Our Heroes Are Broken

What does it take to be a hero? What does it take to keep yourself in the headlines? How do you stay relevant in today's world? 

Easy. 

Go to therapy. 

It wasn't that long ago that our heroes were unbreakable. They were fearless, strong, mighty. They were overcomers. We've been telling the story of the little guy for a long time, the little guy who does one thing great and becomes a hero forever. We've been telling the story of the person with the odds stacked against them who keeps on keepin' on and suddenly becomes everything that we all secretly hope we can be - successful, happy, strong, symbolic, relevant, known. 

And then we started championing the folks who have done all that and overcome some kind of systemic barrier put in front of them. Persons who have been historically misunderstood or underestimated or whatever. We knocked everyone else off the pedestal and put them up there as not just success stories, but as chain breakers, too. 

And that used to be enough. You could be strong and successful and, if you so happened to also be marginalized or wounded in some way, then all the better. 

That's why we kept seeing our celebrities parade across our headlines in various scandals - in broken relationships, in manipulative professional dynamics, in personal failure. Whenever a star failed to have a good movie in awhile or a good record or a good TV show and they wanted to stay relevant, they just made their challenges the headline and threw themselves out there. Hey, at least everyone is talking about them again. There's something about becoming the little guy - the addict, the victim, the disenfranchised - so that you can start to tell your hero story all over again. 

But there's been another shift. Have you seen it? 

Because the truth is that we're all getting tired of brokenness. Of the world's stupid things. Of other persons' stupid things. Of our own stupid things. Everywhere we've looked for a long time, we've seen something broken...because that's what we were asking for. That's what our cultural story was telling us to ask for. 

We've been praising everyone for being broken for so long, we didn't even see it happening, but then we looked around and discovered everyone is broken. And now, as the headlines keep parading across our screens, we find ourselves wondering...is there anyone worth believing in any more?

And it's not really just about them, out there; it's also about us, in here. Everyone is so broken...we feel so broken.... If there's no one we can believe in any more, can we even believe in ourselves? 

Suddenly, we're all getting crushed by the weight of our own lives because the brokenness narrative is just too dominant to break through. 

But what if...

What if there's another story? 

And that's where we find ourselves now. We find ourselves now celebrating the ones who refuse to stay broken. So if you want to make a headline these days, it's simple - 

Go to therapy. 

Tell everyone you're seeking help. Tell them you've been broken in the darkness, in the silence, in the solitude for too long and you're finally seeking help. Tell them you've entered a program. Tell them you're talking to someone.

All of a sudden, you're relevant again. And the reason you're relevant is because you're carrying the hope not just for you, but for the rest of us, too. Everyone's watching to see if it works, to see if there's really a way out of brokenness. To see if there's a way back. 

We're starting, quietly, to look for a cultural story that isn't just about our challenges, but is about our growth. It's about our overcoming. It's about our putting broken things back together - not pretending they're unbreakable, not pretending they've never fallen apart, but in the beautiful way that the Japanese art of repair has taught us, gilding them with gold until something glitters again. 

Our heroes are broken, but our worship of them is changing. Broken isn't enough any more. It's time to do something about it. 

So what are we doing?