Are you the star of your show?

Is this your blockbuster or someone else’s? That tasty nugget of thought popped into my mind yesterday as I was sitting here looking out the window between Zoom meetings. I suppose it is part of an ongoing existential crisis I’ve been experiencing, grown from these strange times. I’ve found myself pondering whether my reason for this gift of life was to be trapped interacting with talking heads and dealing with concerns significant to my job but ultimately detracted from my soul, or if I have a higher calling? Well, maybe it’s not so grand as that, but certainly, there must be something better, right?

When you watch a movie, TV-show, read a book (here is a pretty good one), whatever, you often find yourself in the mind or experience of another. In those worlds, many other characters come in and out of the story. The point-off-view character interacts with some of these, and others are just background-dressing to instill the feeling that the world is “real”. We all feel that we are the main character in our lives, but what if we aren’t the main character. What if we are just supporting characters or, worse, extras in someone else’s blockbuster?

You can’t say this doesn’t happen. Non-fiction is someone else’s show right? If I write about my experience living in China and mention my wife, she is a supporting character in my narrative. I know she’s real- she’s making dumplings in the other room as I write this, but to you, she is words on a page.

As an author, I often think of more detailed back-stories for minor characters than will ever appear in the book. This helps make them complex and “real”. They have a life before and after their little interaction with the story, with dreams, wishes, and desires more profound than the reader will ever know. So, what if most of us play that role in this world? You may think me crazy, and you may be correct, but it certainly is an interesting thought experiment. I don’t know about you, but I certainly see people having experiences like they’re the star in some great work of fiction while I sit here, talking to heads on a screen, answering hundreds of emails, and dreaming of fantastical worlds. As you watch the billionaires blast off in their spaceships and you ask yourself, “why them?” Maybe that’s the reason.

Now, if you’re bold and want to take a trip down the rabbit hole, try to think whose show you’re in if it’s not your own. Ask yourself, are you ok with buzzing in the background while they get all the limelight? What can be done?

Is it the weekend yet? Ha!

Don’t lose hope, dear reader. Hope is what you’ve got. Sometimes, one of those minor characters grows more interesting than expected, and suddenly they return to the page. Some even get elevated to main characters unexpectedly and live happily ever after! Even us extras can dream, right? And remember, sometimes its not always a bad thing to be an extra sneaking by in the background. Jeez, imagine if you were a character in a George R.R. Martin book! What a precarious existence that would be- if you were even written at all 😉

Cheers!