Member-only story
Be The Anti-Hero Of Your Own Life
We exist in shades of grey. We’re all the people we half-root for.
By Heidi Priebe
We’re all familiar with anti-heroes on television.
We have Jack Sparrow from Pirates of the Caribbean. Tyler Durden from Fight Club. Severus Snape from Harry Potter and the psychopathic lead character from Dexter. We feel conflicted over these characters — we love and we hate them simultaneously. We root for them then distance ourselves from them. We both abhor and appreciate these characters because they are the realest damn characters we ever see depicted on TV.
But nobody wants to be them.
We hate anti-heroes in part because we’re scared that we are exactly like them — Flawed. Immoral. Lost. We don’t want to recognize the parts of ourselves that resemble these complicated characters because we’d rather be the heroes themselves. The pure ones. The strong ones. The people who always say the right thing and make the right choice and move through their lives in a blaze of honourable glory.
We want to be the heroes but we’re quick to ignore the unattainability of that desire. There are no one-dimensional characters in real life. And you’re certainly not always going to be the hero of your own.
