When I first read Marilyn Cooper’s article “The Ecology of Writing”, I’ll admit I was puzzled by the differences between what Cooper calls the cognitive process model and the ecological model of writing. The notion of a solitary author, as posited by the cognitive process model, didn’t seem so outlandish to me. Of course writing is a solitary activity– I don’t exactly sit around and gossip while I write essays, and I’ve certainly felt that I was “not a part of the world” I was writing for. As a lonely, nerdy, pre-English major of a child, I often turned inward to creative writing and reading as a substitute for human interaction. (That should have been the first clue that reading and writing are SOCIAL activities, but alas).

Then I remembered something else I did as an introverted child in lieu of socializing with my peers, and the tenets of the cognitive process model started to give way to those of the ecological model in my mind. Don’t laugh (or do, it’s kind of funny) but pre-teen Anna used to pretend like she was the main character in a young adult novel or a coming-of-age movie. Sound familiar? It should. If you’ve been on TikTok in the last year or so, you’ve probably heard of the main character trend (playfully dubbed “Main Character Syndrome”) going around. As the name suggests, the trend refers to when TikTok users romanticize aspects of their everyday lives and themselves (think sitting in a coffeeshop looking mysterious) as if they were the main character in a story. The main character in the TV show Fleabag embodies this idea perfectly. The protagonist frequently looks directly into the camera and talks to us, the audience, telling us what’s she’s thinking but can’t say out loud for fear of judgement or impoliteness.

So what do my poor coping mechanisms of years past, TikTokkers, and Fleabag all have in common? The answer: the internalization of audience. I conceptualized my middle school problems as plot twists and trials in my very own Hero’s Journey as if they could all be laid out and read chapter by chapter. Teenage girls wander somberly through bookstores, trying their best to look aloof and intellectual for the front-facing camera. Fleabag (that’s also the main character’s name) literally looks directly into camera, all the time. This is when I really started to grasp the ideas of the ecological model. Because pretending to be in a book certainly didn’t do me any favors (hindsight is 20/20: just quit sitting alone at lunch). Psychology professor Michael Karson has written about how viewing oneself as the main character can quickly become toxic. In the show, Fleabag only starts to learn and grow once she turns away from the audience.

Finally, I understood what Cooper meant when she said that no one is a truly solitary author– or at least, it’s unhealthy to do so. Because for Fleabag and I, the only long-term solution to feeling like an outsider involves opening yourself up to others. I can’t speak for teens on the internet, but I know that meeting up with friends after a long day of staring at my laptop and scrolling through social media always makes me feel more connected to the wonderful web of life we live in.

You are not a solitary author mournfully narrating your own story to an outside audience, and you’re never going to feel a part of something greater until you let go of your internal sense of audience. So maybe we all ought to get out of our heads, so to speak, and try to engage in reading, writing, and even speaking/socializing from an ecological perspective and not a cognitive one.