As I watched the Pasadena parade this past New Year’s Day, I couldn’t help but remember the lead character from Joshua Marston’s Maria, Full of Grace (2004), and her job snipping thorns and bunching buds in a Columbian flower plantation. I also recalled the manual labor involved in the process of distributing this plant, the long hours, cattle-call lunches, bleeding fingers, and low wages. A survival job, one of a precious few for those unable to find other work. And yet, I don’t see Maria as a victim per se—she is no slave, nor is she under the thumb of a demeaning boss. What she is is discontent. She wants something else, something other. This becomes clear early in the film as she becomes bored, first with her boyfriend, and then with her job as a check-out girl at the local 7-Eleven.

Oh wait, that’s me at seventeen. Actually, it doesn’t really matter where you live: seventeen is a pivotal time in life. A time of questioning, of exploration. Taking a risk is much more inviting than continuing a mundane existence in a suburban New Jersey seashore town, or a small village in Columbia. So Maria steps out, just like I did. But the differences between us are enormous. My own options at seventeen were plentiful: education, comfortable travel, and a variety of job opportunities. I didn’t touch all every possibility, but they were there for the taking. Maria, on the other hand, is solicited by local drug lords, and is given the opportunity to transport powder for quick money and experience a snapshot trip of America at the same time. She too has a decision to make, a choice between two alternate kinds of sustenance. She can stay home, support her family with bitter spirits, work a dead-end job, marry a bore, birth a baby by him, and never taste risk.

Or, she can take the risk. She does. She partakes of a rather unholy bread, a heroin-packed Eucharist consecrated by man. Her confessional booth is an airplane bathroom—her priest, a mirror. But a choice nonetheless.

And so Maria’s story forces me to ponder my own (admittedly less intense and life-threatening) brush with the drug world at a similar age. Putting Maria’s face on the anonymous drug mules who supported my own prior habit really disturbs me. Maria’s independent, high-spirited, attractive young exterior belies an interior which—during most of the movie—is chock full of narcotics.

Her situation, that is, makes me feel some pretty awful.

Sure, there’s emotionally manipulative dramatic tension in the film. I see this Latina on the plane sweating fear, exchanging stares with another mule, and I wonder if she will be the one caught. My anxiety, however, is more than a response to a fictional character’s dangerous situation. I am uneasy because her situation itself is far from fictional and, accordingly, find myself questioning my indifference over the years. Why have I not thought about where flowers are imported from? Why did I never question the source of yesteryear’s recreational drugs? This film prompts visions of back-alley births, full bellies unloading their deadly payloads for the experimental consumption of suburban white kids from Jersey. And I feel convicted.

The film’s tagline is based on 1,000 true stories. Maria is a single voice representing all those lives. The fact that she chose such a path makes it all the more horrifying. To think, my own choice, my own unconcern and ethical blindness created a destructive but deceptively attractive option for someone just like this young Columbian woman . . .