The premise that one is the main character (MC) of one’s life should be pretty much self-explanatory. After all, life takes part from your point of view, and one normally makes decisions based on one’s best interests. However, do we all feel like the MC at all times?
I remember feeling like a proper MC when I was much younger. I must’ve been perhaps 8 or 9, when I felt unstoppable. I had everything I thought I needed: Smarts, agility, bravery, boldness. All the traits I desired then, I had, and it was easy to feel like my friend’s traits were actually inferior to mine (not that I often said that out loud). However, that all changed at some point.
My guess? When life starts beating down on you. When people start pointing out or making fun of your flaws. When people reject you, when people start disliking you simply for who you appear to be. All those negative effects eventually act as a hammer to unrefined ore waiting to be shaped into something. Unfortunately, shaping something does not necessarily mean a good something. It can be an irregular shape, full of inconsistencies.
The idea that one can reclaim the MC status in one’s life is a hopeful one. However, some parts of life are simply too disappointing to be part of one’s MC traits. When one makes an embarrassing mistake as an adult, when someone criticizes you harshly, or if you lose an opportunity. Those things are not things that normally happen to an imaginary main character. Those are things that normally happen to secondary, more expendable characters.
It is easy to forget what the feeling is, and whether one even is the main character of this story. My argument is that — you should be. You should definitely be the main character of your story, not a secondary one.
My take on an explanation for becoming a secondary character is simple. Life’s monotonous tendency and situations that are simply beyond one’s control contribute to this. I say this simply because MC’s in stories normally drive the narrative forward: They advance and the world reacts to their presence, especially in certain types of main characters (I’m looking at you Dragon Ball). However, life is rarely like that.
It turns out that later in life, after exiting the stage where everything you do, you can control (such as choosing your school subjects, or choosing a university, or what friends you make) life takes control of the story. How you spend (if you have any) free time is dictated by responsibilities. The opportunities for you to grow are only factored in by your level of privilege, and even at levels of high privilege your life takes a course normally, within a potentially, and perhaps even fatalistically, set of variable paths for the rest of your life.
What path your life will carry depends on quite a few things, such as:
- Your personality (or range of)
- Your current opportunities (socioeconomic)
- Your capability for internal or external motivation
- Your LUK stat