to you.
That is why I have been thinking about this film (and Atonement… but more on that in a future article) while building a gentler, more artful life. It gives me language for something I have felt but never really named.
How Greta Gerwig Reframes Memory
Gerwig cuts between childhood and adulthood intentionally. The golden scenes of girlhood feel almost too bright, the way nostalgia tends to be. The adult scenes have a cooler tone. Both are truthful, but the contrast reveals something important.
Memory is not a record. It is a lens.
This is why the film lingers. It shows how the past shifts depending on who is remembering it. The facts do not change. The meaning does.
I have been noticing this in my own life. Memories I used to view through embarrassment or self-criticism appear softer now. Moments I once dismissed as small suddenly feel pivotal. When I look back from where I stand today, I see layers I was too young to understand at the time.
This is what reframing really is. Not denying what happened. Not pretending it hurt less. Just giving your past the benefit of your present wisdom. A friend reminded me of this on Friday during a much-needed phone call.
Where My Past Meets My Present
There are memories I carry that still sting, even after years. Times when I pushed myself to achieve instead of resting. Times when I accepted too little from people because I didn’t know how to ask for more. Times when I dimmed my creative instincts because I thought ambition had to look a certain way.
I used to revisit those memories with judgment. Now I try to return with curiosity. Who was I then? What did I know? What did I not know yet?
Gerwig’s adaptation seems to ask the same questions of Jo. The flashbacks don’t just show what happened. They show her relationship to what happened. They show how she has learned to see herself differently, even when she cannot fully articulate it.
That is what reframing has begun to feel like for me. It is a way of honoring the younger self I once viewed through a harsher lens. A way of saying: you did the best you could with the information you had.
Creative Healing Requires Looking Back
Slowing down makes old memories louder. When you stop rushing, you finally hear what your life has been trying to tell you. Sometimes that message is encouraging. Sometimes it is painful. Often it is both.
Reframing helps you recognize that the story you told yourself about your past may not be the whole story. You begin to see turning points where you used to see mistakes. You notice resilience where you used to notice fear. You understand why certain chapters hurt and why others stayed unfinished.
And maybe most importantly, you stop believing that you are behind.
You begin to see that you have been gathering meaning all along.
A Softer Way to Begin Reframing
I don’t believe in forcing transformation. I believe in approaching it the way Gerwig’s film approaches memory. Gently. With warmth. With space.
Here is the practice that has helped me the most.
Return at your own pace: Let the memory come to you. Some arrive easily. Others take time.
Notice how you used to interpret it: Were you harsh with yourself? Were you confused? Did you carry guilt that was never yours?
Invite your current self into the memory: Ask what you know today that you did not know then. This is where something shifts.
Keep the facts, but change the frame: Reframing is not rewriting. It is understanding.
Give the moment a new meaning: Not a perfect meaning. Not a final meaning. Just a gentler one.
This is how I have been learning to live in story. Not by editing the past, but by meeting it with a narrator who has finally grown into her voice, quietly bridging who I was and who I am becoming.
And If You Feel Lonely in the Process
You are not alone. Creative healing can feel isolating, especially when you are rebuilding your life into something more intentional. I feel it too. Jo March felt it. Most women who choose a creative path feel it at some point.
But loneliness is not an ending. It is a threshold. It is the quiet place where you begin meeting yourself again.
And that meeting is the beginning of a very different story.
Questions to Journal About
What memory has been resurfacing in your quiet moments?
What version of yourself lived that scene?
What did she need that she did not know how to ask for?
What do you understand now that she could not have understood then
How might the meaning change if you revisit it with a wiser, softer narrator?