I realized I had been living in a world of my own creation, where everyone else possessed some secret confidence I had been denied. But here was the truth hiding in plain sight: everyone is insecure about something. Our insecurities don’t make us defective—they make us human.
When did busyness become our most acceptable form of hiding? We’ve created a culture where constant motion substitutes for meaningful direction. Scratch beneath the surface of all this urgent activity, and you often find a person running from the uncomfortable work of actually living.
There’s a peculiar grief in education, in the accumulation of truths that dismantle the beautiful stories we tell ourselves about how things work. Each fact learned is also an innocence lost, each understanding gained is also an illusion shattered.
The World Isn’t Fair. Now What? The news arrived on a Thursday: my friend Sarah, who had never smoked a day in her life, who ran marathons and ate vegetables and visited her elderly parents every weekend, had lung cancer. Stage four. Six months, maybe eight if she was lucky. Meanwhile, my neighbor—who chain-smokes on
he tragedy isn’t that all questions have answers—they don’t. The tragedy is that we teach children to stop asking the questions that matter most, the ones that keep the world alive and mysterious and full of possibility.
The adults—those mythical beings who seemed to possess a secret manual for navigating existence—were just as lost as everyone else. They were improvising their way through mortgages and marriages, pretending certainty while feeling anything but certain.
Adult life desperately needs the conviction that change is possible, that help is coming, that we are part of something larger. Maybe adult magic isn’t about believing in fairies, but about staying open to surprise and serendipity.
Why do we reserve our harshest judgment for people who are living our unlived lives? Our judgment serves a function: it protects the careful architecture of limitation we’ve built around our own lives.
This is the loneliest kind of love: being cherished for a performance so convincing that even you sometimes forget you’re acting. They’re in relationship with my best intentions while the rest of me remains invisible, unwitnessed, unknown.
Why does authenticity feel like the most dangerous thing we can attempt? Perhaps it’s because we live in a world that rewards certainty over honesty, confidence over authenticity, the polished lie over the messy truth.
Essays on memory, grief & identity.
Delivered when the world goes quiet.
