Are you afraid to admit you’re small?

Photo by Yulia Matvienko on Unsplash

Everywhere you look you see people bound and constrained by the delusion that they’re big, that each of us in ourselves is a giant. And, to be fair, that’s what so many of us were told. We were told that we’re superheroes by Hollywood, that the world is ours by a pharmaceutical ad, and that we can do anything by a societal impulse which sometimes means well and sometimes just wants us to buy a pair of jeans. In some ways, the message is wonderful. Parents telling children to believe in themselves is beautiful to see. And, at the same time, the strength of our desire for liberation comes in part from the gap between what we were told the world is and the reality of the world we come to know.

Many of us first respond to the injustice of this life by asserting our bigness, our personal ability to resist and make individual choices. And we can make choices, we can fight, we can choose to not comply. Yet we’re inherently limited if our framework centers our individual actions and sees them as the primary mode of responding to the tidal waves of history. The truth is, we just aren’t really that big. Each one of us is smaller than we’ve been led to believe, and that’s okay.