I always thought the idea of having a hero was kind of weird.

I heard people say it a lot when I was a kid. “My mom is my hero", “My dad is my hero", “My grandpa is my hero.” And they all had really heart-wrenching stories behind it too. “My mom beat cancer", “My dad survived a car crash", “My grandpa fought in the war.”

To my 8-year-old self, hearing these stories created a very specific narrative about what it means to have a hero: Something tragic that results in something miraculous – that spells heroism in its truest and most honorable form.

There my elementary school brain was, thinking that there were stipulations to having a hero – that something disastrous has to happen first, otherwise “hero” wasn’t the right word. I wanted so desperately to say that I had a hero too but I just could never think of anything that seemed “hero-worthy”.

I grew up in a very normal, very healthy, very typical family. No one in my house walked away unscathed from a major car crash, no one had really conquered any life-threatening disease, and no one had found themselves on death’s doorstep, about to ring the doorbell only to find out that luckily no one was home.

So maybe I just wasn’t allowed to have a hero.

Or maybe I had to wait until a tragedy (and then a miracle) struck to say I had a hero.

It was to my advantage that somewhere along the way, my 8-year-old self became a 17-year-old self – and my 17-year-old self still hadn’t really experienced any tragedy.

But she had found her hero.

Almost ten years (and a lot of heart-wrenching heroine stories later), I realized that I didn’t actually need a tragedy to have a miracle. At 17, my now high school brain (clearly much more mature and sophisticated than my elementary school brain) had discovered not only her role model, her muse, and her inspiration, but also her hero.

That hero is her older brother.

Of course, there are a few brotherly things that do make him my hero. Like having someone to introduce me to Ramen, threaten to kill any boy who broke my heart, and warn me which 6th grade teachers were going to be the absolute worst as I prepared to enter the treacherous journey that was middle school.

But he’s not my hero just because he’s my older brother. In fact, these things seem to carry little heroic significance when I remember that my brother is so much more than just an older brother.

My brother is my hero because he selflessly does what most people in this world are too afraid to do. In the midst of tragedy, when everyone else is silent, he trains himself to speak up. He sees more hatred and danger in a day than most people would care to see in their lifetime. He bends over backwards for even a little bit of substance in a world that is already so broken, and he learns lessons that no 23-year-old man ever deserves.

He fights for peace in places he’s never been and unity between people he’s never met. He sings an anthem alongside all the other brave people who are just like him – people who are in a constant battle with those unapproachable in-betweens of pain and anger, heartbreak and suffering, crime and injustice.

Every day, he tips his hat off to just a little bit of sanity, no matter how temporary, and to all the people who still believe there’s a reason that we’re all here. He sees the world in all its shattered pieces and still believes in putting all those pieces back together in the hopes that one day, his service will unite his community, his country and all the people inside who are hurting too.

He wears proudly a badge that somehow went from a being a symbol of honor to a symbol that unabashedly marks him as integrity’s mortal enemy – in permanent ink.

And yet, he still does all of these things.

He protects the unprotected, fights for justice in an unjust world, and carries on his shoulders those who are too weak to stand up on their own. My brother fights every day for what you and I may criticize but are too afraid to do ourselves. And he does it all for everyone else.

My brother is not an enemy. He is not an adversary, he is not a rival and he is not a contender. My brother is a human being. He is a leader, an opportunist and a dignitary.

My brother is a police officer.

Every now and then, I find myself at odds with my own attitude towards the path that my brother has chosen. I spend 50% of my time bragging about him with this giddy smile on my face knowing that my own brother does every day what I could never even dream of doing. It's during this 50% of the time that I often have to force myself to stop talking about him, because I've probably already said enough, but I'm just so happy that I can't stop the words from coming out.

The other 50% I spend quite honestly fearing for his life.

The perceptions about police officers that have been fed to us the past few years mean that people hate guys like my brother – people that don’t even know him, people that do know him and people that used to know him. And yet, even when he takes his uniform off, he doesn’t take the badge off, no matter what other people say about him.

Instead, he keeps that badge on knowing that the career he has selflessly chosen is not meant to be the enemy. It’s meant to be the path toward the unity of broken communities that are only the byproduct of a grieving and aching nation. In the midst of a country that picks apart the every move of people like my brother, a country that constantly looks for things he is doing wrong, and a country that criticizes him when he takes one step in the wrong direction, my brother is still proud of what he does.

And so am I.

I’ve never really told my brother that he was my hero. (Okay, maybe once. Via a Facebook post.) But it wasn’t out of fear or embarrassment that it took me so long to admit what my brother meant to me. I just wanted to say it and I wanted to say it right.

So, to an older brother who makes me want nothing more out of this life than to be kind in all things, find charm in the bad things, and be grateful for the “hey, that makes me laugh” things: Thank you. Not only for being my hero, but for being a hero to the lost and the broken, the undeserving and the angry, the ones who still believe in purpose and justice, and the ones whose lives you’ve touched that may not even know your name.