The problem with romanticizing our humanity
the illusion of life on the other side
The algorithm knows us by now.
By now, we’ve got a feed full of videos and posts, telling us exactly what we want to hear, and for a while, we will believe it.
We will soak up every tarot card reading, and will hedge our bets on having the best first half of 2026 possible because we are Virgos, and when we keep scrolling we will be told that being a writer can’t be that difficult because we can follow three simple steps to make it all easier.
We will see someone else cooking a healthy meal and we’ll imagine ourselves doing it, too, every single meal of every single day; we will watch a reel of an author on book tour and deep down ask if it’s possible for us; we will see a happy couple and imagine that happiness is a constant.
We will imagine love in ways it may not exist, at least not in that exact way, for us.
We will dream about belonging to other cultures and peoples, and we will avoid the rage and grief sprawled across headlines because we don’t know how to handle it—but we can imagine ourselves as activists nonetheless.
I’m a romantic. I love a good story, one laced with nuance and surprises, one that takes us in a direction we weren’t expecting. I struggle with the villains until I know more of their story, and then I cheer them on. I am starting to learn how to question the “good guys” because of course not everything is as it seems. Storytelling teaches us so much about how to understand the world.
But the thing is, we romanticize it so thoroughly sometimes we cannot see things as they are. We lose the liminal, the nuance, the complexity. We want it to be better than it is, as good as it seems.
We want love stories that don’t die and relationships without conflict. We want only joy, only easy, only wise.
We want the algorithm to whisk us away.
I was thinking the other day about what it means to be Indigenous. I’m so proud to be an Anishinaabekwe, to be constantly learning what it means to walk this earth in a good way. I am a perpetual student, and I love that.
I was also thinking about the way our culture is romanticized, how we get portrayed as the wise and wild sages, all of us medicine men and women, all of us full of expert knowledge on what it means to be fully connected to Mother Earth. But still, we are learning our part, because we, too, have been and are colonized. We are always working our way home, and our stories of trauma are part of that.
You don’t get to the healing without the pain.
I am a mystic, a spiritual writer, thinker, being. I think about visualization and fantasy; how they give us deep glimpses into our inner worlds and into the worlds possible around us. If we cannot dream, we cannot step into the future.
But sometimes, we romanticize that future. We visualize what cannot be. We get lost in the dream world and get a bit stuck on the way back to reality; those fantasies, those algorithms, are pros at getting us lost, aren’t they?
I was thinking about activism the other day, about protest, about what it means to put our bodies in the streets. Political activists and organizers aren’t doing the romanticized part of the job; they are the ones in the background, the ones not seen in videos and reels, the ones making sure people are safe and the movements happen as they are supposed to.
They stay up late charting paths and praying. They ask if it’s all worth it and try again in the morning. The people who sit through difficult conversations and lose sleep between the protests aren’t the ones we try to model ourselves after, because we don’t see that as at the beautiful part.
Writers and poets are prophets. We write through our tears, rage, grief; rarely do we only see the upside of things, the joy, the healed parts, as much as we wish we could.
We write from our own valleys; alchemists who are hurting and show up when it hurts most.
It’s real to be hurting and going anyway. It’s real to be human.
We can only romanticize our way through humanity for so long, only in so deep, and then we hit a reality check.
It’s the lure of starting over, isn’t it? If something’s not working, maybe that grass is greener over there.
If we aren’t feeling our responsibilities right now, maybe we can lose them all without looking back.
Here, dear reader, is where I struggle.
I want us to let go when we need to let go, to start over and journey elsewhere when it’s time.
But don’t give up on this thing right here, on yourself right now, because you envision something or someone who will simply take it all away.
This is where we desperately need our liminality to show up.
My ancestors were liminal people.
They found their way to the Great Lakes where food grows on mbish, water. They made home there. Many of them were removed from the Lakes in the 1800s in the Trail of Death and forced to walk to Kansas.
Liminality became them.
They couldn’t romanticize what lay ahead of them. They simply journeyed, trusting something on the other side, trusting that future generations would know them, wouldn’t forget them, wouldn’t deny them.
And here we are, still liminal, still existing between those ancestors and future generations.
The real depth of being human. The unfiltered version, no algorithm, no audience.
I want that.
So what do we do, then?
Instead of going wide, go deep.
Meaning, instead of looking around out there take stock of what’s happening in here.
Spiral downward. Make a home within yourself and ask for the truth of who, where, and how you’re supposed to be in the world. That’s where the answers wait, and they wait patiently.
Remember, we are in winter. We can, like the bears, go into the caves of our being and ask what’s waiting there.
We can, and should, be romantics; we search the world to find ourselves, and we don’t stop until we do.
This, too, is love.
Michigan friends!
I’m going to be touring Grand Rapids next week!
Please come see me, either at Calvin College for their January speaker series, or at Books & Mortar, where I’ll be doing a reading on Everything Is a Story followed by a book signing.
Hope to see you there.
And a recent chat I had with the Center for Action & Contemplation for anyone who’d like to check it out:
Just found my way here after listening to Katherine May's The Clearing podcast. Your words are a balm in an increasingly irritable world. Thank you.
This deeply resonated with me today. Thank you! I wonder (and worry) about my/our discomfort in being uncomfortable, and what that is doing to us. Your invitation to go deep is what I need to hear today and I. These days!