Prompt: Who Is the Fictional Character You Relate to the Most?
There are louder heroes than Walter Mitty.
There are men who save galaxies, detectives who solve impossible murders, wizards who defeat darkness, and warriors who charge into battle with swords raised toward the sky.
None of them ever felt like me.
Walter Mitty did.
Not because I have daydreamed about skateboarding across Iceland or hanging from helicopters over volcanic mountains. It wasn’t the adventures that found me. It was the silence that came before them.
For decades I became fluent in silence.
You can become remarkably successful while disappearing. I know because I did it.
I learned how to become the dependable one. The husband. The father. The investment banker in tailored suits who spoke the language of markets and risk. Later I became the pastor who preached hope every Sunday, sat beside hospital beds on Monday, buried the dead on Wednesday, and reminded broken people that God had not abandoned them.
Everyone knew that person.
Almost no one knew me.
That’s the cruel thing about hiding. It isn’t a single lie. It’s thousands of tiny edits made every day until the edited version becomes the only version anyone remembers.
You laugh when you’re supposed to laugh.
You answer questions without ever answering them.
You become an expert at changing the subject.
You convince yourself that surviving is the same thing as living.
For a while, it works.
Until it doesn’t.
There is a scene in The Secret Life of Walter Mitty that I have probably watched more times than I can count. Walter stands at the edge of a helicopter perched on a fishing boat somewhere off Greenland. The pilot is drunk. The ocean is angry. Nothing about the situation makes sense.
He hesitates.
Then he jumps.
Every meaningful life eventually comes down to a jump.
Mine didn’t happen over the North Atlantic.
Mine happened the day I admitted that the person I had spent decades protecting was never really me.
People often imagine that coming out as transgender is a single conversation. One confession. One dramatic moment where everything changes.
They couldn’t be more wrong.
It’s more like watching a glacier melt.
Slow.
Painful.
Beautiful.
Irreversible.
For years I carried myself like a man walking through an airport with someone else’s suitcase. It looked fine from the outside. It rolled behind me just like everyone else’s luggage.
But it was never mine.
Every mile became heavier.
Every year demanded more strength than the year before.
I often wonder how much energy I spent pretending.
Enough to build a career.
Enough to raise a family.
Enough to become a respected pastor.
Enough to fool nearly everyone.
Including myself, some days.
Walter Mitty spends much of the film believing that extraordinary people are somewhere else. They’re climbing mountains. Photographing snow leopards. Living stories worthy of books while he develops negatives in a basement and watches life happen through photographs taken by someone else.
I understand that feeling.
For much of my life I believed authenticity belonged to other people.
Other people were brave enough to tell the truth.
Other people deserved to be fully seen.
Other people were allowed to become themselves.
My responsibility, I thought, was simply to keep everyone else comfortable.
It turns out comfort is one of the loneliest places a person can live.
Anthony Bourdain once wrote about travel in a way that had very little to do with geography. His journeys weren’t really about food or countries. They were about allowing unfamiliar places to dismantle familiar lies.
That’s what authenticity became for me.
Not a destination.
A demolition.
One carefully constructed wall after another collapsing under the weight of truth.
Some walls deserved to fall.
Others took pieces of my heart with them.
People imagine loss arrives with fireworks.
It doesn’t.
It arrives quietly.
A phone that rings less often.
Holiday invitations that stop coming.
Family photographs where your place becomes uncertain.
Conversations that become weather reports because no one wants to touch the real storm.
You grieve people who are still alive.
That may be the strangest grief of all.
Walter loses things too.
Certainty.
Routine.
Predictability.
Only then does he discover that life had been waiting just outside the boundaries of his fear.
I think that’s why I return to his story again and again.
It reminds me that courage rarely feels courageous while you’re doing it.
It feels terrifying.
There is another moment that never leaves me.
Sean O’Connell finally finds the snow leopard he has searched years to photograph. Walter expects him to lift the camera.
Instead, Sean simply watches.
“Beautiful things don’t ask for attention.”
I used to think that line meant humility.
Now I think it means something else.
Authenticity doesn’t perform.
It simply exists.
Flowers never apologize for blooming.
The ocean never asks permission to reach the shore.
Thunder doesn’t explain itself before it shakes the windows.
The sunrise never worries whether someone approves of its colors.
Only people do that.
Only we spend years negotiating whether we deserve to exist exactly as we are.
I’ve done enough negotiating for one lifetime.
These days I find myself chasing quieter adventures.
A black-and-white photograph where light lands perfectly across an old face.
A thunderstorm rolling over the Atlantic before dawn.
The smell of old books waiting patiently on a shelf.
The rhythmic tapping of fingers across a keyboard as another chapter appears one sentence at a time.
A congregation discovering that grace is always larger than fear.
A conversation where someone whispers, “Me too.”
Those moments don’t look heroic.
Neither did Walter Mitty’s.
That’s the point.
The greatest adventures almost never make headlines.
They’re fought in therapist offices.
In empty churches after everyone has gone home.
In bedrooms where tears soak pillows no one else will ever see.
In mirrors.
Especially mirrors.
I have spent long minutes looking into one, asking a question that haunted me for decades.
Who are you?
The answer did not arrive all at once.
It came slowly.
A little courage here.
A painful goodbye there.
One truth after another.
One impossible morning becoming survivable.
One ordinary day becoming a life.
Walter Mitty taught me something I wish I had understood much earlier.
Adventure isn’t the opposite of ordinary.
It’s the opposite of hiding.
The bravest thing he ever did wasn’t jumping into the ocean.
It was refusing to remain the man everyone expected him to be.
I understand that now.
Because the longest journey I have ever taken wasn’t across countries or oceans.
It was the twelve inches from my head to my heart.
I finally made it.
And while the road cost me more than I ever imagined, I would walk it again without hesitation.
Every single mile.
Because there is something infinitely more exhausting than becoming yourself.
Spending your entire life pretending you already have.
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