The Protagonist Theory

I have this theory about life that I call The Protagonist Theory.

In simplest terms, it is the idea that there are some people who are protagonists, leaving the rest of us to fill in supporting roles. Some of us are destined to be secondary characters, some of us even playing antagonists.

I don’t know exactly when I came up with this theory, some time during my teenage years, I suspect. Perhaps it was in my first semester of college, when, to my amazement, each week a girl named Sarah sat down next to me and recited the drama going on in her life--only some of which could actually be blamed on her.

During these 16 weeks, Sarah was in three car accidents, fell in the bathroom and ended up in the ER, contracted mono, dated three different people (without their knowledge that she was seeing other people), her roommate and her roommate’s boyfriend were arrested leaving her paying two people’s rent, and somehow ended up taking care of a kitten (or was it a puppy? I can’t remember anymore) because someone abandoned it at her house after a party, where the cops had had to come to break up fights and shut down the rowdy, underage kids.

Every class, as she told me about her life, which seemed absolutely insane to me, I politely listened and remarked how bad her luck was and asked her if she was feeling better yet. And when her stories were over, if it was still before our professor started the class, she would ask me how I was or what I had been up to, and I would gesture at the essay for the class we were sitting in, telling her that nothing ever happened to me.

Of course, I didn’t go looking for things to happen. I didn’t go to parties. I still lived at home. I didn’t even drive. I could’ve gone looking for these things, but it didn’t occur to me at the time that I needed to look for things; I just supposed that at some point, the opportunities would present themselves to me.

But even then, when opportunities did present themselves, it felt like it was always in the context of someone else. I was a supporting character in other people’s stories. I was an outlet for Sarah’s monologue about mononucleosis. An interesting side-character she met in English 110, who had bright colored hair and wore wannabe edgy clothes.

Sarah drove me to my mom’s work a few times after class, in her messy beat-up car she had named Ted after the protagonist from How I Met Your Mother, but after that semester, we never saw each other again. We were friends on Facebook for awhile afterwards. I would watch her life go by on my feed or watch snapshots from her life go by on Snapchat, still as crazy and overwhelming to me as ever. Despite the occasional comments about meeting up, getting coffee, or just hanging out, we never did anything. Perhaps that was one of my opportunities for the things to happen. If I had just reached out, made firm plans with her, I probably would have found myself in the middle of a good story.

Sarah has been just one of many people I have interacted with whom I believe fits into a protagonist role. These are people who have led strange lives, whose upbringing seemed unnecessarily complicated, as if written by some fumbling author in order to give them an interesting backstory and a motivation for forward movement. People whose abilities seem effortless and natural, yet whose challenges are huge and heavy. Chosen Ones, Protagonists.

In my second year of college, I met a girl whose life seemed so amazingly unreal, I constantly struggled with whether or not she was a habitual liar. Her backstory unbelievably tragic: brother had died in a house fire, mother committed suicide in grief, raped in middle-school, cancer in highschool.

We made friends one day, when I walked into a student lounge and found her crying on one of the couches. I got her tissues, offered her a hug, and listened to her explain that her boyfriend’s mother had just called her to break up with her, because she (the mother) didn’t think she (the protagonist) was good enough for her wonderful, wounded army-vet son.

I would spend nearly two years thinking this man had stepped on a land-mine or other type of explosive in the line of duty in Iraq, only to find out he had driven into a light post when he was in the States, injuring himself permanently, getting retired with honors, and having benefits for life. A true American hero, a wounded warrior, a terrible driver.

I was friends with this particular protagonist for 2-3 years, enjoying her confidence and attitude, convinced she would go places in life. My calm steadiness and her raging hurricane made an interesting protagonist and supporting character duo. I patiently listened to every story she told me, from MMA fighting in an illegally run, underground ring owned by a drug cartel to every argument with every boss she ever had, to her crying about her generosity being used and abused by another man or another friend, to proud stories about her grandfather, the KKK wizard from Alabama.

She was a perfect protagonist, and I was the perfect supporting role for her, laughing at every joke and giving blunt advice when the script called for it.

Being her friend had rewarding moments, I was grateful to the confidence and compassion she showed me and for having a friend when I didn’t have many, but ultimately, it was exhausting. I am not proud of how I ended the friendship with her, I more or less ghosted her honestly, but I know it needed to be done. After years of joking that we were basically dating, I was tired of feeling like my friend was a clingy partner, demanding my undivided attention at all hours of the day and night. I was working 40+ hours a week that summer, and she would be upset with me that, at midnight on a weeknight, I was unwilling, or simply unavailable because I was sleeping, to go on Walmart runs with her. I was tired, and tired of being pulled around by a protagonist.

