Broken or better?

I had a dream last night where I was with a lot of the people I grew up with. We had a homework assignment where we had to make these collage books about our lives. (great stress dream, right? homework and people from my old church)

I was flipping through the preacher's daughter's book and found out that our preacher wasn't her biological father. Her father was a jazz musician from New Orleans and that she had been a child protégé singing in jazz clubs until she was like five. And I thought, wow, if I had known you were this interesting we would have been better friends.

Now, of course, she wasn't an illegitimate child of a jazz musician. She looked just like her father. She was the child of a minister and choir director, she grew up to marry a minister and lead the choir in his church just as she always expected to. We were not close for many reasons, but you can kind of see the outlines of why. I would have found her much more interesting though if she had been the person in my dream.

When Katie was in high school they had to do capstone presentations their senior year. She went to a performing arts school and their capstones had to be a presentation about their lives and their art. The other students got to go watch the presentations. Her junior year she told me she was worried about her presentation. I told her that was probably normal and she said that was the problem. She was too normal. The ones she found most interesting the people had really hard lives. They had interesting stories about something terrible. I sympathized and asked her if she'd like her dad and I to be real assholes for the next year so she'd have a better story. She passed on my offer.

But I did tell her that I understood. Broken people who have repaired the break are more interesting. Struggle makes a better story. People who are still in the middle of the broken phase can have interesting stories but they often are not as "fun" to listen to. She did end up giving a really good capstone, no asshole parent intervention needed.

A few weeks ago Katie and I were talking about a TV show she wanted me to watch. I finally have gotten in to it so we were talking about the characters. Her favorite three are on the side of the bad guys. I told her I was appalled and how could she favor the villains like that? Okay, kidding, I told her that made sense to me considering who her mother is. Villains are more interesting in most stories. Good guys are all the same. Villains have different reasons for why they are villains, and sometimes once you know their reasons you can empathize. I mean, Maleficent just wanted an invitation to the party.

Today I had coffee with a friend and she was telling me about the women's group in her church. Every meeting they alternate who tells their story to the group. Recently one of the women suggested she go next. Now, my friend was fine with telling her story but what she wasn't sure about was how they would all take it. She goes to a fairly conservative church, as a liberal. It's the church she grew up in so she's comfortable there. It's the church she's done her yearly missionary trips to Mexico with so she's established there. But she also understands that she's not in a pocket of her people outside of the base of "Jesus said to love everyone" so she's walking a line.

She ended up calling her minister's wife and saying, look, I am fine telling my story but I want you to understand that you are going to get push back as soon as I do. I'm active in a lot of different ministries and there is going to be some pearl clutching and probably at least one or two people telling you that I should be removed. She wanted to make clear that she wasn't ashamed of anything in her life, but she also understood the way other people would react. Like I said, she grew up in that church, she knows the church ladies.

Now, her story, her past, her present, is why we are friends. If she didn't have that back story we probably wouldn't have connected. I love her and she loves me and we both operate from that point of view. And we don't judge each other for our pasts, or our present. She knows I'm an atheistically leaning agnostic and is fine. I know her life rules are love Christ and then love everyone else. And I'm fine with that. She isn't anti trans. She isn't homophobic (is part of the rainbow family). She is just love everyone as Christ tells you to. Which is a religious belief I can get behind. She was telling me today about a tshirt she had just ordered, it's George Washington reading The Constitution saying "I don't think they understand it at all" and Jesus is standing next to him holding a bible saying, "Tell me about it."

You can see why we are friends.

I don't really have a tidy little wrap up here, but I thought it was interesting that my mind is dwelling on these things right now. Who is the villain? Why are they viewed that way?

I think it's also because I'm not sure when we go from being a broken country to an interesting one. Broken is interesting, as soon as you do the work to repair the break. Up until that point it's just broken.

Right now we are just broken and the people the administration wants you to think are the villains are much more relatable and the people they want you to think of as heros are just boring bullies who want you to be just like them and have no tolerance for any other story.

Or it could just be that I want to be friends with a former child protégé jazz singer. I mean, that's an interesting story...