When it comes to affairs of the heart, we are all beginners. Some of us, however, at least speak with authority. Introducing Shon Faye, author of The Transgender Issue (2021) and the forthcoming Love in Exile (2025), whose advice caught our eye. Contact her at DearShonVogue@gmail.com for your own chance at enlightenment.
Dear Shon,
I had a revelation earlier this year that I don’t feel like the main character in my life.
I am in my early 30s and feel like I have been living on autopilot, spending my energy supporting or worrying about family, falling in love with depressed men I couldn’t fix (duh), and not managing my own mental health especially well. (I am a high-functioning depressed person, and most people don’t have any idea.) I am getting better at setting boundaries in these areas, but it doesn’t come naturally to me. I feel lost and oddly nostalgic for the type of belligerent confidence I had at 17.
I have a successful career working with a friend I adore, but their vision drives the business, and despite my seniority, I am definitely a supporting character. What makes me good at my job is the same set of caring qualities that have defined my personal relationships. I have many great friends but feel lost and alone.
How do I work out what I want and need in order to become the main character in my life?
Best Supporting
Dear Best Supporting,
You use the metaphor of being a supporting character in the story of your own life to describe a cluster of different issues that are conspiring to make you feel both alienated and in stasis. The state of mind you describe, that idea of something missing, is part of a broader cultural malaise. You’re a younger millennial with a successful career, which I imagine means that you—like many of us—were raised to believe that professional success contained a promise of personal fulfillment. In fact, even if we are doing well at work, we find ourselves in the midst of a rampant consumer culture with fewer bonds of community than at any point in history, constantly at work (because we are always accessible on phones) and trying to blot out crisis after crisis in the economy, world, and climate. It is very normal to feel, in such surroundings, that getting up every day, working and paying the bills, seems like living on autopilot. You are not alone.
Yet there’s also the matter of your specific circumstances and mental health. The first thing you mention is that you are depressed, and very few people know about it because you are high-functioning. I often find when people talk about functioning with regard to mental health, they tend to mean turning up for work and generally keeping the external wheels of their lives turning. The problem is this can run on and on for years, stealing time from people, allowing them to avoid taking their condition’s impact on their interior life and relationships seriously. Have you sought out medical advice for your depression? If not, that is your first port of call. You may need to commit to finding treatment and support to manage this better and not overextend yourself. Feelings of numbness or disinterest in your own life and things that once made you happy are warning signs, and I urge you to take them seriously and get some professional help.
How you describe your personal and professional relationships sounds like, somewhere in your development, you learned that your main value rested in taking care of and fixing others. You’re okay if they’re okay. At some point, this has become a way to avoid sitting with yourself and asking deeper questions about what you actually want from your life. I am going to take a leap and assume you are a woman too: Sadly this tendency is also built into female socialization. Please do not waste time trying to feel good about yourself by fixing a man. I have been there, and it is a thankless task, compounding issues of low self-esteem when the other person doesn’t live up to our unrealistic expectations. When stuck in life and profoundly bored, it is very tempting to wonder if a new romance will liven things up and change how we feel. It can work for a time, but then life and the other person’s flaws come into view and the whole thing is a disappointment. That love can’t fix us is one of the big secrets of adulthood that no one tells you when you are a kid.
I do think therapy would help you, but given what you said about your career and your friend’s vision taking precedence, I also wonder if you would benefit from taking time to discover your own creativity. I would recommend The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron as a starting point to get you thinking about cultivating time that is spent just on nourishing yourself and your own talents, rather than just pouring out all your energy in service of other people. Cameron’s suggestions include writing every morning before your day starts and a weekly date with yourself to cultivate a greater sense of affinity with your own creative and spiritual drives. It’s got to be worth a try, right? Your letter to me suggests you want and know you deserve more than to be an understudy. Yet the only person who can give you permission to be a leading lady is yourself. So don’t wait—give yourself that permission today.
