What We Do in the River

PERSONAL ESSAY

Hello lovelies,

Paid posts are going to look a little different this year. Every other Wednesday, you will receive an email from me in addition to the Friday posts.

For free subscribers, it’ll include a preview (like this one) with the option to upgrade to paid or sign up for a 7-day free trial to read the rest. If you’d like to read the Wednesday posts in full and you don’t have the extra cash to justify paying for an upgrade, shoot me an email. No need for a financial breakdown or a copy of your bank statements. Just grovel and beg and I’ll upgrade you for free. Kidding! Just let me know you’d like to upgrade, and I’ll make it happen. No questions asked.

Paid subs will obviously receive the full posts. The second Wednesday of each month will deliver a personal essay. The fourth will bring a dopamine dump (feel-good post).

Without further ado…

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What We Do in the River

I was sitting on a couch in the home of a New York Times Editor in Washington, DC — do I sound cool and cultured and worthy of literary society? I shouldn’t because this editor didn’t even live there. He just rented it out to recent grads. How long are we allowed to call ourselves that? Anyway, I was sitting in some fancy guy’s house celebrating my less fancy friend, a Call You Mother bagel in hand, its sesame seeds in my teeth, when the internet phenomenon “main character energy” wormed its way into conversation. The crowd was a mishmash of friends who didn’t know each other well. I couldn’t speak to the energies of most in the room, but I didn’t think that was necessary to weigh in.

As a writer of main characters and a liver of life, I felt particularly qualified to have an opinion on the subject. Regardless of one’s willingness or desire to romanticize their daily doldrums into TikTok vlogs, I believe everyone is the main character of their own life, and they should be. This, coming from my gorgeously big smart brain, felt obvious. Who else would be the main character of your life?

Everyone agreed with me, complimented my genius, and we moved on. Kidding! What a shitty essay this would be if that were the case. No no, my friends. Main character energy is all about conflict and overcoming obstacles, and I was about to weather my own.

The responses were polite but pointed. Main character energy, one woman said, was simply coded language for vanity. How could you think the world, the story of life, revolved around you? A man chimed in that it was totally self-indulgent to think you were at the center of everything. That anyone who thought they were the main character must lack empathy. I was embarrassed yet tickled.

On the one hand, how sweet it is to imagine the greater story of Life, to spend some time on this one shared intricate experience we’re all participating in. Surely, to think you were the main character of all this *gestures wildly for some too-long amount of time* would be ludicrous. But how often do we think of life in those terms? How often do you, dear reader, think of your life in terms of the entire globe, universe, cosmic unknown? Do you plan your days with 8 million other humans in mind? Set your goals against the backdrop of all humanity? I certainly don’t. And if you’re all nodding along saying you do, I’m horribly embarrassed because I didn’t think we as a species had the capacity for that. On the mainstream, we’ve only really tried to do that with one thing, climate change. And I’m trying my best, but sometimes I don’t wash out the peanut butter jar to recycle it. I just throw it away. Sorry, humanity.

We, at least from my American perspective, live crushingly, glaringly, laughably individual lives. There are many essays worth of content on the subject of community in modern life, but I think it’s safe to say individualism is a tenant of American culture. Exacerbated by the personal branding of social media and the isolation of the internet age and the grind of capitalism etc etc etc.

So when asked who I feel is the main character of my one individual life, I will always and unwaveringly say me. And I have been called “selfless” before (#yuck #recoveringpeoplepleaser #havingaselfissexy). I would hope, down into my gut and around my soul and back through my earthling brain that you wouldn’t allow anyone else to be the main character of your life. At the end of the day, it’s just you and yourself in that consciousness of yours. Plus maybe some greater spiritual element I’m not yet qualified to discuss. Who else is going to make the choices that build your life? Who else is going to move the body you inhabit? Who else is going to feel all your feelings and grow all your growth and experience all your experiences? Who else, if not you?

Regardless of what a self-involved whorebag you think this makes me, this is what I believe: You are the main character of your own life. And the supporting character of someone else’s. And the antagonist of someone else’s. And an extra of many many more.

Another word for main character is protagonist. (File that away for later and you’ll crush it on Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader.) Protagonists can be split into one of two categories: active and passive. I recently received feedback on a script that my protagonist was passive, a voyeur in her own fictional life, swept up by the current of her story. This protagonist, I’ll confide in you, is based on me.