A Far Better Thing...

The term comfort character is defined by Urban Dictionary as “a character, which can be from a TV show, game, book, etc, [who] makes you feel safe and happy when upset, sad, down, etc.” Having grown up isolated and ostracized by my community, I learned from an early age to find the companionship I lacked in works of fiction. I’ve had a number of comfort characters in my life, but the one that stands out is Sydney Carton from A Tale of Two Cities. That character kept coming back into my life at times when I needed comfort most, and that started at a young age.

It was a crisp fall afternoon in 1995, about a month shy of my seventh birthday. I came home from school feeling sick, which was an all too common occurrence for a kid living with a rare disease. While the other kids in the neighborhood played outside, my mom sent me straight to bed. Unable to sleep, I turned on the tv. This was not a nice new cable television; it was an ancient model even by mid-90s standards. That tv got four channels, only one of which aired children’s programming at that time of day.

The show was Wishbone, a public television program in which the titular jack russell terrier inserts himself into works of classic literature. That day’s featured story: A Tale of Two Cities.

Unfortunately not even the cute little doggy in the period costume was enough to make me invested in Charles Darnay, and I was (and still am) a huge animal lover! I still vividly remember watching that show, confused and bored out of my mind throughout the first half… until a guy with disheveled dark hair came onscreen. Enter Sydney Carton, the only character in that adaptation to hold my attention.

Between that version’s severely truncated storyline and my six-year-old mind, some parts of the story were lost on me, but I got the most important things. I understood Sydney’s feelings for Lucie Manette, I understood what the guillotine did. I understood that Sydney traded his life for Charles, though that didn’t stop me from being mad when I found out he died! What I didn’t understand at the time was that watching that episode of Wishbone had planted the seeds of knowledge that would change my life many years later.

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“I am a disappointed drudge, sir. I care for no man on earth, and no man on earth cares for me.” That is how Sydney Carton describes himself, and until three years ago, that quote described me as well. Like him, I fell far short of the benchmarks of a normal adult life. By summer 2020, I had nothing meaningful to show for my existence: no spouse, no kids, no 9-5 job, no college degree, no car, and few friends or family to dull the loneliness of COVID restrictions. ll I had were frustrated ambitions of a law career, mountains of bills I couldn’t afford, and a disability that robbed me of any chance at a normal life.

Everywhere I turned, I was confronted with just how dispensable my life had become. The pseudo-uplifting news stories of nurses, essential workers, and mothers’ courage reminded me of the ideal woman I could never be. The scary ones of hospitals running out of resources painted a bleak picture of my future. I knew that my illness would make me more susceptible to complications of COVID, and if that happened, I couldn’t expect anyone to spend valuable resources saving a disabled, childless, jobless loser like me.

I could reconcile the likelihood that I wouldn’t survive the pandemic, but the part that scared me most was the thought that when my time came, no one would mourn because I hadn’t done anything useful with my life. Resigned to my fate, I stopped trying to be productive. It seemed a lost cause when one’s days were numbered. I turned to alcohol to dull the negative emotions and spent most days in bed, mindlessly scrolling through my phone.

On one such day, a familiar fictional character appeared in my youtube recommendations. I had seen several iterations of Sydney Carton over the years, but this one was new to me. I remembered gravitating toward that character as a child when I saw that episode of Wishbone - and again later when I read A Tale of Two Cities in high school - and clicked the video out of curiosity. As I watched, I didn’t just see my old comfort character. I saw myself in him… the same cynicism, self-loathing, and wasted potential.

That video made me cry for his misspent life and my own, but more importantly, it made me think. Knowing how far Sydney had fallen and what he did in the end gave me hope that I, too, wasn’t too far gone to turn my life around. I went on to meet the person responsible for that video, and his kindness inspired me to make a promise similar to one made by my comfort character, I promised to dedicate myself to giving back to him and honor his faith in me by becoming someone worthy of it. Were it not for that promise, I never would’ve gone on to lose eighty pounds, overcome my shyness, or lay the groundwork to start a small business. Were it not for that video, I wouldn’t have made that promise, and were it not for that episode of Wishbone I watched so long ago, I wouldn’t have found that video.