You’re right: my writing would be stronger without “maybe” and “I think,” if it took a firm stance and spoke with confidence.

You should write like that. The world rewards confidence.

But I’m sick of a world where confidence trumps nuance. You can project confidence all the way to the White House and do irreparable harm. You can be a wildly rich CEO that traps customers and stomps out competition for profit. People are sold things that are bad for them. Lives are lost.

I don’t mean that being decisive or certain is somehow bad; I mean that any worthwhile conviction should stand up to lived experience without rejecting whatever’s inconvenient. That’s a hard, slow process for me to work through. I’m always having to grapple with a memory or new experience that doesn’t seem to fit.

I’ve known nurses and artists and combat veterans and janitors and police officers and politicians and firefighters and priests and drag performers and pastors and musicians and doctors and salespeople and designers and hunters and vegans and engineers and social workers and managers and CEOs and teachers. Each one a real person, not any more saintly or evil than you and I.

Why not empathy for every single person, regardless of the policies or politics that can do the most good for everyone?

Why not abolish the concept of “them” that makes it so easy to fight and disparage, and pay close attention to find the basic motivations of another person alive somewhere in yourself?

This does not mean tolerating hostility and neglect and bullshit, but identifying it more acutely.

I regularly hear there’s no center and that attempting to occupy one commits the sinful fallacy of bothsidesism, which forcibly frames everything into opposing sides. I want to be on another side of empathy and humor and peace. I do not want a fight, even if that means I’m ill-equipped for the one that inevitably comes. I don’t want to be constantly bracing for a battle, but ready for a conversation. Understanding, not annihilation.

I’m on the fence about Bill Maher’s work and he made a religious teardown film that mostly just irritated me, but he asked a question at the end that still rings in my ears a decade later: “what’s wrong with having doubt?”

That’s my question for myself, and for you.

I want to hear what you know for sure, what you’re proud of, what you feel strongly about. But I have a hard time believing you if I don’t also hear about doubts, mistakes, or things you’ve noticed that don’t fit neatly with your strongest opinions.

Sure, if you only wallow in doubt and don’t work toward answers and clarity and conviction then what are you doing? But if all you have is the utmost confidence, I would argue it’s lacking the humanity that might make it vulnerable and relatable. Honest.

Go ahead and never qualify the strength of your thoughts and convictions.

I’ll be over here telling you how I waffle so you’ll know there’s triumph when I don’t.

And even then, you’ll have my full attention when your experience doesn’t seem to fit with mine and you’re willing to share notes. I will be wrong, learn something, and go on to be wrong about something new.