Living in America, at this unequal, messy moment, can break your heart—but it doesn’t have to break your spirit. Living in America is so interesting, so fertile, so up-for-grabs. It’s also disintegrating and reconstituting and recalibrating. It’s up to us to make lives that we can be proud of — and to make communities and systems and policies to cradle those lives. It’s up to us to reject tired narratives about success, instead authoring new ones that are less about exceptional heroes and more about creative communities. It’s up to us to reclaim the best of what previous generations did that made this country so unique and so beautiful — as well as to own up to the destructive legacies that we’re a part of, to expose them to the light, and to figure out how to fix them. It’s up to us to be humble, to be brave, to be accountable to our own dreams, no one else. It’s up to us to be iconoclastic, to be together, to stay awake.