We\u2019re all familiar with anti-heroes on television.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
We have Jack Sparrow from Pirates of the Caribbean<\/em>. Tyler Durden from Fight Club<\/em>. Severus Snape from Harry Potter<\/em> and the psychopathic lead character from Dexter<\/em>. We feel conflicted over these characters \u2013 we love and we hate them simultaneously. We root for them then distance ourselves from them. We both abhor and appreciate these characters because they are the realest damn characters we ever see depicted on TV.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But nobody wants to be them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n We hate anti-heroes in part because we\u2019re scared that we are exactly like them \u2013 Flawed. Immoral. Lost. We don\u2019t want to recognize the parts of ourselves that resemble these complicated characters because we\u2019d rather be the heroes themselves. The pure ones. The strong ones. The people who always say the right thing and make the right choice and move through their lives in a blaze of honourable glory.<\/p>\n\n\n\n We want to be the heroes but we\u2019re quick to ignore the unattainability of that desire. There are no one-dimensional characters in real life. And you\u2019re certainly not always going to be the hero of your own.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The truth is, you\u2019re going to mess something up at some point. Probably something huge. Something that makes you hate yourself \u2013 that knocks you down one or ten pegs. And that\u2019s the point where it will become all too easy to take on the victim role. If you can\u2019t be the hero, you\u2019d rather be the helpless one. The unaccountable one. The who got dumped on by life and needs a hero to come along and save them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n We hate the anti-hero character because we prefer moral extremes. You\u2019re batman or you\u2019re the joker. You\u2019re good or you\u2019re evil. You\u2019re somebody we all want to root for or you\u2019re someone we hope will crash hard and burn. And we want to put ourselves into these extremes too. We\u2019re either triumphing over our lives \u2013 riding in on a blaze of glory, or we\u2019re hiding from it \u2013 waiting until we\u2019re worthy of better circumstances. We don\u2019t want to play the anti-hero because we don\u2019t want to dwell in moral grey areas. We don\u2019t want to half-root for ourselves.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But here\u2019s the truth about heroes: None of the real-life ones are pervasively moral or gallant. None of them did everything right along the way. Not a single hero in the untelevised world has done the right thing at every opportunity they\u2019ve had. They\u2019ve all been anti-heroes at some point. They\u2019ve all had to accept the darkest parts of themselves.<\/p>\n\n\n\n We are not the stock characters we\u2019d like to be. Those don\u2019t exist in real life. In real life, we all fall somewhere in the middle. We\u2019re all the brave, wretched, strong, hopeless, determined, awful anti-hero that we so loathe to watch on TV. We exist in shades of grey. We\u2019re all the people we half-root for.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And perhaps that\u2019s something we have to get more comfortable doing \u2013 half-supporting ourselves. Half loving what we\u2019re doing with our lives and half working on it. Developing the ability to segregate the parts of ourselves we are proud of and the parts that are in progress. When we lump it all together, we get a black-or-white version of ourselves. And the amount of energy it takes to shift from one category into another seems insurmountable. We forget that we\u2019re halfway there. We forget that it\u2019s not all bad.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There are times when you just need to be the anti-hero of your own life. You need to look at yourself as you are \u2013 not as you have been or as you hope you will be \u2013 and understand that you are not entirely one way or another. You\u2019re not a hero riding in on a white horse to save the day. You\u2019re not a villain, trampling over others on your way to the top. You are, in every way, a little bit of both. You\u2019re a person who has good intentions but sometimes-twisted methods. You\u2019re a person who\u2019s made some bad choices but wants to turn things around for themselves.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Because here\u2019s the thing about anti-heroes: They always do turn things around. By the end of a movie, every character that started off as a bumbling, self-loathing mess changes into somebody we root for. It\u2019s the very end of the archetype \u2013 to transform. To grow outside of themselves. To pick up the pieces and move on from what they once were. These are the characters we abhor but they should be the ones that we admire. Because they\u2019re realer than any hero out there and they\u2019re more honourable than any victim.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Being the anti-hero of our own lives is something we all need to strive for when we\u2019re down on the floor. It\u2019s not a weak character to play \u2013 it\u2019s the strongest one imaginable. It\u2019s one who knows that where they\u2019ve been does not necessitate where they are going. That their dark parts do not have to overcome their brave ones. That as flawed and as scared and as hopeless of a situation as they\u2019re in, they\u2019re not waiting for someone else to come along and save the day. They\u2019re going to pick up the pieces themselves.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Because that\u2019s the thing about heroes \u2013 they are not born in real life. They\u2019re made. They are the failures who kept fighting. The villains who repented. The catastrophes who clawed their way back up from rock bottom. And the anti-heroes who overcame themselves.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" We\u2019re all familiar with anti-heroes on television. We have Jack Sparrow from Pirates of the Caribbean. Tyler Durden from Fight Club. Severus Snape from Harry Potter and the psychopathic lead character from Dexter.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":114678431,"featured_media":1185485,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"thoughtcatalog_call_to_action":"","tc_post_redirect":"","thoughtcatalog_is_sponsored_content":"0","footnotes":""},"categories":[603198233],"tags":[],"anchortext":[],"posttemplate":[],"adcampaign":[],"coauthors":[219077519],"class_list":["post-1185483","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-self-help"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/thoughtcatalog.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/dekler-ph-NSvJaLMSi7k-unsplash.jpg","author_meta":null,"photo_credit":null,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thoughtcatalog.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1185483","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thoughtcatalog.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thoughtcatalog.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thoughtcatalog.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/114678431"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thoughtcatalog.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1185483"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/thoughtcatalog.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1185483\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1185486,"href":"https:\/\/thoughtcatalog.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1185483\/revisions\/1185486"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thoughtcatalog.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1185485"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thoughtcatalog.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1185483"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thoughtcatalog.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1185483"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thoughtcatalog.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1185483"},{"taxonomy":"anchortext","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thoughtcatalog.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/anchortext?post=1185483"},{"taxonomy":"posttemplate","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thoughtcatalog.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posttemplate?post=1185483"},{"taxonomy":"adcampaign","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thoughtcatalog.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/adcampaign?post=1185483"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thoughtcatalog.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=1185483"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}