On Main Character Energy, The Empress, and Our Inner Child

Yellow Brick Road.

Graphic: Ethel Moore

Welcome back to Yellow Brick Road, Thursday’s newsletter and exploration of one’s guided path. My week so far has been mostly sitting in the afterglow of birthing something that feels so incredibly resonant with who I am at this place in my life. Thank you all so much for reading and sharing! If you’re signed up and love the newsletter, consider subscribing! It’s $5 a month! That’s less than a latte in BK!

The Empress

In many ways, I do believe there is a perfect time to do everything. Ideas, like strawberries, can be too green to be tasty, and all strawberries at their ripest are still simply okay to some (another lesson for another day about why not to prime yourself for consumption). Alternatively, you can wait too long to plant a seed, and be stuck trying to harvest in the dead of winter.

So yeah, perfect timing is real. For creatives, perfect timing is not when you feel most comfortable, most free, or most secure with your personhood - it’s when you are ready to nurture. Sometimes you’re not the nurturer you’re most precious project needs yet, and so you wait until it’s the only thing that feels necessary and good. This reminds me of the energy of The Empress in the tarot. Traditionally, they are depicted as the archetype of “divine feminine,” a pregnant woman sitting on the throne of Venus to symbolize abundance, comfort, fertility, and maternal instinct. If we can stretch our imaginations beyond the gendered nature of the card and a physical birthing body, we can tap into its actual healing properties. For me, this card is one of re-parenting and reconciliation with my inner child in order to birth, nurture and protect my most authentic creative expression.

Left: Rachel True’s True Heart Intuitive Tarot, Right: Modern Witch Tarot

Representing Venus, The Empress claims strength through love. Not the kind of love that demands ownership over another, or even who we are right now. Not the Valentine’s Day version of love, but the bell books version of Love. In All About Love, she echoes the definition of love found in M. Scott Peck’s The Road Less Traveled as “the will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth.”

By this definition, love includes both an intention and action. We can only love as much as we are practitioners of it. For many reasons, I identify most with this card than any in the tarot, and have a particular affinity for these two versions of The Empress by virtue of them looking a lil’ bit like me. The depiction of the card on the left is my favorite because it is one of the only I’ve seen in which The Empress is standing and in motion. With a wand in their hand, they represent the ease with which we attract love in our lives through embodiment. I founded the idea of Come Home on this principle, as a ritual - an act - and a show of support for who we are, and who we witness ourselves becoming in reverence of our inner child. That is true love.

Are TikTokers kind of genius? Yes!

I’ve dedicated an embarrassing amount of time scrolling through my For You Page on TikTok while I could be sleeping, eating, and…idk working? If you don’t have TikTok, I liken myself a master curator of TikToks on my IG stories. It’s a lot of babies and black people doing things they love excellently. One of my favorite TikTok trends, for which there are entire creators committed to the bit, is Main Character Energy TikToks. So funny, so delicious, so Gen-Z.

Embodying Main Character Energy is sitting at a coffee shop, “journaling” over an aesthetic latte, tapping a pen against your lips in contemplation; wearing your billowy, cottagecore dress to lay out on your gingham print picnic blanket at the park to “read.” Going somewhere, doing something that makes you feel magnetic, like a celestial being with an orbit of your own, just slightly more magical than usual, and believing other people feel you in magnetism. Believing you are at the center of your own universe, and people can’t help but gawk in wonder. I love the energy of it all!! It kind of sounds like an unintentional act in mindfulness and inner child work by our youngest class of Earth-dwellers.

Main Protagonist TikToker: @ladyyasmina1

Main Character TikToker: @daiseygorgeous

As a Millennial/Gen-Z cusper, I’m really fascinated by the younger generation’s acute awareness that corporate America and capitalism are failed experiments. They literally think capitalism is corny…and they’re absolutely correct! While Millennials invented Girlboss as a symbolism for structural equality (aka white women forcing themselves into closer proximity to white, male power structures after reading once that “money is energy”), Gen Z chants Eat the Rich.

