You are the main character
On doing what you want to do from a new POV
I’ve been doomscrolling lately. I know I shouldn’t, I know it just makes things feel worse in the long run even if they feel mildly better in the moment, but I can’t help it. There’s a lot going on in the real world and TikTok is a welcome escape. Though I know full well that the app is more of a roulette table than a rabbit hole right now. I might get a funny video here and a lighthearted one there, but in between I might get several political or news-related posts. I tell myself it’s helping me stay informed, and in many ways it is, but it also starts to wear on me after a while.
However, I stumbled upon a post the other day that made scrolling worth the risk. It was a short, simple video of a girl in her car talking about something she’d heard on a podcast recently. It was something like:
If your life were a TV show or movie and you were the main character, what would the audience be shouting at you to do?
Immediately, I thought of several characters across a number of different mediums who I’ve rooted for but also felt frustrated with because they weren’t doing what they so obviously should be doing. One example is literally every main character in any horror or thriller movie. You know, the ones who stay in the house looking for the monster even though they should be running for their lives? Or (spoiler if you haven’t seen it), Rory Gilmore of Gilmore Girls when she drops out of Yale. The list is endless.
In American culture, thinking of oneself as the main character isn’t a new or novel concept. It’s pretty much the ideology the country was founded on. Plus, as humans, we’re all natural navel-gazers to some degree. So it makes sense why there are so many trends online about romanticizing your life by imagining yourself as the main character or commending someone for having “main character energy.” But where these trends celebrate the self through a take-it-or-leave-it lens, implying the person is a main character simply because, the question from the video strikes me as a more self aware approach. It’s an exercise in looking not at the shiny, sparkling parts of ourselves, but the ones we can’t – or don’t want to – see in ourselves.
It’s funny, because I’d argue that for people pleasers like myself, many of my decisions have historically been made from what seems at first glance like this same lens: what do they want me to do, and what will they think of me depending on whether or not I do it? This, of course, makes making an actual decision much harder because there are now multiple external factors. And when you’re juggling everyone else’s wants, wishes, and expectations, it’s easy to forget your own.
What I love about this question is how it changes the perspective. By thinking of ourselves as the viewer, we can externalize and separate ourselves from the situation and see it in a different light. It reminds me of Parts Work Therapy, where you parse out the various parts of yourself (anxiety, sadness, etc.) and try think of them as separate pieces in order to look at them in a different way. It’s a modality that can help us reframe a situation and heal a pattern. Anxiety, for example, might be our way of keeping ourselves safe, but when left unchecked, it can take over and make things worse. Once we’re aware of it, we can better prevent it from over indexing and taking the wheel.
Ultimately, recovering people pleasers like me know that sacrificing what we want in order to appease others doesn’t feel good, and the way to combat that is to tune into what we really want. But tapping into our intuition can be hard. Those parts of us that are scared and unchecked might still sound like the outside voices we’re trying to ignore. It can be loud and make it hard to know what to listen to. It’s why it can be so easy to tell a friend to leave her unhealthy relationship or unfulfilling job – because you see it so clearly – yet stay in one yourself. This concept of putting ourselves in the viewer’s seat for the movie of our lives is a way to see things more objectively, like we do with everyone else. It’s really a shortcut to accessing our intuition.
Part of me (that pesky part called Shame) wishes I knew about this trick sooner. If I had, maybe I wouldn’t have taken that rebound job I didn’t really want after my layoff. Maybe I would have spoken up sooner in that toxic friendship. On the other hand, though, I see now how certain lessons had to be learned by going through it. They’re information my intuition can now use to steer me in the right direction. And because I feel I’ve gotten slightly better at following my gut, I can’t think of many things my viewer self would shout at me to do.
Well, other than: “Stop wasting so much time on TikTok!”
Author’s Note/Journal Prompt: What would your life as a show or movie look like? What would the audience (or you as the audience) be wanting your character to do? Feel free to share if you’d like. Either way, thanks for reading and thanks for being here. 🤍
Tarot reading can be that audience shouting, sometimes and with the right deck ;)