✨Why Bringing Main Character Energy to Midlife Matters✨

How to take back your agency when you're feeling 'storyless' 🖋️📚👑

✨ A vibrant space for midlife women, The Empress now reaches over two million readers through our networks of networks. ✨ From bestselling author Alisa Kennedy Jones. ✨ If you enjoy content about midlife, humor, and agency, I’d love to welcome you as part of our community.

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Fellow Empresses, How the hell are you?

Apologies for the radio silence this summer… I have been caught in the multilayered GenX sandwich of parental care—something that falls largely to midlife women—as does child and domestic care. It’s easy to lose sight of yourself amid all the tasks, which again reminds me why main character energy is so important when we talk about cultural visibility and agency in the latter half of our lives.

Why Bringing Main Character Energy to Midlife Matters

Lately, we’ve all seen the awesome power of the arc of the understudy. We’ve watched it ignite our nation. The backup singer suddenly called to step into the spotlight, finally showing she is a star with incredible pipes and a voice all her own. No longer waiting in the wings, she is now moving the narrative forward with her words, and her ideas, and she feels unstoppable. There is momentum. There is energy.

For many of us, it felt like an existential epidural... freedom from the nonstop agony, the nonstop doom. This moment is the arc of our ambition, redemption, pleasure, and what it feels like when a whole country finally holds space for a woman to win. When she’s finally allowed to bring the fullest expression of her main character energy—her laugh—to the stage. Suddenly, everything we’re faulted for is now OK. The reversal can feel uncanny.

What Does It Mean To Be ‘Storyless’?

To be storyless in midlife, in the middle of the complex, multilayered, all-systems physiological, emotional, and spiritual transformation that is peri/menopause, is to find oneself invisible, without a voice, without agency, and often muddled—without a clear purpose. To be storyless is to be vulnerable. It means that you are fundamentally a blank slate onto which others can impose their narratives of who you are, what you are going through, and what you might be capable of at this stage of life. You are not only waiting in the wings, you are being tasked as a production assistant in the play of someone else's life.

What does it mean to be a main character?

A main character will always possess a desire and a heart in conflict with itself and it is this conflict that will fuel her story. The main character has true agency. She proactively moves the plot forward. By definition, her actions have nothing to do with magical thinking or grandiosity: they are, in Dr. Sharon Blackie’s words, “founded on a vivid sense of belongingness to a rich and many-layered world; a profound and whole-hearted participation in the adventure of life.” Hers is so much more than the monomyth of The Hero’s Journey as it was originally conceived by Joseph Campbell.

The main character decides what's a big deal and what is not.

The main character looks at the other guys and she NDB's them. She raises a brow and says, “Those guys are just weird. Let's choose better instead. Let's choose freedom instead of fascism. Let's choose funny instead of scary. Let’s choose calm instead of chaos.” The main character decides. She sets the tone of the action. And she does it in a way where everyone can say, “Yeah, let's do that... That makes sense. We're with you.” Because it has to make sense—the main character's actions—if we're going to go along with them.

The main character is naturally intuitive. She embraces curiosity and awe, while fully engaging the creative imagination. She excavates myth, archetypes, folklore, poetry, fables, song, dance, and her own innate wisdom to outfit her archetypal and narrative tool set. This is where the Empress comes in. She’s clearly a main character as well as a highly generative, creative force.

And… whereas in the traditional hero’s journey, the woman’s role is limited to that of either the Temptress, there to test the Hero and lead him off-course, or the Goddess, who represents the ‘unconditional love’ that must be won by the Hero to go on with his quest, main character energy allows for multiple narrative choices and outcomes. Again... Agency.

Ultimately, to live as a main character in midlife is to pick up the pieces of our unseen bruised and battered hearts, and offer them the creative sustenance for which they starve. It is to usher them from the wings, out into the light, to sing, to be awakened and shaken to the core by the extraordinary power of their own song. That’s the lead in action.

Above all, to live as a main character in midlife is to fall in love with your own story (and song) every night all over again. It is a leap of faith into a deep, dark pond necessary not just for your own sake, but for the sake of the collective in whose evolution you are inextricably bound.

That’s what it is to bring the main character's mojo to midlife. It takes courage, creativity, as well as enough humility, and a sense of humor to drag your story with all its concomitant shame out into the light and revel in it. Revel in it with radical self-acceptance, with radical empathy.

And when it comes to the unmoored, liminality of it all, those moments before stepping out into the spotlight, can you ask yourself:

• Is this a chance to rewrite or rethink all of our narratives? Can we tell better stories about midlife? Because those stories will ultimately become our lives.

• What happens when midlife women tell stories of unrepentant cultural visibility, and agency?

• What happens when these stories are solely about the arc of our pleasure?

This might be where all the happily ever after begins…

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ICYMI, for a hilarious multi-part midlife rom-com set in Spain…

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4

Yours in Grandeur & Deep Sh*t,

PS - I’m going to be teaching an Empress Workshop with Dr. Heather Bartos, MD as part of Menopause Monday - August 26 at 7:30 pm (Chicago). Click here to join us and reset your midlife narrative!

Midlife got you feeling invisible, storyless, or in the malaise of menopause? Join us for an Empress Archetype Workshop with Alisa Kennedy Jones. Get your main character mojo back and reset your narrative with powerful neuroscience, mythopoetic, and storytelling techniques. Only on Menopause Mondays hosted by Dr. Heather Bartos, MD named one of the top five menopause specialists in the nation by Oprah Anne Maria Shriver.

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Here are some lovely things readers have said recently about this newsletter:

• “One of Substack’s funniest voices on midlife, menopause, and showing up for yourself.”

• “It's so refreshing to read inspiring, longer-form deep dives after years of swimming in seas of short-form social media.”

• “Alisa always brings something extraordinary as a writer and it's forever enlightening to peek into her midlife brain.”

I’d love to see you as part of the community — and I hope you enjoy these pieces above about midlife love, agency, and believing in yourself.

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