You Are the Main Character, and Here’s Your Reminder

Oddly enough, some of my greatest life clarity came from a TikTok sound. Yes, very on-brand. Let me explain. 

“You have to start romanticizing your life. You have to start thinking of yourself as the main character because if you don’t — life will continue to pass you by. And all the little things that make it so beautiful will continue to go unnoticed. So take a second, and look around and realize that it’s a blessing for you to be here right now.” A few months ago, this Tik Tok sound by user Ashley Ward went viral, introducing the concept of being the main character to the internet. Throughout my social media pages, I saw this phrase becoming commonplace in funny videos and jokes, but I found a large degree of resonance with it. 

As many little kids do, I grew up deeply obsessed with the fictional worlds of young adult novels. I went through every phase imaginable, my biggest one being my Hunger Games phase. My love for the endless stories provided by books is what truly gave me a limitless imagination, one that I carried with me throughout my everyday life. My mind would constantly conjure up some larger-than-life story out of any ordinary occurrence that ever happened to me, or dream up a crazy scenario that half of me expected would actually happen. I was always the main character in my life, I just never put a name on it. 

Now, I jokingly like to call this frame of thinking “main character syndrome.” Living for yourself, and maybe sometimes romanticizing the heck out of your everyday life, is something I wholeheartedly believe in. I make a big deal out of virtually anything and everything, because why not fully appreciate and soak in the otherwise mundane moments of life? From birthdays to trips to the grocery store, I like to think that I’m constantly the center of attention. Outwardly this may come across as extremely narcissistic, and to some extent it might be, but I think it is a large part of what keeps me sane. It makes little moments in life so much more thrilling. 

Especially now with everything going on, crafting my own doses of joy from life has been the one thing keeping me happy. At the end of the day, it’s your life and you are the main character of your story. If there’s anything we can learn from living through a pandemic, it’s that your time is precious, and there’s every reason to make the most of it. 

Figure out what romanticizing your life means to you, and then live it to its fullest extent. Get dressed when you’re going to study and pretend you’re the mysterious girl in the coffee shop that everyone can’t stop looking at. Go drive to a fast food restaurant in the dead of night and blast music in the car with all the windows down. Get that spontaneous piercing one day out of sheer boredom. Go take yourself stargazing. Life is exceedingly too short for us to not try and enjoy every single second of it. 

 

• life
• main character
• social media
• tiktok