They seem to think less about “what” they are going to be when they grow up, and more of “who” they are going to be when they grow up - probably and seriously as a result of the influencer economy they’ve been raised by, and the blurred lines between person and career. As the pendulum swings from valuing labor above our own fulfillment to a certain level of detached self-absorption, I am hopeful (always hopeful) we will level out somewhere in the middle as a populace far closer to self-actualization than we’ve ever been before because of these kids. They are fearless in pursuit of…themselves, an of honoring their desire to not only be seen, but known and celebrated. I don’t think they’re wrong. They’re honest about what the inner child in all of us demands.

So boom - Main Character energy is inner child work. For folks with identities seldom portrayed or offered space as the main character in any story, let alone their own - like sayyyyy a fat, black, queer woman - believing that we are not only deserving, but safe to live a life in which we are the hero is an act of revolution. For those of us who have been raised to believe sacrificing one’s own health and happiness for another’s is moral goodness, for those of us who have lost ourselves in the dogma of subservience at one point of another, for those of us who are trying to redefine love for ourselves outside of the scarcity myth, and beyond systemic and interpersonal violence, Main Character Energy - or acting with intention to love and be nurtured as the creative center of our own lives - is freedom.

“Bitch, how the fuck is being self-centered revolutionary??”

Well, it expands the imagination which expands the possibilities of what our own worlds can look like.

Not That Girl

In middle and high school, everyone plays their part. Some are popular and play the hero, some are class clown and play the jester. When I was in middle school, I decided to step out of my role of sage and academic to try something I always wanted to. Not to drop High School Musical on that ass, but I felt comfy as Taylor McKessie (also, so seen that the nerd was a black girl) while secretly wanting to try Sharpay Evans on for size.

I’m very much using High School Musical references because it applies!!!!!

In an absolutely iconic move of grandiosity and pure love, my mom took me on a surprise trip to New York City for my 13th birthday. They announced Grand Central over the intercom on the train, and only then did I know where we were. This was the only time I traveled to the city prior to moving here on a hunch and about $9 exactly 10 years later, so the trip was formative in many ways. Despite the fact that we bumped (yes, bumped) the Wicked soundtrack in the car on the way to school, the store, basketball practice, just about everywhere for months prior to heading to the city, I was very shocked to find out we would see the show.

If you don’t know, Wicked is the villain origin story of the Wicked Witch of the West in The Wizard of Oz. During its viewing, the audience questions “is evil born, or is it made?” Spoiler: Glinda the Good Witch is just a stand in for white, female privilege, and basically the whole plot is the source of why white folks think its okay to say ‘I don’t care if you’re black, white, or GREEN!!" when defending their overt racism.

Anyway - my 13 year old self fell in love with performance that day. I also gathered from the storyline that evil as a label is often a tool for gaslighting, the othering and subsequent exile of what power and groupthink deems dangerous, and the privilege of telling history is left to the victor.

I knew Elpheba’s character arc (sans villain vibes) in my bones. I, too, wanted to be simply beautiful, simply popular, simply charming, to experience a life in which anything about me was effortless. Instead of constant overcompensation for how much space I claimed, for how I knew the world might perceive me, I yearned to live for the girl within me who just wanted to be fabulous and fun. No fat, black woman were written to take center stage outside of trauma stories and harmful stereotypes, no green woman was human, but this new love for performance and to be known fully stirred something in me. The desire to be the hero, the victor, and the truth-teller of my own story burned in my soft belly.

