When you read a story, it isn’t one
line continued page after page until the ink runs out or there’s no
more paper. It’s punctuated. You seamlessly travel from one moment
to the next with little interruptions, little characters, that take
every thought and organizes it against another. You can be thrust
into any number of storylines that can complement each other or give
you an added perspective the other parts don’t know. You can find
your conception of things suddenly challenged after thinking a
certain way for so long. A good story has you hesitating, worrying,
or rooting on behalf of the characters regardless of whether you’d
consider them to be good or bad. There’s a tension, an excitement
for the unknown. You anticipate the resolution.
I’m a sucker for a storyline. I’m
such a sucker I’ll follow a bad storyline for the resolution. For
as much as I struggle with harboring feelings for real people,
I’m still drawn to characters. As a conscious agent, to some
extent, there is no mystery. I know my options for how I can behave
or react to anything. But no matter how many times you see a “cop
drama” or read a “sci-fi” novel, you’ll never be able to
anticipate when a character draws you in. You don’t realize when
you’ve started caring.
The non-verbal limbic part of our brain
carries all the feels. It gives you gut impulses. When you see
something you truly empathize with, it puts the butterflies in your
stomach. The reasons I find myself caring about so many characters is
that they are the extreme examples of the endless nuances of human
behavior. Basking in the fantasy of the conclusions for different
behaviors truly helps give perspective as to why or why not to do
something. It assures me I’m capable; I can feel it in my bones.
Understandably, it’s this sort of
process that has me drawn to personalities. Not all of them
like-minded or necessarily as interesting as they could be, but
managing to be personalities nonetheless. It keeps me hyper-obsessed
with my personality as well. What message am I sending? What am I
setting myself up for in the future? What am I finding myself more or
less capable of dealing with or doing? You never really feel like you
get to conclude on a good character until the story is over. Every
decision exists in a continuum punctuated by the moments of their
journey. The last line could put the entire thing in a new light.
Good characters, good stories, are
always in danger. Whether it’s by their lives being unceremoniously
cut short or an internal struggle, or maybe the world can’t help
but to keep blowing up around them, nobody reads to imagine someone
who’s content going about their daily life. Most of the characters
I find myself drawn to, I would never in a million years want to be
in their situation, but I can conjure the same uncertainty they must
be feeling. The leader of a band of heroes, the mob boss, the one
with a secret no one could know the depth of, or just the chaotic
sarcastic one with an agenda, all flip that switch.
Giving yourself over to the uncertainty
is when you gain perspective. You don’t call the author and
complain that a chapter didn’t go over how you thought it should.
You may want to, and I’m sure some crazy people do, but they’d be
missing the point. Everything about the characters is why you love or
love to hate them. It’s a perspective I try to practice when it
comes to calling people friends. When you’re brave enough to try
and shape your own story amidst the vast uncertainty of everything,
it’s something I’m compelled to respect. The constant effort it
takes to resist the metrics in place that would try to read your
story for you or describe your character in a few lines is what
heroes are made of, anti-ones included.
I understand the importance of asking
why, but feel I need to maybe step back and simply do. I wonder the
implications of the stress of micro-analyzing decisions. I don’t
ask why one of my favorite characters got shot, I not-always-simply,
yet am always pressed, to reform how I think about them and what they
mean to me. We’re expressions of reality. Something about existence
puts me here writing about myself as an ongoing conclusion of
“everything.” My thoughts will change, my feelings will change,
but “me” is what will always be the fight to vocalize how and why
they are doing so. Whether I do something good or bad, it’s foolish
to pretend I have the knowledge about what bearing it has on your
perception or what it means I can claim about myself. I’m just
changing, or I’m not, and the measure of that is in how the world
does around me.
I’m a decision engine. When I put
myself in a dangerous situation, I want to tell that kind of story.
When I decide to surround myself with a certain kind of people, I’m
shrouded with a backdrop that interesting bits can spring from. I
concern myself with telling a story people need to hear in order for
something to change. I’m only able to understand my character
within a context. When the conditions are set, now you’re allowed a
purpose and the decisions matter. Given that we can’t know
everything about our context though, it makes the existence,
implication, and message of that character invaluable. My “morality”
at that point is the bed time story I tell myself, about myself,
paying close attention to whether it brings me nightmares or helps me
dream bigger.
I’m only borrowing ideas. I rent a
body to inhabit a small amount of space and spend a small amount of time.
Neither fortune nor sorrow is mine to own or hoard. I inevitably pass
them along after they've been caught, hopefully in better shape
than when I got them. It’s only in imagining myself as something
larger than life, a potentially eternal storyline, do I feel so
compelled to act a certain way. It’s exciting to believe, to have a
cause, to work towards a goal that feels bigger than any one moment
or character could express. I think I’m just lamenting a lot of
unresolved chapters that speak to so much potential.
