Grieving the American Story

the end of any story is the beginning of a new one

Remember when you realized Santa wasn’t real?

Or that your parents were a little too human to be superheroes?

Growing up is realizing that everything the adults said was true… wasn’t ever objectively true.

It was just a story.

It was all just a story.

The most profound story of my youth was the story of America.

I was sold an America that was a solid, impenetrable force for good. It was a story of wars fought and won for freedom and mistakes that had all been corrected as we evolved towards greater technological and social progress.

The American story was linear, and always trending positive. I believed as a kid that I lived in the best country in the world… by a long shot.

Today, this story is far past its prime. The internet improved the flow of information, and as a result, this story melted to something resembling primordial soup.

Most Americans today either believe that: (a) America was never really that good for most people, or (b) America is progressing away from its once good past.

No one, not even kids today, believe the basic, cut-and-dry story of my youth anymore. Which is the societal equivalent of all of us simultaneously realizing that Santa isn’t real.

Today, most people that I hang around talk about America as if it is something out there. Everyone — on every possible point in the political spectrum — seem to only want to discuss an unidentifiable “them” that is “ruining everything.”

I have empathy for it.

I’m also frustrated by it.

Because all a country really is is a group of people trying to organize themselves. It’s you and me and your friends and my friends, and suddenly that adds up to something like 330 million of us. We aren’t a monolith by any means, but we are a group… whether we want to be or not.

Our predecessors weren’t perfect.

We certainly aren’t either.

We’re all just a bunch of humans, running a grand experiment and fucking things up along the way.

That’s it.

And I think the only path forward is for us to accept this so radically.

I think — if we don’t have the courage to grieve the “we’re the best country in the world” story of my youth, we don’t stand a chance as a nation.

In my own life, and on a very personal level, whenever I have been unable to accept death as imminent or face off with my own grief — I have struggled immensely.

Masked grief looks like anger and hopelessness.

It looks like pessimism and depression.

The American people are filled with all of that right now.

Which makes me think we’re all just avoiding grief.

And if we continue to lead with these masks, we are only inviting more destruction — to our society, our way of life, and our world.

A death becomes toxic when you don’t deal with it.

But I think if you want to do something for this country, it’s to grieve — honestly, fully, and with your closest people.

Grief is a complex and messy set of feelings — it’s about integrating the good and the bad and the everything in between. It’s about staring honestly at the relationship you had, and letting the loss hit you square in the heart.

Moving through grief is a beautiful process of letting go of idolization and resentments, and moving into truth.

In regards to America, it’s a harder thing to hold all contradictory ideas at the same time — that this place is wildly imperfect and that it has also afforded me so much.

But this is where we all must land.

Because it’s from that place that we can start to make change.

To stop talking about this unnamable “them.”

And start realizing that it is us.

It was always us.

We are the authors of the next American story.