Main Character Moment

You never hear her complain about anything, not a missed train, inclement weather, ex-lovers or childcare that’s fallen through, and she never gossips about anyone. She is fearless and full of self-belief, if she says she is going to do something, she does it. Always dressed in a chic outfit, she looks effortless in monochromatic greys, black or white, occasional neutral tones, rarely colour, classic with a Copenhagen street style edge. She has beautiful, almond shaped blue eyes, high cheekbones, a chiselled jawline that belies her forty-five years and when she smiles her face lights up. Her complexion is flawless, yet she owns every year she has lived, growing out a crown of natural salt and pepper hair that sweeps down to the bottom of her shoulder blades. She turns heads in every room she enters, immediately puts people at ease with her warmth and genuine interest she takes in them. This is the type of woman that can be and do anything she puts her mind to. I imagine she is also Teflon for mum guilt and any variant of shame, this woman I desire to be.

Last week, on a day I was very much lacking main character energy, I came across an exercise in a book of writers prompts on character creation. As an experiment and to see if I could shift my frame of mind, I decided to write into existence the person I wanted to embody. I found it easy to describe this woman using a distancing technique. I could create her through the gaze of an interested onlooker who is mindlessly people watching over coffee and stop short of any complicated back story. This woman is the self-actualised version of the person I want to be. She is impeccable with her word, never makes assumptions, does not take anything personally and always does her best. Perfect outfit check! blow-dried hair, check! A day when the childcare is sorted, the deadlines are met and when, due to the diet/supplement/strength/sleep/hydration/meditation/coffee-ban that has been implemented, riding a balanced hormonal wave and not bloated, check! The camera zooms out and this idealised me, cat walks down the street in sensible (to clock the 10k steps) but stylish mid heeled boots and statement coat, tote bag swinging from my shoulder. If only life was that one-dimensional.

In this book, I was also introduced to a story structure aptly named “save the cat”. Originally developed by screen writer Blake Snyder and modelled on a mix of the classic hero’s journey and three act structure. The main idea is that you want to stick a cat (your protagonist) up a tree (dicey) and then throw rocks at them (make the situation worse), and I thought well that sounds like every day in the life of a woman over forty, and laughed, then cried a bit, cause hormones. For fear of sounding too hackneyed, as I read on I continued to think that for every accomplished, adult, working woman who is still raising young children and attempting to develop creatively, while journeying through the complete physical transformation of every system in their body due to reproductive hormonal changes, many days can feel like being that stuck feline.

We open on the image of a seemingly ordinary world… let’s say 7:30 am on a school day. The house is calm and filled with the aroma of sandalwood scented candles. The protagonist has laid the clothes out neatly the night before and has been awake since 5:30am, to squeeze in some creative writing, meditation practice and a 30minute home dumbbell workout before packing a school bag and air frying salmon to meal prep a healthy lunch. So far, so perfect Our protagonist is suddenly confronted by a perilous situation... She notices there is a 5pm meeting in her diary that day she forgot about, after school care closes at 6pm and she will not make it back to pick up her child! How can she arrange a babysitter at this hour?! On top of this, the child has now woken with a sore tummy and does not want to go to school, the salmon is close to burning, her emails are pinging audibly creating a sensory distraction her limited concentration is at odds with, all because she opened her desktop to access her work calendar, and she’s scanning through a mental list of which school mum might be able to do her a solid. This foe is tackled head on… she’s fired off a text to someone who’d offered a school pick up “any time” she needed it, administered some Calpol, a tummy rub and rocked and shooed the poorly child until they are cajoled into teeth brushing and dressing. But it will all become too much and all will seem lost… In the time it has taken to do this, the salmon has burnt to a crisp, which summons the irrational hot blanket of perimenopausal rage. She snaps at the child she has just soothed, screaming “please just put your bloody shoes on”!!! The child stands statue still with a stunned look of terror, then runs off wailing proper tears, and our protagonist’s oxytocin/endorphin high from the exercise, meditation and hugs bottoms out into a shame sludge. But eventually, our protagonist will push through and find inspiration for the big finale… She recedes down the hallway, closes her bedroom door and takes three deep breaths, once calm, she seeks out the child, crouches down to their eye level and softly says “mummy should not have shouted, I am so sorry, it was not okay, I was upset about something but it is not your fault and you are not responsible for my emotions. Are you okay and do you need a hug?” There will be jeopardy like ‘cascading catastrophes’ where the character tries to find a solution but only make it worse… Before she text the school mum she’d tried her big brother, which elicited a WhatsApp laundry list of all the things he has to do that day for his own wife and daughter, and did she know he’s loaded with the cold, his old knee injury has flared up and he’s got a slow puncture. She is now pulled into his world and feels responsible for adding to his woes. And foreshadowing…. which I am sure is just common or garden anxiety that if something can go wrong it will, The kind that runs on a permanent loop in the background, like the digital hoardings round a football pitch. Not the main part of the action but suddenly you’ve got a hankering for a Domino’s pizza, which sounds pretty good to our protagonist because she’s had no breakfast, and her salmon is burnt.

Creative advice for writers suggests we write what we know, and the woman in the save the cat scenario is a more accurate description of my life on any given day. It has taken a lot of soul searching to get to the root of where my perfectionism comes from, but even with that self-awareness and the knowledge that it’s a hustle, I am still not immune to the influence of social media feeds that trigger thoughts that everyone else has life worked out. Often, I can forget that I am living an incredible life, one that is materially comfortable, filled with people who love me and experiences that take my breath away. Also, that I have put a shift in to earn my achievements and create that life for me and my son. At forty-five years old, I am still working to cultivate self-acceptance and to stop holding myself to a higher standard than I hold others. I am the main character in my own life and I have no doubt from the outside, to some observing, I will be that chic version I aspire to be, but I have a back story and it’s complicated and if it wasn’t I’d lack the necessary three dimensional quality for building character and meaningful relationships, and, more importantly, I would have nothing to write about.

Meet me in the comments section and let me know what parts of yourself are at odds with each other and how you practice self-acceptance on the days when your main character energy is a bit lacking.