[INCLUDES MOVIE SPOILERS]
Wait…Brad Pitt isn’t real?

The revelation shocked me as I sat, staring at the flickering light of the screen. I saw the flashbacks showing the narrator punching, not Pitt’s character Tyler Durden, but himself. I saw him do things far out of his normal comfort zone, all because of this delusion, this imaginary friend of Tyler Durden.

After watching the film Fight Club, I couldn’t stop analyzing it and considering the implications of its plot. When I saw the main character, a confused and increasingly sleep-deprived young professional, I began to see myself. The narrator struggles to find meaning to his mundane, insomniac life until he meets the striking Tyler Durden. The man encompasses everything the narrator wishes he could be—confident, charismatic, passionate. What begins as a simple friendship becomes a constant companionship as the men begin a club in which they channel their aggression through barbaric violence. I became more intrigued, though, as the club became a cult; where Tyler Durden manipulated participants into joining him in an attempt to take down mainstream financial institutions.

The film gained its real meaning with the twist: everything the audience sees Tyler Durden say and do is actually done by the main character instead. Durden summarizes the phenomenon, saying, “People do it every day, they talk to themselves... they see themselves as they'd like to be. [But] they don't have the courage you have, to just run with it.”

I saw myself in the narrator, not because he hallucinated or created conspiracies, but because of his struggle to live up to his own potential. I found something fascinating about his creation of Tyler Durden and how this alter ego allowed him to become the person he always wanted to be. Excluding the violent and illegal nature of the transformation, I thought it was actually admirable. I loved the idea that the main character was able to improve his situation and influence others simply by changing his mindset. He fought with Durden’s strength, he spoke with Durden’s conviction, and he acted with Durden’s poise, without actually possessing any of these traits.

In the context of my own life, I saw the opportunity to accomplish what I want by convincing myself that I have the ability to do so. I finally understood the power of the mind. I wondered where my potential could lead if I found my own Tyler Durden.