“True enough” stories

Hopeful truth

The attachment style psychologist Gottlieb writes that all parents make mistakes — but there are specific things you can do as a parent, called “good enough” parenting. 

When I think about what’s true, the kind of capital T truth journalists are always chasing, I think about Gottlieb a lot. 

What is “true enough”?

I first found hopeful truth in fiction — stories that cut through their own burnout, shame, and escapism to reflect without shame or judgement, how people work and grow together to make the world better.

I’ve never been a particularly hopeful person. As a community organizer then a freelance journalist, I wanted social change, but I didn’t believe it was possible —  I thought grim stories were the truest stories, especially when it came to the future of our planet and the world. 

When I did activist PR, working with other transgender organizers or helping tenants unionize, I saw over and over that the “truest” story didn’t always win out in the 24 hour news cycle, especially if that truth was complicated. Journalism gave me much more room to explore complicated truths, but writing about Chicago’s segregated zoning process, or the obstacles trans people face when finding employment, was depressing, painful, and paralyzing. What was the point of documenting every messed up fragment of racist infrastructure, the way gentrification destroys communities? Why did the truth matter if we couldn’t change it? 

After burning out, I started trying to understand the stories I told myself about the truth, especially about the future. Was the truth always grim? Really? During this time I watched a lot of television and read a lot of books to escape reality through fiction. I liked stories that, even though they were fictional, felt true. Stories about people who failed, who were imperfect, sometimes even terrible, but still tried to change the future. They were hopeful. 

These stories made me realize that I wasn’t hopeless because of “the grim truth.”

I felt hopeless because I was ashamed. I was ashamed of times when I hadn’t done the right thing, hadn’t shown up for people or causes I cared about, or times when my actions put someone else in danger. I was ashamed of the way my privilege, as a white middle class trans man with a college education who had been paid to organize provided me with opportunities I knew so many people I cared about did not have. And even though admitting this truth to myself was hard at first — for the first time in years, I felt hopeful.

I wanted to find other true hopeful stories, so I started interviewing organizers and others trying to change the future. I asked them the question I really wanted to know the answer to: what made them feel hopeful? Their answers became an audio project called Working 2050. We ask people about their day-to-day and use what they say to write hopeful fiction set in the future. I started writing a daily newsletter, holding weekly “feelings in the future” writing workshops for organizers based on these hopeful answers, for anyone stuck in their shame and focused only on grim truths. The work I do now feels truer, more hopeful, than anything I’ve done before. It feels like a reflection, without shame or judgement, of how people work together and grow to make the world better.