letter two: act of faith

halloween & the end of the year but not yet the world

Dearest friend,

My instinct is to wish you a happy Halloween — but is it Halloween where you are? If it isn’t, then oh my goodness, the warmest hello to you and to the month of November. God, can you believe we’re already in the penultimate month of the year? I still have a couple hours left before I have to contend with that fact, and to distract myself even more, I’ve decided to camp out on my porch and emotionally prepare myself for a trick-or-treat evening of complimenting costumes and handing out chocolates — which, admittedly, I maybe, possibly have too much of? (Do you have a favorite grocery store chocolate, by the way? I float along the simple, boring lane and am happy with any plain milk chocolate bar. Like Kit-Kat. Or the unlabeled ones you buy from fundraisers. No fuss, all melt-in-your-mouth sweetness.) Anyway, I bought two of those assorted packs of fifty, right, after I realized that two of the four choices in the first box probably aren’t as popular with kids and would definitely leave some without their candy of choice. I figured I could just drop off the leftover chocolates at my brother’s campus and leave them to the mercy of university students who forget how to discriminate with food when they’re hungry, exhausted, high, or all of the above; in retrospect, though, the more money-savvy choice would have been to return the first box unopened and then buy the second one, but at the time I was so worried that at least one kid who somehow happens to especially love the chocolates in the box I could have potentially returned would come home with one less of candy they like. And none of them got to go trick or treating last year, you know? What if this is the first year that some kids are going, or what if somehow there are a lot of kids in my neighborhood who happen to love peanut butter and were looking forward to getting some Reese’s Pieces this year — and, unknowingly, by returning that first box, I somehow contribute to dampening their trick or treating experience? I can’t handle that possibility. It’s bad enough inconveniencing anyone my age and above, but with kids, what might be a small inconvenience from my perspective can lead to things like tantrums or bad childhood memories or god forbid even lifelong trauma. Kids scare me for a plethora of reasons, but this in particular is terrifying. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory was the first movie I ever saw in the cinema and — have you seen it? It takes something as ostensibly mundane as chocolate to reroute someone’s childhood and yet years of skewed up attempts at mothering your inner child as an adult to get back on a functional track. So yes, I know I sound deranged, and I promise it didn’t sound as hysterical in my head as it might seem with my train of thought detailed out like this, but I still maintain one can’t be too vigilant when around kids. 

As a side note, because it sounds a little like I underestimate children and that is so far from the truth, I do think being a child is the most intelligent we ever have been and will be — which doesn’t necessarily mean that’s when we were smartest, because to me the most valuable kind of smart you can be is wise, and wisdom is only truly accrued through years of being open to receiving it, to watching and interrogating and gathering and being open to more, more, more, again and again, knowing it is nonetheless never complete — and when I say we are so, so intelligent as children, I just mean that this is when we are the most blessed with the ability to see something as new, as foreign, as unfamiliar, and therefore something worth examining and testing the boundaries of and measuring up to what we already know. Even the most reserved, uninterested, withdrawn children have their ways of interacting with the world, have things they’re scared of or curious about for reasons that we often forget as grown-ups because we get into cycles of categorization and curation, from the things we love to our own selves. And maybe we still interrogate, maybe we still examine, but at times it is to ask ourselves if something is even worth feeling, or at times the examination is in comparison with someone else’s life, and while any question is fruitful because it helps us explore how much nuance there is in even the tiniest parts of our days and emotions, it can also at times lead us off-track from the certainty that preoccupies children most of all — that the world is an endlessly strange, fascinating place, with so much for us to observe and participate in without needing to grasp. I think often of those tweets and Tumblr posts you sometimes see circulating about the phases we had as kids: Greek or Norse or Egyptian mythology, dinosaurs, space, or even obsessively playing The Sims and spending forever on Build Mode or having a dedicated YA dystopian book phase, and while it’s not that deep, you can still make the case that it says even the littlest bit about the eyes through which we saw the world back then, whether out of morbid fascination for how impossibly large and long the history of the world has been or really just out of fascination, period, for the world that you’re only really starting to open your mind to. And knowing this is what makes me want to be as careful and deliberate around children as I can be.

