I’m the villain in her story. God knows I never meant to be. I wanted so much for her. Joy. Peace. Stability. Love. Opportunities. Connections. Childhood. I wanted to give her all of it. I wanted to be the hero in her story.
Is that the truth? It’s what I wanted to believe. But maybe the truth is that I wanted to be a hero in my own story. Don’t we all? Don’t we approach each choice as the protagonist in the narrative of our lives? Don’t we all see ourselves as the good guy?
And inevitably, we live our lives and we make choices and we say things and we do things that will make us the villain in someone else’s narrative. Sometimes we know. We break relationships. We argue. We become estranged. We pull away.
But sometimes we don’t. We don’t know what we’ve done or said or implied; we only know that we’ve been shut out. We’ve been sidelined or implicated or ghosted. And it feels pretty awful.
I held out hope for a while. Maybe I could fix it. Maybe she’d reconsider. Maybe we would be able to reconnect someday. In reality, that’s unlikely. Sad, but true. So how do we move forward? What is to be learned? What’s the takeaway? How do we continue to love and laugh and make ourselves vulnerable, knowing that it could all end in heartbreak?
I don’t know. I don’t have answers. But I have a theory. I think I need to stop trying to be a hero in someone else’s story, and focus on being a real, evolving, growing, protagonist in my own story. Good guys and bad guys only exist in Fairy Tales. In real life, we’re all a little bit of both. We’re all flawed and fallible and helpful and heroic.
A hero can only exist in caricatures or fiction.
But growing is real. Learning is real. Kindness and hope and compassion are real. I can’t aspire to be a hero in someone else’s story. I can only aspire each day to be a slightly better version of the flawed human I was in yesterday’s narrative.