We all have a story we tell ourselves: about what we value, about who we are, about our presence in this world.
It’s a narrative that we’ve spent our entire lives carefully crafting, made of equal parts aspiration, denial, and wishful thinking; one that forms our sense of self and how we imagine others see us.
And somehow, miraculously, in each of these internal autobiographies, we are all the good people; our cause always noble, our motives always pure, our methods always admirable.
In these heavily redacted fictions, we get to daily play the valiant hero in our heads, regardless of whether the work of our hands yields anything remotely heroic, no matter how those sharing our story may experience us, despite the actual merit of the choices we make.
In other words, in the name of sanity, self-preservation, and comfort, we’ve all learned to believe our own b******t, even if no one else did.
That may have sufficed in the America we once found ourselves within.
In earlier, less turbulent incarnations of our collective story, we could get away with the many discrepancies between who we tell ourselves we are and who our actions (or inactions) declare we are. Back then, the moments of consequence were far more fleeting, the peril far less obvious, and the danger seemingly a long way off.
But America, these unthinkable, sickening, heartbreaking days are burning up the false stories about each of us.
There is no spin to engage in, no caveats to offer, no qualifications to make.
Whoever we are right now is who we are.
If you tell yourself you believe that all people have the same intrinsic value, yet you say nothing as our own government brutalizes thousands of human beings for the color of their skin or their nation of origin or the language they speak, you are revealing that you don’t actually believe that.
If you tell yourself that your faith in Jesus directs your path, and yet you continue to abide or embrace a man whose every word, whose every instinct, whose every decision is the antithesis of your religion’s namesake, that faith is worthless.
If you tell yourself that you’d never have been among the millions of Germans who silently complied with the Nazis’ barbarism, and yet you are rendered silent in your circles of influence and on social media as immigrants are rounded up like animals and LGBTQ people are relentlessly persecuted, you’re wrong.
If you tell yourself that you respect the lives of women, while turning your head from the protection of predators, and remaining silent in the face of misogynistic preachers, while allowing the legislative assaults on choice to go unchallenged, you really don’t.
Look, none of us wants to believe that we’re cowards or that we’re complicit in systemic racism or that we’re lacking conviction or that we’re not quite committed to justice, especially if that’s the mythology we've assembled around ourselves—but these days are telling the truth about us even if we can’t.
In this life, friends, we don’t get credit for our intentions, we don’t get points for who we’d like to be, and we don’t get flowers for the people we tell ourselves we are.
We are not the collection of our aspirations; we are the sum total of our choices.
I don’t know what story you tell yourself, but what I do know is that you, me, that every single one of us is being fully revealed right now: in our shouts and our silences, in our confrontations and our cowering, in our pointed words and our polite niceties, in our movements and our excuses,in the peace we keep and the peace we disrupt,in the turbulence we engage and the conflict we avoid, in our running into the fray and our taking the life of least resistance,in the pain we sit with and the suffering we click away from.
That is the true story of our lives.
America, we are in some of the most urgent days in our history, and we each need to stand in front of the mirror, turn on the raking, unflattering light of complete honesty, look with a sober and steady gaze, and ask the question: “Who the hell do I think I am?”
The way we step into the dizzying torrent of this day, individually and collectively, will be our clear and indelible reply.
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