Not many months after this trip, I auditioned for the middle school performance of How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, a show ironically about the ease with which a cis-het white man can follow the script of baseless confidence, and trust in good ol’ boy alliances to get to the top in order to claim the American Dream. The song I choose to audition? Embarrassingly “Not That Girl”, my favorite song from the Wicked soundtrack. A short clip of the lyrics here:

Don't dream too far
Don't lose sight of who you are
Don't remember that rush of joy
He could be that boy
I'm not that girl

Every so often we long to steal
To the land of what-might-have-been
But that doesn't soften the ache we feel
When reality sets back in

Blithe smile, lithe limb
She who's winsome, she wins him
Gold hair with a gentle curl
That's the girl he chose
And Heaven knows
I'm not that girl

Don't wish, don't start
Wishing only wounds the heart
I wasn't born for the rose and the pearl
There's a girl I know
He loves her so
I'm not that girl

YEAH, DEFINITELY A CRY FOR HELP, Y’ALL! LIKE MAJOR SOS!!! It was that, or I Can’t Make You Love Me by Bonnie Raitt. When you are constantly overlooked by your crushes, a repressed romantic, and simply emo as hell as a kid, a propensity for ballads about unrequited love is inevitable. I still have the music taste of a bitter divorcee if we’re being honest!

Unlike the other contenders for the lead role, I was nearing 300 lbs, black, and had a voice in Toni Braxton’s range (not to be confused with Toni Braxton’s talent, though the shower had convinced me otherwise). Two Julie-Andrews-wannabes, the school theater queens, had already counted me out, and auditioned before me. Then I sang, and I could see the shock wash over their faces, and the casting directors loved it. You could cut the musty air of pubescent power struggle with a knife.

In the end, the lead female roles of wife and quirky secretary went to the thin, white songbirds, and they gave me a congeniality award in the form of a solo that was written into the script just for me. The Coffee Break Solo, they called it. Here is a picture of 13 year old me singing my lil’ heart out. If you saw this performance live, no you didn’t! They only gave me about 2.5 minutes of spotlight, and I was gonna soak that shit UP.

Me photographed by my mom’s digital camera from 2003

The casting directors, who were 19 year old Tisch rejects themselves, ALL-offense, told me straight up that I didn’t get the part because it wasn’t written with me in mind, but the truth is they lacked imagination…among other things.

I didn’t perform again for a decade, until I moved to NYC three years ago and gave myself no choice but to become a practitioner of love for my inner child who formerly defined herself by what they decided was and wasn’t a main character. Who defined herself by other people’s limited imaginations.

Naturally, the reality of being the protagonist in your own story means you are accountable for your journey in this life, not just looking cute in public spaces like the TikToks may imply. Once you start interrogating why you do what you do, you realize how much of who you are and what you think you want is a result of someone, maybe a few someones along the way, telling you to grow the fuck up too early, or inappropriately. Since mending and unlearning some of that, the key to unlocking happiness, to stop parenting others and stop taking responsibility for any journey that is not my own, is to effectively un-adult. Unraveling, and disrobing the armor of being adultified too soon, parentified too soon, supporting role-d too soon, and tending to the person who exists beneath it all waiting to be the celebrated.

Tapping into The Empress energy, we re-parent and take responsibility for our inner child as the center of creativity for our lives - as the compass for where love is - and we naturally become the Main Character and the other way around. Children only have the instinct to run exactly and precisely where they are loved. Where love is recognizable, uncomplicated, and requires zero mental gymnastics to hold.

To claim my space as the protagonist in my story is not individualism, but is a sacred act in revolution because it threatens the rugged individualism of whiteness and the scarcity myth. Under whiteness, personal power is synonymous with conquest. When you expand, someone else contracts - everyone else must become a supporting role. If we - those of us cast in supporting roles in our own lives - become main characters, there exists a belief that no one else will know which role to play. To which I say - good. We’re not here to play a role, even if that’s all we’ve known thus far.

There is always enough. In the case of Main Character Energy, you and I are expanding within limitlessness. I am the hero in my story, the protagonist acting within interest of my own survival, growth, and fulfillment. So is everyone else! When we all act as a main character - accommodating for our own needs, lending help when our own cups are full, let love come to our aid when they’re not, and holding ourselves accountable to the boundaries of letting others be their own protagonist too - we are engaging in Love and interconnectedness. We become an ensemble cast, like Girlfriends or Living Single. We abandon cacophony of trying to be the loudest for the sake of dominance, in favor of a finely-tuned, perfectly-pitched, joyful symphony.