The Origin Story Is Complete

McSteamy

Keke Palmer said it better than I could: "It's more than that person. It's the memories that are attached to that person that's manifested through them being whoever they are."

I've been sitting with that quote for a while now.

Eric Dane died. And here's the uncomfortable truth I had to reckon with: I didn't grieve him. Not really. I don't know the man. Never followed his interviews, never cared about his personal life, never gave him a second thought outside of one very specific context.

But something in me broke a little anyway.

That context? Mark Sloan. McSteamy. Grey's Anatomy. A show I've rewatched so many times the episodes feel less like television and more like a recurring dream I keep choosing to have. I leave it playing in the background while I cook, clean, exist. Not because I need to know what happens — I already know what happens — but because there's something I find in the rewatching that I can't quite find anywhere else. Patterns I missed the first time. Omens hiding in plain sight. The bittersweet luxury of witnessing what could've been prevented while being completely powerless to change it.

I was rewatching when I found out about Eric Dane. And the timing was almost cruel — I was right at the episode of Mark Sloan's death. The plane crash. That scene with him and Lexie. The tribute montage at the end: him at Derek's wedding, him with Callie, him with his baby. Clips that are supposed to function as closure but never quite do.

I've seen those scenes dozens of times. But this time I was verklempt in a way I wasn't prepared for.

Maybe it's the lived experience accumulating behind my eyes. Maybe it's what happens when grief finds an unexpected container and floods it. Whatever it was, I sat there genuinely emotional over someone I've never met, for a fictional man who died in a plane crash that never happened, played by a real man I didn't know I'd been carrying a quiet hope about.

Here's the thing about hope that I didn't realize until that moment: sometimes it lives in the most irrational places, and you don't know it's there until it disappears.

As long as Eric Dane was alive, some part of my brain held onto the possibility. A spinoff, maybe. A return. Some narrative miracle that would let Mark Sloan exist again in the present tense. The character died, yes — but the person who gave him life was still out here breathing. That meant the door wasn't fully closed.

Now it is.

And what I felt wasn't grief for Eric Dane. It was grief for the finality. For the door that just sealed itself shut permanently. For a specific flavor of comfort that I didn't even know I was depending on.

"What is a person if not memories." I saw that in a reel once and never forgot it. Because that's exactly what Mark Sloan is to me now — memories. A constellation of scenes and feelings and versions of myself that I associate with watching that show. And Eric Dane was the living proof that those memories had an origin. Now he's gone, and the origin story is complete. Finished. Past tense in every direction.

What unsettled me most wasn't the grief itself. It was the realization that followed it.

I started thinking about every public figure I admire. Every artist, every creator, every person who's carved out some kind of cultural real estate in my mind. And the honest answer is: I don't know any of them. Not actually. What I know is what they represent to me — what their work unlocked in me, what phase of my life I was in when I first encountered them, what version of myself I become when I engage with what they've made.

We project entire worlds onto people we've never touched. We mourn their deaths in ways that have nothing to do with them and everything to do with ourselves. We call it admiration but sometimes it's closer to self-recognition — we love in them what we're reaching toward in ourselves.

Which led me to the question I didn't expect to spend so long with:

What do I want to represent?

Not to everyone. That's not something you control anyway. But to the people paying attention — to the ones who will one day attach their memories to something I made or said or put out into the world — what do I want to be the container for?

I know I'll be misunderstood. I know most people will never fully humanize me in the way I humanize myself. That's just the physics of public life, even at whatever small scale I'm operating on. You become a symbol before you become a person to most people. And if that's inevitable, then the question becomes: what symbol are you actively trying to be?

I'm still figuring it out. But the answer that keeps surfacing is this: someone who took full ownership of his life. Who chose vulnerability as evidence of living rather than evidence of weakness. Who was present in his own story instead of narrating it from a safe distance.

Trying is doing. Becoming is a practice, not a destination. I'm in the middle of it.

But I want to leave you with the real question; the one that hit me sitting in that feeling while Grey's Anatomy played in the background:

What do you want to represent to others, knowing most of them will never fully see you?

Not what you want to accomplish. Not what you want people to say at your funeral. But what do you want the people who loved your work to be mourning when they mourn it?

What feeling do you want to be the origin of?

Go figure that out. Then go embody it.

Easier said than done; but once it's done, it's easy.

As always, stay tricky, be open-minded, get curious.

Until next time,

Tricky Sol