It's Giving Author Energy

Let's talk about main character energy. If you've been anywhere near social media in the last few years, you know the vibe. Treat your life like a movie. Romanticize the ordinary. Do it for the plot.

That impulse is  beautiful. It's reaching for something real, the feeling that your life matters, that your choices mean something, that your ordinary Tuesday is  worth paying attention to. Hold onto that wonder and romance.

BUT main character energy is passive and performative when the plot is not authored by you. It is like we're waiting for the story to happen to us. Like someone else already wrote the plot and we're just showing up for our scenes.

The people I see in therapy living  the most joyful, grounded, meaningful  lives? They're not trying to be the main character. They're learning to be the author.

There's a difference. And it changes everything.

Whose Plot Are You Living?

When you're doing it for the plot, ask the simple question, who wrote the plot?

The cinematic edit, the aesthetic, the sense of what a "protagonist move" even looks like, most of that doesn't come from inside you. It comes from every story you absorbed growing up, every cultural script about what your kind of life is supposed to look like, every message you received, spoken or not, about who you are and what you deserve.

Main character energy says: I am the star.

But it rarely stops to ask the more interesting question: whose story is this?

A main character needs a compelling script to follow. An author gets to decide what the story is about, what it means, and whether the current chapter even belongs in the book at all.

This is where the real work begins. Stop performing and get curious about who's been writing  you.

The Stories We Inherited

Therapists who work in narrative therapy, a beautifully human approach developed by Michael White and David Epston, start from one radical premise: the stories we tell about ourselves aren't just descriptions of our lives. They're actively shaping what comes next.

In other words, the story you're living is producing your future.

Most of us, without ever consciously choosing it, are living inside what's called a problem-saturated story. A dominant narrative that wasn't written by us, it was assembled from things that happened to us, from what we were told, from the cultural/ familial scripts that surrounded us. Over time, it starts to feel like our reality.

Maybe you're not an anxious person, instead you're carrying an anxiety story, and that story may have been written in someone else's handwriting entirely.

That's a very different thing.

The goal isn't to pop a positive spin on the existing story. It's to get curious about the moments the old narrative tried to erase. The times you acted against the script. The relationships that didn't fit. The version of you that kept showing up, even when the story said you wouldn't. Those moments are evidence of an alternative story already in progress, a preferred narrative that actually belongs to you.

Research in this space has found something worth sitting with: the degree to which people experience themselves as actively shaping their own story, what researchers call narrative agency, actually predicts both depression and wellbeing over time, above and beyond personality traits. How you story your life is not a small thing. It has real, measurable effects on how you feel.

Performing Parts

Sometimes even when we start to see the inherited story clearly, something inside us keeps performing it anyway. That is often a protective part showing up for you.

A framework called Internal Family Systems, or parts work, offers a genuinely beautiful way of understanding this. Developed by Richard Schwartz, it invites us to see that we're not one single unified self. We're more like an inner family, a whole cast of internal characters, each with their own perspective, fears, and very good reasons for doing what they do.

And deep underneath all of those parts? There's something called the Self, a core place of compassion, clarity, and calm that doesn't go anywhere, no matter what you've been through.

Think about main character energy through this lens for a second. Some parts of you probably love it. The part that needs to feel significant. The part that performs confidence so the more vulnerable parts don't have to be seen. The part that aestheticizes pain before you've even had a chance to actually feel it. These parts aren't bad. They developed for really good reasons. But they're running a performance, not a life.

Narrative therapy asks: what story has been written about you, and by whom? Parts work asks: which parts of you are keeping that story alive, and what are they protecting? And underneath both: when you listen from your heart, your actual center, what does your story feel like from the inside?

When these two lenses work together, something shifts. You get the wide-angle view of your whole narrative, and the up-close, gentle view of the inner world that's been maintaining it.

Living Your Story vs. Performing It

Performing your story looks like making choices because they fit the aesthetic you've decided your life should have. Staying in something because leaving would mess with the arc. Processing pain by packaging it into something shareable before you've actually sat with it. Measuring your experiences by how they look from the outside.

Living your story looks like pausing before a decision and asking, not whether this is a protagonist move, but whether it's genuinely yours. It looks like letting your actual values lead, not just appear as nice backdrop. It looks like being willing to write a chapter that looks completely unremarkable from the outside but feels deeply true from the inside.

It looks like tuning in to your heart center, your body's quiet wisdom, your gut feelings, your actual needs and boundaries, and letting that be the compass instead of the script.

The goal isn't less self-focus. It's deeper self-authorship.

Questioning the Scripts You Inherited

Here's something I invite clients to consider: that inherited story is a first draft, not a final one. 

Some of those scripts will still fit. Some will feel true when you hold them up to the light of who you actually are today. And that's beautiful, keep those pages!

But some of them? When you really look? They won't fit anymore. Maybe they never did. Maybe they belonged to someone else's fears. Maybe they were written for a version of you that no longer exists, or a version that was never really you at all.

You get to decide which chapters stay, which ones get rewritten, and which ones you close with compassion and set down.

Five Ways to Start Living Your Story

1. Ask whose story this is before you act. Before you act, especially when something feels urgent or image-driven, just notice. Is this choice coming from my values? Or from a script I inherited? 

2. Find your "plot twist" moments. Think of a time that didn't fit the story you usually tell about yourself. A moment you were braver, softer, or freer than your dominant narrative typically allows. Write it down. That moment is evidence of an alternative story already in motion, and it matters more than you think.

3. Get curious about the part that performs. If you love main character energy, great! Get curious about it. What part of you is drawn to it? What is it trying to protect? What might happen if you put the camera down? You're not trying to get rid of that part. You're trying to understand it. That's where the real softness lives.

4. Come back to your heart center. Your body knows things your mind is still catching up to. Notice what your body is telling you. Notice where you feel contracted versus open. Notice what your actual needs are, beneath the performance. Your values, your boundaries, your physical cues, these are your authorship tools. Use them.

5.  Instead of asking how do I want this to look, ask what do I want this to mean? Authors think about theme, truth, and what the character is actually learning. You're allowed to have a story with real stakes and real meaning, not just a beautiful aesthetic.

I hope you always romanticize your life.

You deserve more than a well-curated performance. You deserve an actual story, one with real values, real depth, and real meaning. One where the hard chapters mean something because you decided what they mean. Not because an algorithm told you what a plot twist is supposed to look like.

You don't need main character energy. You need author energy.