Main Character Energy
We’re all the protagonist in our own story.
Think about it for a second: each of us is an individual person. We call ourselves “me”, “myself”, and “I”.
We see the world through our own eyes, and we can’t see our eyes or face unless we look at them in a camera, photo, or reflective surface. Each of us can look down at our arms, hands, torsos, legs, and feet. We can see and feel how they connect to the rest of our body.
But we can only feel our own experiences, and we base our worldviews on things we learn from our environment.
We all have what younger generations are currently calling “main character energy” (assuming I used the slang correctly). Each of our stories uses a first-person-limited point of view. We can only comprehend the world as we see it or as it’s revealed to us. We can only know our own thoughts unless someone tells us theirs.
Why does this matter?
Well, being the main character in our own story predisposes us to want the most out of life. We often can’t decide what that “most” is, but we all want to do or have things that make us feel good.
This makes us inherently selfish creatures. Literally, self-centered, because we are physically the center of our own world.
That isn’t always a bad thing. It’s not selfish to want to satiate a growling stomach with food or slake a dry throat with water. It’s not selfish to want to keep warm when we’re cold or stay cool in heat.
But this trait of our humanity can be warped and twisted. Selfishness can cause us to hurt or refuse to help others, simply because we don’t want to risk degrading our own life experience or having our worldview challenged.
Enter empathy: the ability to relate to what other people feel.
Empathy has been getting a bad rap recently, especially in conservative Christian circles. I don’t know all the arguments. But from what I hear, the conflict arises from the idea that empathy can make us weak and manipulable by people who don’t care about our interests.
Main characters hate being weak. Read or listen to any story with a protagonist and you’ll see that their moments of weakness are when they struggle the most. It’s usually unpleasant until the story turns their weakness into character growth. And nobody likes a main character that doesn’t grow in some way, because then the story goes nowhere and gets frustrating.
To empathize with someone is to “put yourself in their shoes.” It’s to use your imagination to try to see the world as if you were looking through someone else’s eyes. The common result of empathy is a desire to help someone else, even if it means sacrificing your own wants or needs for a time.
Now, I’ll admit, I have a tendency toward empathy. Relating to people isn’t that difficult for me, even if I can’t completely grasp their experience, because I have an active imagination and a decent number of life experiences to draw from.
Because I’m a reasonably empathetic person, I can understand arguments against empathy even though I don’t agree with them. Empathy leads to vulnerability, and nobody wants to be stabbed in the back after they’ve tried to do the right thing.
Nobody likes to be taken advantage of. Nobody likes to be deceived. Nobody likes to be ignored or feel like someone who’s supposed to have their back is too busy looking after someone else (or themselves).
We’ve all experienced these feelings. Unfortunately, instead of being healthily processed, these feelings often end up buried in an emotional junkyard, waiting to explode like a claymore mine (“front towards enemy”).
Here’s the issue: the world doesn’t revolve around you and I, no matter how much we wish it would. We can realistically control precious little in our lives, which is a cause of much fear for many people who likely already live in fear and doubt (been there, done that, got the free t-shirt).
Photo by Toa Heftiba on Unsplash
Empathy makes us think beyond ourselves. Thinking beyond ourselves can be uncomfortable, especially if we’re trying to protect a worldview that we fear someone will carelessly drop on the floor like a piece of fine china. When we decide our lives are more important than the lives of others, our ability to love goes into the refrigerator.
We each have ideas of how the world should work. However, none of us knows enough to be 100% certain what the right way is (and people who are “always right” are hard to be around—I know because I’ve acted like that before).
We all make mistakes because we can’t see the full picture—only our own, right in front of our ocular organs. Despite humankind’s history of attempts to change this fact, we are not gods and never will be. People who try to make themselves into gods usually become monsters instead.
Empathy, therefore, is useful and necessary. It helps us see problems when they occur in others’ lives and make decisions to help them, even if that means leaving behind our “main character energy”. It helps us bond with people in friendship and love because there’s nothing like a shared emotion or experience to unite people.
Ironically, practicing empathy is usually more rewarding than staying stuck in our own experiences. Through empathy, we can see a more complete picture of the world around us and how we can positively influence it. Through empathy, we gain connection and leave isolation.
I refuse to see empathy as a bad thing, even if I sometimes wish I didn’t feel it because it threatens my comfort.
Not only that, people of Christian faith (like me) are required to have empathy for others, because how else are we to fulfill the Great Commandment to “love our neighbors as ourselves” or even to “love our enemies”? We can’t adequately show love to someone if we can’t get out of our own heads and somehow imagine what the world looks like through their eyes.
Building self-centered, empathy-lacking lives leads to our own destruction.
Yes, we are physically the main characters in our own stories. But other people are the main characters in theirs. And if we want to have any sort of genuine joy or fulfillment in this world, we must learn to unselfishly desire a life that enters others’ stories, so we can make a difference.