Still Taking Notes for My Best-Selling Memoir

I have always been a know-it-all. I could have published a book of my whole theory on life at age 10, and it would have been a very long book with not a lot of pictures.

I knew where to draw the line between good and evil; I knew roughly how old the universe was; I knew how the dinosaurs died; I knew what the perfect economic system was; I knew why there was poverty and hunger in the world; I knew why there were mosquitoes… In short, I understood the mysteries of God entirely.

Then something rather ordinary happened to me at the end of my junior year of high school. My friend, who not unlike myself was a socially awkward and nerdy fellow, asked the hottest girl at school how her weekend had been. I was highly disappointed, and a little indignant, as I watched them politely chat.

Due to my vast understanding of the inner workings of the universe, it took me a whopping three seconds to arrive at my conclusion: My friend was completely selling out by talking to this girl.

I understood girls like her. They were selfish, dim-witted and shallow. My friend was obviously giving in. He was tired of being a real person. For me, striving to be a real human being––to attain personhood––was a call to an honest, genuine lifestyle in which I had to sacrifice hanging out with people who walked around wearing masks all day trying to get people to like them for who they wished they were.

But this was really no sacrifice at all. The only challenge was resisting my desire to be accepted by the crowd. My friend had given up. He had exchanged personhood for acceptance.

It took me another four seconds to become completely floored. Thank God I was shorter then.

Somehow my eyes were opened to what was actually in front of me, and what I saw was two people talking. Two people. Talking. Being human with one another.

In that moment, standing in Mr. Thomas’ classroom during lunch  period on a rainy day, I realized that I was wrong. Not that I had been wrong, but that I was wrong. I realized that I had closed my book about life too early.

Last summer I read “Blue Like Jazz,” by Donald Miller. If you have already read it, it is one of the greatest books you have ever read--I assure you. In it I think Donald Miller spells out exactly what I have been learning for the past four years:

“The most difficult lie I have ever contended with is this: Life is a story about me… No rut in the mind is so deep as the one that says I am the world, the world belongs to me, all people are characters in my play. There is no addiction so powerful as self-addiction.”

I do not hold the keys to all knowledge and truth. People are people in process. They are not who they were or who they will be, ever. I might disagree with what people say about how the world works, about what is and is not important, but I can’t say for sure who people are or what drives them just from reading one thing they write or hearing one thing they say.

People are people, not the masks they wear.