Brave Enough to Not Become Who You Are Not

​I’ve shared this high school memory before.

Back then, like now, wars were raging around the world. And in the early 80s, there were murmurs about reinstating the draft.

I remember friends who were almost giddy at the idea. They had this bring-it-on attitude, ready to go off and fight.

I didn’t get it. That wasn’t my reaction. My reaction was Canada. And how fast I could get there.

That memory stayed with me—not in a way that haunted me daily, but in a way that subtly shaped something inside me. I think that was the first time I came face to face with the possibility that I wasn’t brave. That somewhere inside me I had adopted coward as part of my identity.

I don’t think that way anymore.

Because I’ve come to understand that bravery doesn’t always look like running toward war—even as I recognize that doing so may be one of the bravest things a person can do. Sometimes, bravery looks much smaller. At least on the surface.

Bravery is getting out of bed in the morning—soaking in the first breath of the day when you’d rather not breathe at all. You get up not because you want to, but because if you don’t, something in you will wither. Because you know there are people who need the pieces of you that you still have to offer, even when you don’t feel like you have what it takes to offer them.

Bravery is getting up and being a good and loving dad to your kids when you've lost all belief you can ever be that good dad. You do it not because you feel some sudden reassurance toward that belief, but because you'd rather feel like an incapable dad than a missing dad.

Bravery is getting up and writing and sharing the insides of your heart, not because you need to prove you can share them, but because you so deeply refuse to ever go back to the place where you had no idea how to share those insides at all.

Bravery isn't proving to the world who you are and what you stand for, bravery is being unable to sleep living out any version of you that doesn't look like who you are and what you stand for.

It’s taken me a long time to get here.

It's taken a long time to get from being a high school kid completely unaware of who he was to being a man who knows exactly who he is. There are still many days I'm not brave enough to be that man, but when I am feeling those less than brave moments, I don't lean into a need to prove I am that man, I lean into a fear of dying my way back to the man I used to be.

Be brave today.

Not to prove who you are, but out of a fear of turning into someone you are not.