The questions we live through

I recently discovered this thing called the “central drama” or the central dramatic question while watching a storytelling workshop video – the kind I probably had no business watching since I’ve never written fiction in my life. But the concept has been stuck in my head ever since.

A central drama is the core question that drives a story forward. It’s the fundamental tension that makes you care about what happens next. I’ve become slightly obsessed with trying to spot the central drama in everything I watch.

In Finding Nemo (because I’ve had the pleasure of watching this movie about 20 times with my daughter), the movie is essentially asking: Will this overprotective father learn to let go of his son? Everything else – the sharky, the surfer turtles that say duuuuude, the P Sherman 42 Wallaby Way Sydney – they’re all just creative ways of stress-testing that core question.

In The Lion King, the central question is: Will this guilt-ridden son finally accept his responsibility and step into his father’s role or will he continue to hakuna matata his way through life? The rest of the movie just exists to contribute to Simba’s core conflict about running from vs. running toward his destiny.

In Breaking Bad, everything boils down to: Will this ordinary man’s pride destroy him as he tries to prove he’s NOT ordinary?

In Pride and Prejudice, the central question isn’t even about romance, it’s: Will these two proud people learn to see past their own prejudices about each other’s social class? And fall in love. Okay I guess it is about romance.

Either way, it’s fascinating how these fictional central dramas are so sticky and engaging. Maybe because they reflect our own central dramas. The persistent questions we keep trying to answer, the patterns we can’t seem to break.

Everyone seems to have their own fundamental tension. A recurring theme that presents itself as a kind of chronic struggle that they have to work through. While it’s somewhat easy to spot the central drama question in a TV show, it’s not that easy to identify it in someone else’s life. But with some thinking, you can probably find your own.

It could be the constant battle between the desire to be extraordinary and the deep fear that you’re fundamentally ordinary. Every good thing you accomplish then feels like both a celebration and a question mark – and I guess it manifests as some form of imposter syndrome.

It could be the tension between your capacity for joy and your awareness of suffering. You find yourself moving through life with one eye on beauty and another on pain, unable to fully inhabit either state, always conscious of how one informs the other. And you take up jobs in the social/development sector to try and make sense of this.

Or there’s a fundamental struggle between ambition and authenticity – that constant recalibration between what you want, and what you’re willing to sacrifice to get it. Regularly switching between striving and being.

I don’t think these central dramas are flaws in our character (although they definitely can be). I feel like they’re the raw material that we have to work with. 

Now, it wouldn’t be fair if I just called out Nemo’s dad and Simba and Walter White without revealing what I think is my own central drama. It was hard to pick one, I feel like we all probably have one central drama playing out at work, another in our marriage, maybe another with our personal goals and habits.

The central drama that I’ve been grappling with for myself is a version of this: I want to be looked at while also absolutely not wanting to be looked at. I want to be seen, but only in precisely the way I intend. This mainly applies to my writing, but it definitely extends to other parts of my life too. I’ll try to explain it better.

I want to share my thoughts in these essays, but only after I’ve anticipated and addressed every possible misinterpretation. I want to be part of conversations, but only when I’m absolutely certain my words will land exactly as I mean them to.

I want deep connections with people, but I want to engineer exactly how those connections unfold. I basically want the impossible: To be fully known without the vulnerability of being seen, to be deeply understood without the messiness of potential misunderstanding, to be authentically myself while maintaining perfect control over how that self is perceived.

Writing it out like this makes it sound completely ridiculous, but knowing how irrational it is doesn’t make the impulse any less powerful.

Every major decision in my life somehow plays out along this fault line.

And for the longest time, I used to actively run towards things that helped me dull the effect of this central drama. Alcohol was the easy one – a few drinks and suddenly I didn’t care so much about controlling every aspect of how I was perceived. That self-consciousness would finally shut up. The relief was immediate: I could just exist without analyzing how I was existing.

But it wasn’t just alcohol. There’s a whole buffet of escape options that I’ve cycled through over the years. Sometimes it’s throwing myself into my work, becoming so consumed by projects that there’s no mental space left for self-awareness. Other times it’s the comfortable numbness of mindless scrolling. The methods change but the goal is always the same – to find some way to temporarily stop being so achingly aware of myself.

