Imagine you are reading a book that is told from a first person point of view. As your eyes flit across the page, lines of words creating a new world or dialogue and introducing you to a new person, you realize that you are no longer reading as though it is someone else’s story, but rather your own. Suddenly, you are the diamond of the first water at the society ball in the 1800s or a valkyrie in a fantasy realm going to war. That is, until someone breaks your concentration and you are brought back to planet Earth, no longer the main character.
Except you still are.
Toward the end of 2020, a popular TikTok trend came into the picture: the main character. It became a TikTok challenge where you were no longer watching the movie; instead, your life became it, and you were the protagonist. People began pulling from dramatic scores to find their background music or narrated their TikToks with nostalgic monologues, turning them into 60 second short films that really made one believe the person they were watching on an app on their phone was the leading character.
The term left the boundaries of one app and filtered its way throughout all of social media. It turned into a joke; this idea that you could be at the grocery store thinking that you might have a meet-cute and someone would fall in love with you, or that everyone was wondering who the mysterious person on the bus was while you read Jane Austen. In truth, people probably weren’t thinking about you, but of themselves and their own lives. They weren’t wondering who that person at the Harris Teeter in Cameron Village was, but whether or not they needed almond milk for the week. No one was going to fall in love with you on the Wolfline because you were reading classic literature on public transit, but instead thinking of the laundry they have to grab out of the dryer at University Towers before someone else takes it out.
But for a moment, didn’t it make life so much more interesting?
The idea of being the main character isn’t one that should be taken too seriously, but I find that people should live their everyday lives as though they are. No one else will get to live the story that you live, and no one will ever be able to tell it the same way you do. No one will ever impact people the same way or feel love or pain similarly to the ways that you have.
You may not yet be convinced, but this was a large part of my college experience. NC State is the largest school in North Carolina with almost 35,000 students. It can feel shocking to find yourself in such a large environment in which you feel lost at sea with people who are very similar to you in age, educational interests or general pursuits. You may suddenly realize you aren’t the only one who wants to become a lawyer or a doctor one day and there are quite a few people who were in the top 10% of their class.
This can be disorienting and frightening, but it represents what this world is truly like. There are millions of people living lives similar to yours, and the only way to escape the crushing feeling of being inconsequential is to believe that your life is undoubtedly unique because there is simply no one else who is you. Each person is here because of their talent, their intelligence and their willingness to hone their skills, all of which make them a protagonist that is fundamental in order to not only complete this world, but make it better.
There is no better person to be cast as you in the film of your life other than yourself. Romanticize your life because it will make you realize that every moment, whether it’s studying at D.H. Hill Jr. Library, getting ice cream at Talley Student Union or running late to your class in Caldwell Hall. All you have to do is live it.