But I was talking about chocolates and Halloween and how we’re only a month away from the end of the year. I’m sure you can tell from how digressive I am right now that I’m a bit loopy from having to take breaks from this letter to talk to kids and the parents chaperoning them, but it’s also just strange, period, to be back to autumn routines this year. I began the year so unsure about the state of the pandemic, unable to even contemplate what comes after graduating university, and I am now coming close to its end disoriented about how it feels like life has been abruptly unpaused while I am the narrating voiceover caught on a slow scrolling fast-forward in an attempt to catch up to the scenes onscreen. It still feels surreal to me, living in a big city in Canada, how so much of the world around me has lurched back into motion as if all the grief and urgency and stillness from the past year never happened, and as if it isn’t an immense privilege to be able to do so, as if we aren’t only able to return to concerts and Homecoming parties and restaurants because we are part of the low percentage of the world to receive vaccinations in abundance, to have access to free healthcare, even as parts of the country are denied access to clean water and countless graves are found in the plots of residential schools that were open not too long ago. It’s so emblematic, I think, of Canada as a whole, this need to present a facade of normalcy and constant friendliness and kindness; while I am far from being patriotic to a country I’ve only called home for less than half of my life, I do feel the most comfortable here, the people warmer than anywhere else I’ve visited and the social etiquette more reassuring, yet this is also exactly why the people here tend to be desperate to sweep things that aren’t friendly nor kind under a rug, to slap an apology band-aid over them and leave it shelved under a day of celebration or memorial added to the national calendar. But kindness isn’t a facade you maintain out of sheer stubborn reputation, or a status quo you try not to disrupt because you have been so defined by it. It’s something you work for, something you navigate like anything else in life, something that isn’t a strict etiquette so much as it is a response you adjust to the people that will be impacted by it. 

I worry a lot about not knowing the difference, these days. That living in such a privileged country in the West, relatively untouched by everything that has happened south of the border and east of the world, will make me unkind, incapable of true sympathy and empathy. Over a week ago now, I tweeted continuously about a job interview I had, which lasted for an hour and had me rambling so much that I had a sore throat the day after, and I remember being in the middle of a tirade about how so much of the world is terrible and how kind, loving storytelling is so much harder to do right in this sociopolitical and literal climate — and there was a moment of like, what the hell am I saying? I’ve spent a lot of time this year talking about how kindness is all we owe to each other, is the least we can do for each other, but I also know that there are people I will never choose to be kind to, that plenty of life stories, mine included, have been far from kind, and that as it is, more of the world is bad than it is good. I thought, how could I sit here and believe in kindness when the world around me is so keen to prove me wrong? Am I more foolish than I believed, for even using this word when it in itself is a privilege, is a luxury I can afford because I have the space to choose it? You know that scene in Parasite, where the mother says that if only she was rich, she’ll be nice, too? Or how in Squid Game, Sang-woo snaps that at least he has the guts to see their situation as it is? I made an audible noise of protest at that when I first watched it. I thought, You think that’s hard? You think conforming to what you’re designed to be is the difficult choice when what you’re choosing is in fact the path of least resistance? You think affirming the systemic flaws of the world we live in is what makes your actions valiant and justifiable? But all of us do it. Everyday, we have to live in a world we know is flawed and participate in its flawed-ness, and depending on where you live, many of us have better access to ignoring this paradox. We say we criticize the world but we are ultimately powerless against anything bigger than our own existence. So sometimes, when I say I want to stand by what’s hard and kind, maybe I also just mean that I don’t think I’ll survive standing by what’s hard and terrible. And that in itself is a different kind of privileged cowardice.

