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Sacred Lies, Useful Truths, and the Stories We Keep Living
A reckoning with the unspoken rules, hand-me-down fears, and guiding lights we never named.
My earliest memory is standing on a beach with my grandmother.
I must have been three or four, and I remember the feeling of her hand wrapped around mine as we looked out at the waves rolling in along the shores of North Carolina. For a bit we broke away from the rest of the family to walk along the coastline and I asked her, “Where are we going?” and without missing a beat, she smiled at me past her giant sunglasses and floppy straw hat and said:
“You’ll know when we get there.”
As a young boy, that answer felt mysterious — almost evasive. But over the years, it’s grown into something that feels deeply true. It’s one of those statements that doesn’t make a lot of sense until you’ve lived enough life to understand how things come together. The way stories unfold. The way we wake up sometimes and wonder, “How in the world did I get here?”
We all have those moments.
Maybe it’s a strange job you never imagined yourself in. Maybe it’s a complicated friendship, or a romantic chapter that took a strange turn. Maybe it’s standing in a room that feels…