I Ain't No Saint

Pretending to be the person the world wants—the one our parents, teachers, and friends expect—might just be the oldest performance known to man.

Be good.

Be like Jesus.

Be polite, selfless, quiet, clean.

Smile for the picture.

Say thank you.

Pray hard enough, work hard enough, and maybe, just maybe, you’ll be enough.

But what if you never needed fixing?

What if the longing to be good lives right beside our yearning for connection, comfort, and the full range of human emotion?

What if we are not meant to choose between the divine and the beast—but to accept that we are both?

We carry the instincts of survival in our bones, do we not?

We laugh at violence in movies, weep at weddings, sin and repent in the same breath.

We indulge.

We betray.

We create beauty and burn it down.

We love with trembling hands and sometimes walk away anyway.

And yet the world says:

Be perfect.

Perform your sainthood.

Tuck away your wildness.

Don’t get angry.

Don’t speak too loud.

Don’t want too much.

Perfection is the mask.

It’s the role.

The play.

But behind the curtain, we are messy and magnificent.

And if we’re being honest, the mask is slipping.

Maybe it always was.

There comes a moment in every life—sometimes quietly, sometimes with thunder—when you realize that no amount of pretending will bring peace.

That peace, if it’s coming at all, lives in your wholeness.

Not your perfection.

So what if we stopped apologizing for being human?

What if we forgave ourselves for the parts that don’t fit in the frame?

What if we stopped reaching for sainthood and started reaching for truth?

Not the sanitized version of ourselves, but the one with cracked edges and fierce joy and deep, human hunger.

Maybe the goal isn’t to be good.

Maybe it’s to be real.

Maybe that’s holy, too.

Later,

DD