About a month ago, someone left me an anonymous question saying something along the lines of, “How does someone write about love when so much of the world feels difficult to love?” And I wrote them back saying, “A small part of it is that there’s really no choice but to keep going. I’m holding on by the skin of my teeth here, and I'd rather hold onto something that will also hold onto me too if it could. [...] When I write people in love, I think I’m really just believing in what I want to be the inherent capacity of human beings to understand each other.” I thought to myself that I’ll spend the rest of my life reworking this answer, and I have been, but for now, I think the key part, the words that really give away my own vulnerability, is how I said, “I want.” Believing in what I want to be the inherent capacity of human beings to understand each other, I said, or — to scramble it around to be closer to the truth — I want to believe that the capacity to understand each other is inherent to human beings. Maybe, even, I need to believe it, because I’d rather be a fool than be someone who actively hurts other people. And yes, it’s hilariously concerning that I’d spend an extra five dollars on a second box of chocolates for kids who don’t even know who I am, and I really should do better stopping my obsessive-compulsive thought trains, but it costs me nothing otherwise. Five dollars is nothing compared to the possibility of making one kid’s night. Or maybe a parent loves the cookies & creme Hershey’s and their kid wants to get one for them! Or maybe someone’s older sibling wanders into the kitchen to get a snack in the middle of overnight cramming and tears into one of the chocolates leftover from what I gave during trick or treating! That tiny, tiny sliver of a possibility is already enough for me. Perhaps because I have the luxury of being able to buy and give out chocolates to begin with, and I won’t deny that, but if it comes down to doing my best within the worlds I belong to, if it comes down to the small things I can do in my small life and the other small lives that happen to briefly overlap with mine, at the very least I can make sure I have nothing to regret there. At the very least I can make sure that if ever I have consciously taken part in a butterfly effect, I have made the choice that I had faith will precipitate the least harm. 

Faith, then, I think is the key thing children possess, and what a lot of us with any sort of awareness have more good sense than to have. How do I believe in a future that isn’t there? How do I love a world that is hurtling towards the end, if not in this lifetime then the next? How do I have faith in anything the way children do when the people meant to protect and help us don’t? And it’s just — I don’t know the answer. I don’t know the answer, and the enormity of that not-knowing isn’t the sort you can find fascinating. It’s not a non-answer you give a kid because it’s too roundabout to explain the Fermi Paradox if they ask you about the likelihood of aliens; it’s the non-answer you settle for because it’s all you get, because in two months, another year will have passed where the world has gone on even if the people on it no longer feel like they have much left to keep going. 

But at the same time, is that enough reason to give up? It’s reason to feel helpless, yes, and I see no way out of that, but do we have to feel hopeless about our own small lives? Because — I think — it’s all I can do, all I can be: small, doing small things, thinking small thoughts, and yet they pile up towards a life that I hope is still worthwhile at the end of it all if only because I never gave up on it, because even if the world is worthless, even if it is not worth all the love I want to throw at it, I refuse to let it turn me cold and unsympathetic to those that do not deserve it. I refuse to let it make me worthless, too. I refuse to see the world for all the harm it causes and the awfulness it spreads and think that I might as well also give into that. I refuse to allow the bad side of the world autonomy over me when agency, however miniscule, is all I will have left at the end of all this. All I have now is my privilege of choice, and for as long as I can help it, to echo what I replied to that one anonymous question, I want to choose something that will choose me back if it can. If the world doesn’t want to choose me or people like me, if it wants to continue going to shit — I don’t know what I can do about that overall. But I know that I won’t choose that version of the world, and so I don’t. 

I think, sometimes, about all the things I have survived, about all the hurt I am lucky to have found myself on the other side of. I think about someone who hurt me when he should have been taking care of me, and I think about all the anger and bitterness I inherited from him. I think about how, as a child into my mid-teens, I had a temper that mirrored his, that was capable of doing what he did. Now, as an adult, far away from him and never again to be touched by everything he left me with, I see my efforts to be kind as me erasing all traces of him on me. People respond to trauma differently, and I will never say my perspective is by any means universal, but what I’ve cemented for myself, regardless of closure or forgiveness, is that I don’t want to spend the rest of my life giving him the satisfaction of having a say over it even when he’s no longer around. And on a broader sense, if for the sake of nothing else, I refuse to let my life be dedicated by those that have never done anything for me. If I live, I will live for those that have loved me, for those that have been kind to me, and if those people do not exist, then I will work my hardest to be that person for myself. It does not always work, but if I die trying — hey, there are worse things. 

It’s funny, because kindness is always drawn as something so far away, so separate, from the emotions that fuel ones like spite. Do you know what I mean? I think the idea of kindness has taken on this very tender, gentle, saintlike image, something almost virginal in its martyrdom. After a neighbor slaps you, turn the other cheek. If a neighbor wrongs you four times, forgive them five times. I know because I grew up with a grandmother who lived this in practice, who has been so stupidly gentle and kind and obedient and selfless for all of my life that I know, when the day comes that I will have to say goodbye to her, that I will do so with the certainty that she deserved more than she ever got in this lifetime. And I will also know that hers is not the kindness I wish from myself or anyone else, because god knows the world does enough subjugation for us to join it in normalizing that. I don’t want anyone to be submissive in their kindness. Not when I think believing in your ability to be good, in the possibility of the future being good, are the two greatest and also toughest acts of faith we are called to make. 

