Be the Hero
“Be the hero of your story if you can
Be the champion in the fight
Not just the man
Don't depend on other people
To put paper next to pen
Be the hero of your story, boy, and then
You can rise to be the hero once again”-Big Fish, music and lyrics by Andrew Lippa
I’ve been on a run lately of memoirs and biographies of writers, actors, and performers I admire including Kelly Bishop, Carole King, Marvin Hamlisch, and Elmore Leonard. As much as I love reading stuff like this, it can also be an exercise in frustration for me as well.
I lament that I wasn’t born to showbiz parents or that I wasn’t born in the vicinity of New York City or Los Angeles and generally just find a hundred different ways to blame my situation on everyone but myself. When really I should be realizing my situation isn’t really that bad. Someone somewhere said something that really stuck with me: Your life is someone else’s bucket list.
That’s humbling. Also, there doesn’t need to be any blame at all for how you find yourself. All there really needs to be is next steps. And I’m proud to say that for once instead of whining about how many opportunities were ripped from me or that I never even got, recently I did something to make my own opportunity.
Because that’s what these memoirs and biographies have really taught me. Regardless of how privileged these folks started, there is always some moment where they made a crazy move or took a chance or did something that made them the hero of their story that led eventually to greatness.
So far my move hasn’t paid off, but it hasn’t been shot down yet either. And regardless of whether it leads where I hope or not, I’m happy I made the move. It will make it easier for me to jump on the next opportunity or seize the next small moment.
After my diagnosis and after I started medication, I spent more than a year working through a lot of grief and regret about failures and missed opportunities. It got to the point where I had convinced myself I had missed my shot at being who I really wanted to be and I should work on accepting something different, something lesser. But there is still so much in front of me. Not enough that I can afford to waste time, but enough to still do everything I’ve ever wanted and to be who I always wanted to be.
One of the biggest parts of this for me has been finding out who I really am as a writer and as a person. I spent more than two decades of my life creating a fake version of myself to cope with the real world and lost sight of who I really am and what I really want. Kevin Smith has this incredible video where he talks about creating a persona he calls The Other Guy that eventually took over his life. I highly recommend watching it.
I’ve written quite a bit here and other places about my internal struggles between being true to who I am as a writer while also wanting to be the sort of dark, serious, important writer that gets the awards and critical acclaim I crave. I am certainly not the first artist to deal with this conflict, it’s common enough to be cliche at this point, but it’s been debilitating enough for me that I haven’t finished a novel of my own in almost a decade.
Watching the biopic Love and Mercy about Brian Wilson, I was confronted again by one of my biggest fears - I’ll be so worried that the next thing I make isn’t amazing enough or brilliant enough that I won’t make anything else ever again and I’ll drive myself crazy in the process. That’s why therapy and medication are vital to me and why I write newsletters like this. To keep myself accountable and to share my struggles in case anyone reads this who might be going through the same thing.
Be the hero of your story and hopefully you can do it in a way where your story isn’t a tragedy.