Where Certainty Thrives...

a preview of chapter 1 of my book

Hello Blue Roomies,

How are you faring?

I’m waving at you from here in Book Writing Land. I thought I’d share a bit of No More Normal with my supporting subscribers. This is from chapter one, addressing one of the biggest drivers of a culture that values “normal” above all: the desire for certainty. This is by no means final, so don’t hold any typos or inelegant wording against me. I’d love to hear your thoughts though!

The title of this post refers to a phrase I heard in a meeting last night: where certainty thrives, creativity dies. The quest for certainty is driving a lot of our politics right now, and it’s a poor tool for a world as complex as ours. I believe people will suffer as a result of this singleminded quest.

So, this is where the book starts:

Photo by Nk Ni on Unsplash

We need to start with the guy at the airport.

I had just moved through the metal detector and was saying that silent prayer you say as your bag disappears into the X-ray machine, hoping it doesn’t get flagged for additional screening. A man who looked to be on a business trip was waiting nearby and chatting with a colleague. He had the air of what a friend here in the DC area calls “masters of the universe,” people who move through the world with ease because the world is designed for them—because they’re the ones who designed it. The man was talking about his son, currently a college student at an elite university with a household name. The colleague asked, “What year is he again?” A seemingly simple question, made complicated, the first man explained, by his son having entered college with 33 AP credits, college-equivalent classes taken in high school. He’s in his second year, but he’s almost a senior, he said with breezy humblepride. Wow, the colleague breathed.

My bag was deemed safe for air travel, so I grabbed it and wheeled it toward my gate, my travel face on as I shuffled through the busy corridor. But behind the exterior, I thought about my own teenagers, especially the one who had been in and out of school for more than a year at that point, enrolled in one mental health program after another to treat persistent anxiety and depression.

The journey has been shattering, and in many ways we will never be the same as a family. Our kids’ troubles are mostly at bay—I say that not as a chipper assurance for people in similar struggles, but because I know you worry, and I need you to set that aside so you can hear what I’m saying now. What I can tell you is that today, we are okay. Better than okay. But in the words of a friend who went through his own harrowing journey with a gravely sick kid, we are like Jacob in the book of Genesis. We wrestled our way through the dark night of the soul and emerged injured in the process. Like Jacob, we walk with a limp and always will. We received a blessing the hard way: not bestowed so much as inflicted.