If that sounds vaguely religious, maybe it is. I still don’t know where I stand about that whole thing, and unpacking it will fill up another letter all by itself. But it is a kind of worship, isn’t it, to think of the goodness you’re capable of? What do you think, my friend? Often, when we say we knew something bad will happen, we selectively forget all the other moments where we thought that and it didn’t come true. We mistake confirmation bias for intuition, and similarly, we think the worst of outcomes and of ourselves and of each other because, granted, if I ask you to think of a really good day you had at school or work, it’s likely nothing will come to mind, or at least not in the same way it’s easier to think of a really bad day you had. But statistically speaking, you had to have had at least one good day, or if not that, then one good memory, and I always think that all of us could do better remembering those when they happen. We used to be so much better at that, when we were kids. Or I know I was, running to my grandfather when he picked me up from kindergarten to tell him a story I liked from that day, or if I told him about one kid chasing another across the playground, it would have been because I thought it would make him laugh. We’re always like, “Man, being a kid was so much better.” Or we say, “All my good memories are from when I was a kid.” And either or both may be true, but it may also be true that you have stopped cultivating your capacity to contain good memories because bad ones always feel like they have a bigger consequence on your life, with the way our world is structured. But for all that the idea of self-care has been gentrified and the concept of positivity hyperbolized to the point of toxic, I would argue that the good things still matter, from someone opening the door for you to getting a promotion, and sometimes doing and celebrating them is the best act of revolt you can make in a world that wants you hung up on all the bad stuff. 

Because Mitski was right when she said, “I used to rebel by destroying myself, but realized that’s awfully convenient to the world. For some of us our best revolt is self preservation.” Because I know what Emily Dickinson meant when she said, “If I can stop one heart from breaking, I shall not live in vain.” Because sometimes the reminder I need to give myself is found at the end of Good Bones by Maggie Smith, which reads, “Life is short and the world is at least half terrible, and for every kind stranger, there is one who would break you, though I keep this from my children. I am trying to sell them the world. Any decent realtor, walking you through a real shithole, chirps on about good bones: This place could be beautiful, right? You could make this place beautiful.” And because, if nothing else, for all the conceit and idealism that I know underlines the luxury of being able to choose goodness, I found this post just shortly after I said goodbye to my teenage years:

i want to be so kind it echoes backwards in time and undoes the things that hurt you. i want to be so kind it radiates from me. i want to be so kind that i make someone else find faith in humanity again. there’s not much i can do, i’m small and weak and i only know so many words. but i know i can be kind. and sometimes, i believe, that changes the world.

And so, as I wrap up an evening of giving out chocolates to hyperactive children, I will go back inside with my heart warmed by the realization that at least a handful of them will go home with one more chocolate bar from tonight’s haul. My apologies to their parents, seriously, but there is so much we forget to love once we grow up, and I know that as October comes to a close for me, I will head into the last two months of the year knowing there is something to be learned from the way children don’t bother asking themselves if the world is worth loving and living in. They just do, openly and unabashedly, even with their crass unfiltered mouths and perpetually sticky hands. There’s that Susan Sontag quote that goes, “Be clenched, curious. Pay attention. It’s all about paying attention. Attention is vitality. It connects you with others. It makes you eager. Stay eager.” And man. Kids are so, so eager. I need to step up my game even more, moving forward.

My dear friend — I am so sorry for how long this letter is. It’s only the second time around and already I am talking your ear off. Not really, because this is not an oral conversation, but the metaphor doesn’t work with the other senses — so. If you’re a bit concerned about my state of mind after all the digressions in this letter, that’s understandable. I’m alright, though, and I promise I am aware it is silly that I did all that over chocolates. Would you like some, by the way? I still have so many left. Unless you’re allergic to peanuts, then I guess all I have to offer are the pan-fried bananas I’m about to try making. 

Your huckleberry friend,

Sha