I was in a movie theater on Sunday afternoon, watching Inside Out 2 with my kids, when my phone began to vibrate with the news that Joe Biden was stepping down and, soon after, that Kamala Harris would almost certainly be the Democratic nominee. I sat in the cool dark room and tried to take in what was happening simultaneously on the screen in front of me and the brain inside of me: Anxiety, the emotion whose stated aim in the movie is to protect the heroine “from the scary stuff she can’t see,” and to “plan for the future,” since “the next three days could determine the next four years of our lives!” was producing a whirling, spiraling cloud of fear about how much was at stake and all the ways it could go wrong.

The texts and WhatsApps were coming in fast, swirling round me until they formed their own panicked tornado: I’m so excited and so afraid she can’t win. The racism, the sexism, the racism! The polls are iffy. This nation is not evolved enough for this. I am so scared. Can we even do this?

None of us knows if we can do this. And we are about to do it anyway. And the combination of those truths helped me, in those vertiginous few minutes, to not feel panic but excitement. I felt excited about the future for the first time in years.

More than that: I felt excited not in spite of my uncertainty, but because of it. I felt that our national political narrative was finally accurately mirroring our national reality: Everything is scary, we have never been here before, we don’t know if we can do this, and precisely because these stakes are so high, we are at last going to act like it, by taking unprecedented, untested, underpolled, creative measures to change, grow, and fight at a pitch that meets the gravity of the urgent, existentially important task in front of us. No more clinging to the walls of the past for safety, no more adhering to models or traditions or assumptions that the autocratic opposition has shown itself willing to explode over the past two decades in its own efforts to win.

Our aversion to uncertainty is part of how we got to this precipice. Too unwilling to take risks — on people, ideas, and platforms, on the next generation of leadership — Democrats have remained chained to the past.

We have just been through weeks of wrangling over Biden, a man whose administration exists in the first place because of assumptions that he would be safe and familiar, the kind of person we know to be electable, because we have elected so many like him. We only broke from him because our vendors of certainty — the polls, the self-assured pundits — suddenly went wobbly. These are the very people who made Biden president to begin with in 2020, landing on him as the most secure, stable object in a primary field studded with riskier (and more potentially thrilling) candidates like Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and Harris herself —........

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