Main Character Energy: Prelude
In a post last week, I mentioned that I was going to start sharing some personal writing I’ve been working on in therapy, a sort of memoir that centers on me learning to tell my own story in a clear-eyed but positive way. I’ll be posting entries from that work here every so often, starting now. I’m sharing this because I put a lot of effort into it, and because it feels like a good thing to do if I’m trying to feel more at home with my own narrative. Pre-posting edits will be made if it feels appropriate, and identifying information of others will be obscured except where it’s impossible (e.g. “mom” and “dad” — not a lot of room for ambiguity there!). If you want to skip these posts, it’s all gravy, baby! As I said last week, it’s time for me to “show my ass” (metaphorically. There will be no ass pics in any of these installments. If that disappoints you, DM me for rates).
“I think we both have ‘main character’ energy,” my friend said to me. This was a few years ago, after I expressed to him in a down moment that I had been feeling exhausted from trying to put a lot of love in the world and not getting as much as I wanted back. (We’ll return to analyze this thought in a later entry.)
When my friend delivered this note, I immediately recoiled. I felt gross and full of guilt, emotionally backed into a corner, my Catholic upbringing summoned to render judgment unto me. “Main character energy”? That meant I was a bad person, right?
An internet search of “main character energy” makes plain that there isn’t really consensus on what, specifically, that phrase means. Largely speaking, it seems fair to say that people use it derisively, to describe individuals who don’t really understand that we live in a society (it’s funny that noted main character The Joker famously does understand this). Merriam-Webster, with a mix of clinicism and sauciness, defines main character energy as “dramatic self-confidence” and “obtrusive self-importance.” Speaking my language in a thread about how main character energy connects to late-stage capitalism, the Reddit user Ambroser2 refers to it as “the idea that you are the main character in the world, and everyone else is NPCs (non-playable characters).” For the non-gamers, this means that every person you interact with essentially exists to provide some purpose to you – to assign a quest, feed you information, or sell you something. You are the only being acting with true agency in the world, as in a single-player video game.
This, obviously, is problematic and shitty, and largely speaking, most folks would probably want to avoid it. But why did I react so poorly, so anxiously and intensely, to my friend putting this on me?
Because, for most of my life, I’ve been very afraid that this judgment was true.
Since the following pages are meant to be a chronicle of my feelings and development, I’m going to dive in with the single most definitive piece of trauma in my life. Narrative architects would say that this is starting “in media res”:
When I was 17, after years being separated from my dad – by circumstance, by geography, by resentment – he and I tried to mend our relationship, with an eye towards me moving back into his house to join his new family. This reconciliation (which I was genuinely excited about) became a large part of the backdrop of the fall of my senior year of high school, and I spent the entirety of Thanksgiving break that year with my dad, his new wife, and their kids, learning (I thought) how to reintegrate into a large, “regular” family household after so many years away.
Unfortunately, that reintegration did not come to pass. Shortly after the holiday, I talked to my dad on the phone, and he said these words that I will never forget: “When you stayed with us, we found you to be self-centered and arrogant, and we believe you aren’t ready to be a part of this or any other family at this time.”
(We’ll be circling back to my dad’s particularly cruel word choice further down the line.)
Self-centered and arrogant… that sure sounds like main character energy, right?
I’m 40 years old now1, and it took me until just a few months ago to gain the tools to understand, on a real, deep level, that those words cast upon me 23 years ago shouldn’t define me. But, for 23 years, they did, poisoning basically every major emotional interaction I had with a refrain of “you’re just a selfish asshole who wants more than you deserve, and you’ll be alone forever.”
Heavy stuff, right? Well, as English poet Philip Larkin famously wrote, “They fuck you up, your mum and dad.” (You won’t catch me saying “mum” outside this quote, though. This is America, damn it.)
So when my friend said to me that he felt I had main character energy, even though he meant well, and even though he was just trying to empathize with how I was feeling, his comment threw me back to being 17, on the phone with my dad, hearing about how I’m too selfish to truly deserve love.
Here’s an interesting thing about Googling “main character energy,” though – not every result is a bad one. Google’s top AI result (take that for what it’s worth, which is kind of nothing because AI sucks shit) says that main character energy refers to “the confidence, charisma, and self-assuredness that is often associated with the main character in a story or movie.” And, hey, those are pretty good qualities! Taking this a step further, the crowdsourced self-help website WikiHow hosts an article called “What Is Main Character Energy? (Plus, How to Cultivate It)” which suggests that people may actually want to aspire to adopt some characteristics of “main characters” by doing things like “focusing on romanticizing your life and finding joy and contentment in the little things,” or “by going on solo adventures, treating yourself to little pleasures, and sharing your own joy with the people around you.”
And while I’m not sure that, at least for me, “romanticizing your life” is necessarily the healthiest move, some of the items in the above paragraph are things I would like to do more of. I’d love more confidence and self-assuredness! I’d love to share more of my joy with the people around me!
Here’s the thing about main character energy – our physiology more or less requires that we are the main characters in our own lives, because we do not (at least as of April 20, 2025) have unfettered access to other people’s thoughts and feelings. We live with ourselves full time. And, speaking for me, there are things I had to learn – from therapy, from the media I love, from myself – to really make that living arrangement work out.
In the following entries, I aim to tell my own story, tracking my development from childhood to the present, using media that’s impacted me as a guide to help understand my emotional state at a given time. I’m interested in exploring how the culture I’ve loved my whole life has portrayed its main characters and their stories, and especially in how that might help me understand my relationship to my own story.
Let’s see if we can make a little positive main character energy happen.
More posts from this series coming soon!
41, now! I wrote this in April. The truth must be told.