This Is Us
Why I Secretly Longed for Quarantine
I am not always the hero of my own story
Sometimes, I am not a good person—even when our world demands we trot out our most noble selves for display. In this window dressing that is our public fiction, our hearts are tremendous and our actions infallible. We never scheme, connive, or leave. Oh, no. We’re nightingales, dressing collective wounds, stitching the maimed together again. We’re expert hand-holders, hair-smoothers, advice-givers. Our wants are pure and gleaming. Even when we feel as if we’re spring lambs writhing on the slab.
But life isn’t that simple or clean. We’re neither wholly compassionate or cruel. Patron saints or Ted Bundys. We’re not the villain or the hero of our stories. We don’t fit into neat and tidy boxes. All we are is human. And sometimes our hearts are stadiums, and other times they’re thimbles where barely a person can squeak through. Better to admit we’re fallible than lie our way through our waking life.
People often reduce narratives to likability, but who cares whether you like the character or not? The character isn’t begging for your votes for homecoming queen — they just want to be human. And humans are often mendacious, downright unlikeable.
I took comfort that the world was locked…
