During the show, though, I noticed a phrase repeated continuously. "My journey." They kept thanking the other contestants for being a part of their journey. How they felt this was such an important part of their journey. That even if they didn't compete as well as they hoped, they were so thankful for their development in their journey.
Every single one of them was talking as if they were the lead roles in their own stories.
That's how they see themselves.
It's how most of us see ourselves.
In The Culture of Narcissism by Christopher Lasch, he describes a unique phenomenon that occurs in modern Americans. Because we are uniquely separated from our past, our histories, our communities, we all seek to feel significant in our own selves. A desire to stand completely apart from others and declare that "I am important." We are all engaged in these "private performances" and trying to develop what Emerson called "an original relation to the universe."
Lasch wrote of this phenomenon in the 1970s, but if anything it's more true now. Each of us is desperate to be the stars of our own lives, but in order to make that performance authentic, it has to be recognized by everyone else. With social media, reality tv, and -- dare I say?-- blogs, it's all too easy to position ourselves for the recognition we think we deserve. We are poised to make ourselves the center of everyone's understanding of ourselves instead of positioning ourselves in the context of history, society, family, or anything else that might embed us in something other than individualism.
We demand recognition. As Chuck Palahniuk wrote in Fight Club, "We've all been raised on television to believe that one day we'd all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won't. And we're slowly learning that fact. And we're very, very pissed off." Each of the designers who didn't win the big prize was shocked to find that the show wasn't about them and their journey, and you could watch them struggle with that in real time.
As a writer, I struggle with this daily. The number one piece of advice writers get is to put themselves into the story and to write what they know. Well, guess what? I make a lousy lead player. I spend my life behind a computer screen and homemaking for my family. My life is simple and happy and utterly boring. No one wants to read about me or what I know!
Yet, time and again, I find myself modeling characters off of myself. I think, "what would I do in this situation?" Or "how would I react?"
At least at first.
Thank the gods they never remain so simple. Within a few pages, my characters tend to do the opposite of what I would do. By the time they're thrown into the plot, they take on their own lives, and I can torture them from a distance.They grow, they become something else, and I spend as much time as possible trying to distance myself from these crazy lunatics who are running towards the fire instead of away.
Still I wonder. Is it a bad thing that we're so often the leading players in our own stories? Should we attempt (as I find myself doing quite frequently) to be a better supporting character? Are our lives and the lives of others made better by sometimes viewing ourselves as the leading man's best friend? Or maybe even the villain?