To be perfectly honest, the biggest thing that pushed me away from her was that she no longer looked like she was moving forward. She was stuck, her tragic backstory once making her achievements and ambitions seem greater and more important, were now the excuses for doing nothing, going nowhere. She bought a trailer in the same trailer park where she had lived with her dad. It was desperate for a clean-up and make-over that she kept saying she’d get to. Once planning on studying psychology, hoping to use her background with trauma and grief to help others, now getting fired from a job at a bowling alley, because she cussed at the owner and broke company policy by sleeping with another employee. Things no longer looked like the universe handing her a bad hand of cards, it no longer looked like it was bad luck holding her back. It was choice after choice she made. It was going back to the abusive boyfriend again and again; it was punching a customer at work; it was allowing her pets to constantly urinate on the couch without cleaning it up.

Protagonists are supposed to change the story, even reluctant heroes are the chosen ones to save the day. And she, as far as I could tell the perfect protagonist, simply refused to move away from her own toxicities, instead choosing to revel in them while preaching that she couldn’t stand people who were doing the same thing as she was.

I began to be afraid that instead of her pulling me forward on adventures with her, she was holding me back, demanding my ambition be focused on the same small-town and Midnight Walmart runs being the highlight of freedom.

At the same time I broke up with her, I broke up with my long-time boyfriend, another failed protagonist.

“Boyfriend” never seemed like the right word for him, and I frequently think of him as an ex-fiance. We both knew it was only a matter of time until we got married, I was constantly waiting for the ring, warning him that he better not propose on a holiday or birthday, because that was too cliche.

I could write pages upon pages about my time with him, the various amounts of trauma and abuse I silently suffered, waiting for things to get better, thinking I could make him better, but that would feel too self-indulgent and go too far off the topic at hand. It is enough to say that it happened, and then it was over.

It was at this point in my life, the summer I turned 22 (god bless the Taylor Swift year), that I, really for the first time in my life, attempted to take control of it.

This isn’t to say I didn’t have some control over my life before, because I have always been too headstrong to completely listen to others. But I had, for the most part, gone along with things as was expected of me and asked of me.

I went to the community college in town pursuing an AA on my own until a program leader found me and asked me to join the program, where I eventually met the protagonist on the couch crying. I dropped out of that program when I realized it was terrible, but continued on with my classes at the college. I decided to move across country at the promptings of my long-distance boyfriend, who would become the ex-fiance. I applied to the school there that my mother picked out. I was a dutiful home-maker, while a full-time university student, taking care of an alcoholic partner and four (yes, 4) cats, who were my babies.

I may have always done my own thing, but my own thing was never off the beaten path. My big decisions, my big adventures, were typically based on other people, rather than myself. Throwing away that stable, if toxic, relationship was the hardest thing I had done up until that point. It upset nearly everyone around me, and, more than that, it forced me to break up the home I had had for two years. One cat went to my parents, one cat went to my brother, and the other two stayed with the ex (how I still miss my babies!). I moved into an apartment with three strangers, began dating a new partner, and struggled to maintain good grades in my last semester of undergrad. I did more that last semester to find a social life and contacts with my peers who shared a desire to be writers than I did the entire 4 years previously. If only I had attempted to take real control over my life earlier! Ah, hindsight.

Despite my desires to have a greater sense of control over my own life, I maintained The Protagonist Theory and that I was not one. I was a supporting character, floating through other people’s stories. I would be, at most, a chapter in someone else’s autobiography.

This mindset has set the stage for several years of my life, an unchallenged way to excuse myself from leadership and accountability and explain why other people seem to have all the luck, good or bad. Even as I began reading self-help books and challenging my everyday thoughts and constructs, attempting to free myself from past traumas and truly shape the life I wanted to live, I maintained this Protagonist Theory.

Imagine then, my surprise, when my words were mirrored back at me in the form of Emilie Aries, accusing people, women in particular, of forcing themselves into supporting roles, rather than taking control of their own life:

. . . I learned that so many of us are suffering in silence, feeling like we’re stuck playing a supporting role in our own life story. So many of us feel like life is happening to us instead of the other way around. Many of us feel like we have no choice, no power, and no options when it comes to how we steer our lives forward. (Bossed Up, Emilie Aries)

A supporting role in our own life story. A secondary character in our own lives. Not the protagonist in my own life. Perhaps, my theory was not a skilled observation about life, but instead is a manifestation of doubts, fears, insecurities, societal gender pressures, and, of course, the ever present anxiety and depression which I’ve battled my entire life. Perhaps this mindset about life working like a story wasn’t just making me think everything could be turned into an blog or book or speech or autobiography, but rather it was holding me back, keeping me in a place of secondary character, of codependency, of dutiful home-maker.

While I surely do not have the tragic backstory as my protagonist one-time-friend from the student lounge, nor do I have the absolutely remarkable ability to find myself in so much troublesome drama as my classmate Sarah, perhaps I do have the ability to seize a protagonist role for myself. An unlikely hero, perhaps, but not a reluctant one.