I used to hate this aspect of myself. Self-consciousness just feels like a rebranded version of pride and self-indulgence. And I know it’s stupid. But with age comes, if not wisdom, at least a different kind of stupid. I’ve started to see how our lives organize themselves around these central conflicts.

They’re the negative space that shapes everything else. The questions we keep asking, even when we know better, become the architecture of our choices.

It’s like what jazz musicians do with dissonance (read: funky chords). The best jazz players don’t try and fix the wrong sounding notes – they lean into it. They take the stuff that shouldn’t work and stretch them until something new emerges from the tension.

For me, writing these essays has been my jazz chord dissonance experience. I spend weeks writing essays about vulnerability and authenticity while meticulously engineering every sentence to control how vulnerable and authentic I appear. Barf.

I obsess over being understood perfectly, which is probably why it takes me three weeks to write something that people read in ten minutes. It isn’t perfectionism. Y’all know I let at least four typos slip through every essay for good measure. It’s the self-consciousness that takes ages to get over.

If I’m being honest about what I’m actually afraid of here, I think it’s humiliation mostly. Being thought of as stupid, or pretentious, or both? Is there anything worse!!

And unlike fiction, when you’re writing personal essays, you can’t hide behind characters or plot devices. It’s just you, your thoughts, and the constant fear that you’re not expressing them well enough.

This is part of the reason I’ve developed an almost pathological relationship with language, with finding the right words. The best words. I’m convinced that if I can just find the perfect way to say things, I’ll finally make myself completely understood.

I know how dumb that sounds even as I write it.

When I manage to finish writing something that I’m proud of, I want people to read it. Of course I do. I want them to connect with it, to see themselves in it, to feel less alone. And then, almost immediately after sharing it, I want to crawl into a cave and never be heard from again.

Stop thinking of yourself so much – nobody else is!!!!!

I’m working on it, I promise.

What’s strange is that this writing project – this blog as I hate to call it – has become one of the most meaningful things I do precisely because it’s so difficult. The desire to be seen and to hide are still very much present, sitting on my shoulders like a pair of judgmental parrots. But as I get older, I’ve gotten so much better at ignoring them.

I’m finding myself increasingly comfortable with the risk of being cringe and imperfect and wrong. My arguments have holes in them. My insights aren’t as original as I think they are. Some pieces will resonate more than others. Sometimes I just sound pretentious because I want to be impressive.

I used to think of anxiety as something that holds us back – a wall that stops us from doing what we want. But I read about this interesting idea by a guy called Kierkegaard. He understood anxiety not as a response to limitation, but as the natural outcome of infinite possibility.

We’re not paralyzed by our constraints but by the dizzying array of choices before us.

It’s the same weird rush you feel when you’re standing at the edge of something high up. It isn’t just about falling – it’s about the unsettling recognition that you could jump. The anxiety comes from the presence of choice: The knowledge that you are, at every moment, choosing NOT to jump. That’s what makes it simultaneously terrifying and thrilling – the constant awareness of unused possibility.

Every time I sit down to write, I’m faced with a bunch of choices that affect how I’m perceived. How vulnerable should I be? Which parts of myself do I yap about? The anxiety doesn’t come from not knowing what to say, but from knowing I could say anything.

I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve opened a draft of an essay, stared at it until my eyes glazed over, closed it, reopened it, tweaked three words, hated those changes, and left it to rot. I want these essays to mean something, to reach people, to matter. And then I immediately cringe at myself for being so serious about what’s essentially a public diary.

But I keep writing. Not because I’m brave, or because I’ve figured anything out. Despite Ronan Keating’s lame assertion that you say it best when you say nothing at all, staying quiet feels worse than being seen. The fear of being misunderstood is finally smaller than the fear of never saying anything at all.

I’m learning to accept that this is just how I work, and I’m not sorry about caring this much.

This constant tension between the desire to be seen and the urge to hide is slowly starting to define my creative life. And while I sometimes wish I could trade it in for something less lame –– like I’d LOVE to have a more badass central drama –– but alas. This is the peculiar weight of my particular way of being in the world. 

The nice part is that on the days when it works, when the words flow and I manage to say exactly what I mean and someone out there gets it – those moments make it all worth it.