Though I deal in discourse all of my days, I’m still bewildered at the weight a single word carries.

 Of course, there are sound bites and catchphrases broadcasted by the demagogues among us that were built to elicit emotion. But on my mind is a word that lacks the intent, one that has no view to marketing an ideal or changing a mind. It’s a throwaway word, really. One that we forget the second it leaves our lips. 

 Just a word. ” Just.” 

 The experience of choosing a path and choosing to love it, or to change it if you don’t, is essentially defined by a vacillation between satisfaction and discontent. Every artist, author, philosopher and leader has tried to crystallize that inherent uncertainty of living into some coherent thing we can all look at and say, “Yeah, I know how that feels.”

But when we’re talking about our lives, or at least when I’m talking about mine, the easiest way to confound satisfaction, to allow discontent to reign, is a fondness for the word “just.” It slithers its way into what would normally be a proud, or at least factual, account of one’s life and actions and a sense of doubt begins to permeate. The statement is cheapened. To be just is to be defeatist, to presume that one’s audience, be it a friend, parent, constituent or the world at large, will absolutely sneer.

I am just a waitress. I just write a column every other week. I just graduated college. What I meant to tell you was that I hold down a job, do what I love and accomplish the things I set out to accomplish. What you’ve heard is that I have a very low opinion of myself and my life and expect you to share it.

Worse, just is excusatory. It allows one to make excuses for what would ordinarily be a (surmountable) personal or cultural failure. I’m just a kid. I’m just a woman. It’s just one vote.

The danger of just is that it decreases the amplitude of living: our highs are lower while our lows don’t dip quite as far. It discourages the celebration of an accomplishment, however bantam, while also allowing us to ignore the depth of failures. By doing so, we lose confidence in ourselves and especially lose our ability to learn from mistakes.

A social species, we’re wired to develop norms and create paradigms. But just as we’ve created them, we’re required to challenge them.

An older friend writes me a letter about my column and remembers the struggle of her generation to give a woman like me the opportunities I have today. She knew, she says, that “change was slow and we would not see much of it in our lifetime; we were truly fighting for our daughters.” I must thank her for abstaining from being a just. Had she not, she wouldn’t be where she is today in each facet of her life and neither would I.

Armed with this new inspiration, I’m striking out farther into the world: I choose to stay away from being just.

{April 24th, 2011}