Looking at Myself as a Character in my Own Story

I am looking at myself and thinking I should become a different character type to fulfill the needs of my personal story.  

I often look at things in life through the lens of writing.  I have been doing that to myself and my life over the past several months.  I guess long periods of isolation will direct your thoughts that way.  

When creating a story, one thing a writer needs to decide is how the main character of the story relates to his environment.  There are two types of characters in this regard.  “Doers” and “Be-ers.”  

Doers are people who look at the conditions around them and try to change them.  They are the most common type of characters seen in stories with classic heroes.  To achieve their goals, they believe the world around them needs to be changed and they work to make that change happen.  

Be-ers are people who adapt to the conditions around them.  They are found in stories where the focus in on survival.  Staying alive until the situation they find themselves in changes.  To achieve their goals, they change themselves, their habits, their patterns of living, to wait for the opportunity to achieve their goal to appear before them.  

Characters are not necessarily ALL Doer or ALL Be-er.  But their basic nature, the impulses they follow, and the manner in which they’ll go about working toward their goal will be determined by one of these perspectives as they move through a story.  

When I look at myself, I recognize that I have long been a Be-er.  I can even pick the turning point in my life when I settled into this perspective.  It happened after I graduated from college, when I went to a perform in a summer Shakespeare festival in Utah and then tried to drive across country to see my sister get married.  The trip didn’t go as planned.  My car broke down once in Colorado, and then permanently in Kansas.  I ended up losing most of my personal possessions.  When my father came to pick me up at the bus depot in Asheville he walked right past me into the depot, not recognizing me.  When he came back out, he looked around, looked at me, looked around again, then snapped his attention back at me.  

“Erick?  Is that you?”  He stared at me in disbelief.  “Goddamn boy, what happened to you?”

The trip was that bad.  

I was reminded of the trip this Thanksgiving while having dinner with a friend of mine from college.  He’s one of the few people that I’m still in contact with that knew me before that trip.  He reminded me of letters that I wrote to him while living in North Carolina for the following year.  He quoted me from those letters as saying that I had become determined to never be that helpless again.  

I remember the sentiment even if I don’t remember writing the letter.  In my friends words, I became less “fluffy” than I was in college, but also that I was less adventurous and less fun.  Listening to him tell me his perspective, as if he were describing a character in a story he’d read, I could see that the character he was talking about was a Be-er.  Someone that changed themselves to deal with the environment around them, in this case the conditions of life and living.  

Flash forward to today, that conversation has started me to wonder if I went to far back then to adapt, and that I should consider making another change.  

I did achieve my goal at the time.  I don’t worry as much about something wiping me out like that.  I have credit.  I have savings, both money set aside for short term problems, and money set aside for the future, when I can’t work any more.  I’m employed, which is a big plus these days.  I can handle a car breaking down in the middle of nowhere now.  

But there is a lot I don’t have in my life that I’ve always thought I would get at some point.  Someone else to be here with me.  A place I can say is mine and not borrowed from someone else.  

Moreover, the environment around me, around all of us these days, is a much greater impending threat.  I have been good at adapting to it, wearing masks, washing my hands, staying social distant, putting even more money away, things like that.  But I’m feeling very acutely how conditions are taking opportunity away.  The very opportunities that I, as a Be-er, have been waiting to come to me to take to get the things in life I’ve always wanted.  

It makes me wonder if it’s time to make another change.  

This relates to another decision a writer needs to make about a character.  And that is, when the hero of the story reaches the crisis point, whether they will make a Leap of Faith or decide to Keep the Faith.  

The character that makes a Leap of Faith is one that has done everything they can to achieve their ends, but has still failed.  This character looks at the situation and decides, “I’m going to do something different.  I’ve tried everything I know how to do.  I’m going to go a complete different way.”  They give up on the methods they’ve used so far and take an untried, untested way forward.  

The character that decides to Keep the Faith is one that, after reaching the crisis point, knowing that they’ve failed to achieve their ends, looks at themselves and says, “I can do this.  I know what I’m doing is right.  I just have to keep going.  I just have become stronger, smarter, faster, whatever it takes.  But I’m going to keep going.”  They rely on their determination and endurance, they dig deeper into themselves than they have before, and they push forward along the path they’ve been traveling.  

In my life I can remember making both decisions at times.  But making decisions to Keep the Faith have been far more common than taking leaps.  And, right now, in these times, something is telling me that I should, or maybe more accurately, I want to take a leap.  Or maybe, I just want to fly, for once.  

I’m not at my crisis point.  Not yet, anyway.  I have time to consider.  The Be-er in me has time to prepare.  And when it comes, instead of looking at wall that I have to get through, I think it’ll be like standing on a limb, feeling my untested wings twitch, looking to fly over it.