I’d been trying to live the topic for nearly a decade.

I’d achieved, by my late 20s, about everything a kid is “supposed” to achieve in this society, but I was cracked up. Many of my friends felt cracked up. This was 2016, so the world was cracked up too. So I turned to writing less as a career than as a lifeline, to trace those cracks with words.

I came to believe the world and way of life my generation inherited had reached a dead end. We had no choice but to refuse it, to reimagine our lives on the American landscape, as Sonia Sanchez put it.

Simone Biles’ withdrawal from the Tokyo Olympics became a tipping point. Partly because I saw her stunning act as evidence of an ever-growing great refusal. But also because my dear sister-friend, Sarah Lewis, the brilliant cultural historian, texted me: “The Great Refusal is a book.”

One of the first people who messaged me after the Biles op-ed was a scholar of medieval religion, George Piero Ferzoco. He wondered if I knew anything about Pope Celestine V—I absolutely did not. Turns out “the great refusal” first appeared almost a thousand years ago in Dante’s Inferno. “I looked and saw him who, through cowardice, made the great refusal.” It had always been assumed that Dante was referring to Pope Celestine, the first pope to quit the papacy, who indirectly led to Dante’s exile. 

Needless to say I had not planned to be writing about a 13th century pope. But as I learned of stories like Pope Celestine’s, I realized that I was unearthing tradition. This kept happening, like when a friend and wonderful writer, Cassady Rosenblum, passed along news of the Chinese phenomenon of “Lying Flat,” where “young people…have set off a nascent counterculture movement that involves lying down and doing as little as possible.”

I want the reader to feel as much of a thrill as I did when these refusal figures—some of which are not even people, or real—came into my life. So at any moment we can meet a pope, a New Orleans chef who disappeared, Hushpuppy from the movie Beasts of the Southern Wild, a Japanese mushroom or California palm tree, ghost particles in a quantum physics lab, metaphorical ghosts of Hong Kong documentary cinema. My method falls somewhere between a scavenger hunt and a revelation.

Just take one small step. I think the archive, and stories like Celestine’s, point not to an act of refusal, but a practice of refusal that we can build over time. Little, low-stakes no’s that prepare us for the great one. We see traces of the elder pontiff in the seventeen-year-old Peter who joined the Benedictine monks. We see traces in his early withdrawals further into the wilderness. We especially see traces in his refusals to “stick with people who wanted to be with him,” as Professor Ferzoco explained.

Maybe we don’t have to think about “refusal” at all. At the time of Biles’ withdrawal, I argued that her brave decision was clear evidence of a great refusal. But the reality is that, sometimes, the defiant I won’t is more a defeated I can’t. Sometimes the task is simply to give up. Let go. Not great refusal but great surrender.