Embracing the starring role you play in your own life can lose you all your friends or be a tool for self-development. WH reveals how to harness your main character energy…
Sweat pours down my face. My thigh muscles ache as my trainers pound the pavement. I want to give up, but I don’t. I can’t. So I put on Breathe by Michelle Branch. By the time the chorus reaches its crescendo (‘Everything is alright/If I just breathe…’) I’m sprinting. I’m the star of my own early 2000s romcom in which, after the requisite heartbreak, journey of self-discovery and tear-filled reunion, everything really will be alright.
It’s both a privilege and a toooft-untapped power to believe that things will work out happily ever after. But having faith in the outcome allows me to have faith in my ability to get there. Now, whenever I run to a song that allows me to tap into my socalled ‘main character energy’, I feel myself increasing speed, improving form, even smiling between breaths. And all because I think: if I had an audience, what would I want them to see?
I’ve spent enough years navelgazing, both at an amateur and professional level, that when ‘main character syndrome’ started trending on TikTok and Instagram in 2020, I wasn’t surprised that a term had emerged to define this ethos. I only wondered why it took so long. From a psychological perspective, main character syndrome is an ‘intentional way that a person thinks of themselves as the key player in their life and views it through a storytelling lens, like a movie or TV show’, says clinical psychologist Ramani Durvasula, a professor emerita of psychology at California State University and author of Don’t You Know Who I Am? How To Stay Sane In An Era Of Narcissism, Entitlement And Incivility. In other words, to be the main character is to see everyone else as a potential sidekick or nemesis. Either way, they only matter in terms of their connection to you.
Though deemed a ‘syndrome’ by the court of public opinion, main character syndrome isn’t a formal mental health condition or disorder. There’s no diagnosis beyond the armchair variety, which is to say: you know it when you see it. If you’ve been on social media this year (A* for effort if you haven’t), you’ve likely seen it more than ever. It often takes the form of a self-indulgent birthday post or recording and posting a criminally long video at a concert (complete with a ‘sound on’ Instagram Story sticker).
It would be too easy to write off people who exhibit main character syndrome as self-absorbed, shallow and status-seeking. But in healthy doses, viewing yourself as a protagonist in social contexts, both online and off, is a natural and essential part of navigating emerging adulthood, a life phase from age 18 to 29. So
