Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve had this feeling of apathy sitting on my heart like Eeyore’s cloud in Winnie the Pooh. Although I received an intravenous treatment that helped me walk better and made me a little more confident in my legs, the fact that the days got longer, the weather got better, but I had little to no plans, made me feel like shit. That and the fact that I spent hours on Instagram watching people getting proposed to, getting married, announcing pregnancies, announcing second pregnancies, advancing in their careers or traveling the world, didn’t help with my mental health.

Because, let’s face it, nobody posts their shit moments. Nobody puts a photo of them while in the hospital, nobody makes a reel showing off their abilities to walk with a cane, few to none of the Instagram people show their darkest moments. So, I compared my low to their high. Stupid, I know. Very stupid and very harmful. Having talked about this in a previous post (go check it out, as a Youtuber would say), I’m not going to repeat myself.

What I’m gonna do is tell you about the revelation I had while watching Dune. You see, as I stated before, I have this shadow of wanting to be famous and busy and always on the go, a shadow of wanting to be remembered by something, a shadow of wanting and even needing to be adulated. So, while watching Dune and being in awe of the intensity of the characters’ lives, especially Paul’s, it hit me. Every book, movie, TV series, every single one of them, having one or several main characters, has to be about something extraordinary. Even if it’s about a group of friends hanging out, you only see the highlights: the fun outings, the hilarious work situations, not the ordinary day to day stuff we do, not the bills, the showers, the mundane.

So, I started to recap some of the movies or shows that marked me. Let’s start from the Harry Potter series. Even from the beginning you know that Harry is The Chosen One. No doubts there, he’s special, he’s going to be remembered and he’s going to save the world. He’s destined for greatness and he’s gonna get his fair share of adulation. Moving on to Star Wars, another series, another kid who hasn’t met his biological parents, another savior of the world or, in this case, a galaxy far, far away. One fights a at first faceless then noseless bastard of a wizard, the other one fights an entire empire ruled by, ironically, his long lost father.

Continuing with Dune, the series that triggered my A-ha moment, another prodigy kid, another fight against the system, Paul Atreides’ advanced over Harry Potter or Luke Skywalker is that at least he knew his parents. But the main idea is the same: a gifted kid against the world, a sort of Messiah complex, even though at the beginning of each story, the main character is not willing to accept or to embrace this side and has to be convinced by others that he is, in fact, their only hope.

If we were to think about TV shows, even in Seinfeld, the self entitled show about nothing, they do something in each episode. True, they do day to day stuff, but they make it funny. Even a trip to the laundromat or to the post office has a twist. So, out of one hundred trips to the laundromat, of course they depict the hilarious one, not the boring one.

When I told my mother about my desperate need for my life to have a little va va voom or pizzazz, that the fact that I’m husbandless and childless and my life seems pointless and all the other “-less”es, she told me that I have something that others envy or long for: peace and quiet. At that moment, I said to myself that she’s wrong, that peace and quiet is not something to wish for and that a busy, hectic and full life is the goal.

Well, seeing Paul’s fights and endeavors, seeing him drink his own sweat in the desert, thinking of all the wizards Harry had to fight and all the times he had to run from the dark forces, imagining what must have gone through Luke’s mind while plotting against the Empire, well, I think they longed for a bit of piece and quiet. Maybe they wanted the Instagram infamous “slow morning”, drinking a coffee with Ginny or Chani, going out for a beer with Ron or Han, doing laundry or paying bills. I’m just saying, after all those fights and troubles, peace and quiet would be perfection.

So, here I am, on a Saturday night, writing a post about how I should stop comparing myself to the main characters of adventure movies or to anyone for that matter. Because nobody will write anything about nothing and nobody will post about their failures. Even Jerry Seinfeld’s show, although proudly saying it’s about nothing, was about something. Maybe a good idea would be to try to read James Joyce’s Ulysses to see what could have happened to the main character in just one day.

Or another good idea would be to remember what Julia Roberts’s character, a well known actress said to Hugh Grant’s character, a no name library owner in Notting Hill: “I’m also just a girl standing in front of a boy asking him to love her.” No matter how famous someone is, they still ache, they still get sick, they still question their lives and they still have routines. Even the Gods of Olympus got so bored with their existences that they started messing with the humans like a game of chess. So, maybe the key is to start enjoying the routine and to realize that even the most hectic schedule has a routine in its hecticness.