Tag Archives: Love

Keep Your Loved Ones Close

I was talking to a colleague at work the other day, and we were discussing how I never feel able to get enough exercise in a day (my Apple Watch is always telling me to take a ‘brisk 20-minute walk’ at ten o’clock at night). He suggested I go for a walk on my lunch breaks, and I confessed that I used to to that almost daily, some years ago, and that I used to go on these walks with a good friend who passed away a few years ago.

It reminded me that, despite having moved on in my life, past daily sadness and grief, there are still those things that bring back old memories – for better or for worse. In fairness, if I were to go for walks on my lunch again, I would probably feel both glad and sad; sad that he’s no longer with us, and glad because it reminds me of the good times we used to have. We would talk, share feelings, and laugh and joke each time, and it always felt satisfying to share that time with someone close.

In this instance, I’m glad I was able to have this time with a close friend before they died. I think I have very few regrets about him, because I didn’t lose contact, I didn’t forget, and I didn’t walk away, even unintentionally, from that relationship.

There are others I feel worse about.

A while ago, I tried reaching out to an old friend and mentor from my youth, and received a strange auto-reply implying they would be unlikely to respond. It worried me, and for a time afterwards I fretted, wondering what might have been going on.

More recently, I discovered that this friend had undergone brain surgery, and that during the course of the operation something had gone wrong, leaving them almost completely incapacitated. For over 18 months, they’ve been struggling with recovery, their only communication being via family members posting on Twitter on their behalf.

Just today, I received a response to a message I had left back in September, sharing that they were, astonishingly, on the mend – albeit slowly. I wrote them a lengthy email – perhaps overlong, but I have trouble with conciseness – sharing some of my life, and wishing them well.

I can’t overstate how glad I am for this person to still be alive, considering not only what they meant to me, but also what they’ve been through over the last few years. And in the same way I was glad of my contact with my friend who passed away, I know I would have deeply, deeply regretted not staying in touch with this person had things gone worse than they did.

I’m a very out-of-sight-out-of-mind kind of person, and it’s to my detriment, because it means that the people who I care most about – the people I cherish above all others – tend to be forgotten about as soon as I’m not around them every day. I also don’t generally make friends easily, which leaves me wondering if, as I get older, I might not feel terribly alone.

So the lesson for myself, here, is to not lose that contact. Don’t forget about the people who matter to you. Don’t leave those emails unanswered, and if you don’t hear from someone for a few months, reach back out. I say this because I think regret is one of the most difficult things there is to live with, and although life will always carry on regardless, a life filled with regrets is hardly a life at all.

You’ll never regret keeping in contact. You’ll only regret the chances you missed, and only when it’s too late.

How to Survive in an Increasingly Depressing World

I’ve been (on and off) blogging here for over a decade now, starting when my son, Little Satis, was only seven years old. He’s hardly little now, and going to college this coming fall, and as he’s grown, I’ve seen consciousness and insight develop in him in a way that enlightens me – and depresses me.

Youth has always had its cynicism, it’s bleak worldview and rage against unfairness; think back to your own, whether it be from the 60s, or just this past decade, and you’ll understand, in the popular culture of the day, that youth has always rebelled against the mainstream put forth by our forebears. From hippies to punks, we’ve always said that our parents’ generation was worse than ours, and that we, of course, were going to be different.

How true that change came to be is debatable; every young generation grows up eventually, and whilst some remain dedicated to changing the world, most of us fall victim to the perpetual societal rat race, getting ourselves educated, employed, and, of course, eventually having children of our own, who tell us exactly what we told our parents twenty years before.

So the cycle continues, but what I’ve seen – and learned – from today’s youthful generation is that there is a deeper sense of doom, of futility, than anything I’ve ever known before. When I was young I was depressed; I hated the world and I hated myself, and I wondered at the point of it all. And although I felt at the time that life was pointless, that we were all doomed to suffer and die, it never had quite such a feeling of utter pointlessness to everything – that the world is doomed.

From politics to climate change, today’s new generation believes that it’s already too late; that nothing anyone can do will change the world. The ice caps aren’t melting; they’re already gone. Those in power are dedicated to remaining there, disallowing any new ideas or concepts. I’ve never seen a generation so unable to cope with the world their parents have left them, and it isn’t their fault. We screwed things up. Our inability to change has led to a world where – not in ten generations, not in a hundred years, but now – our children will see the ending of humanity.

And naturally, I wonder what advice I, the perpetuator of this decline, could have to offer my son, and his generation. After all, the hypocrisy is real; I drive a gas-fueled car, I leave the lights on, and I generally go through life without considering the world-ending calamities that he will inevitably have to live through. Perhaps by the time I’m sixty, or seventy, the world will end, but I’ll have had my life by then; he, in his midlife, will have had nothing.

But I believe there is still hope. You see, humans are – have always been – by nature destructive. We’ve destroyed our environment and ourselves since before we were able, as a species, to understand what we were doing. The fate of our planet may quite simply be that one day, there will be no humans left. We may very well kill ourselves off, sooner rather than later. But that is, in and of itself, nothing new to consider; death must always follow life. And to paraphrase Tolkien, it’s what we choose to do with the time we are given that truly matters.

Yes – the nature of the world and the planet we live on is of the utmost importance; without taking into consideration our impact on the world, and on each other, humanity is doomed to failure. But living for the sole sake of survival is, in my mind, an equal failure; it reduces us to animals, put on earth to reproduce and die. Survival doesn’t make us human; just as the longevity of a person’s life doesn’t define who they are, nor does the lifespan of the human race.

No; instead, it is what we do with our time as humans that will, ultimately define us. We are gifted the the ability to choose how we spend our lives, and ultimately, that will be our legacy. We must create more love than hate; we must make more art than war. Perhaps the world is doomed; but we can still choose how to go out.

So I’m just as proud of my son for choosing a music major, over some scientific environmental major; just as proud that he is choosing to make the world a better place through art, as through politics. And who knows? Perhaps humanity isn’t as forsaken as we think, because if enough people create beauty and love, we might find ourselves in a better place for it. Perhaps not the world we wanted, but a world in which we can, nonetheless, thrive.

The “Other” Experience: Representing Diversity

I came across a now-deleted post on Reddit the other day, entitled simply, “The Trans Experience”. By the time I clicked on it, the original post had already been removed, but there was a reply that, I think, beautifully encapsulated the struggle some authors face when trying to include diverse perspectives and representations in their work, and what to do – and what not to do – when doing so. There’s a part of me that wishes the comment had been its own post, because it really made a lot of sense.

The comment was quite long, but in summary, it more or less posits the following: do include trans characters in your books; do not attempt to write the ‘trans experience’. Over the course of several paragraphs, the commenter, a stated trans man, quite eloquently points out that diversity and representation of trans people is sorely needed in literature, but when a cis-gendered person tries to write a novel about being trans, and the experience thereof, they are – even if inadvertently – causing more harm than good to trans authors and the trans community. There are elements of being trans that are difficult, if not impossible, for a cis person to truly comprehend, and therefore put across correctly in a story. Instead, the author points out that you should instead focus on aspects of their personalities that are universal – happiness, sadness, life and death – and have the fact that they are trans as more incidental.

Whilst this is a great perspective specific to the context of the trans community, it can easily be widened to incorporate writing about any community the author is not necessarily a part of. I think many authors are very much aware that there is a distinct lack of representation in literature, with what seems to be the vast majority of stories focusing on straight, white male protagonists, but the answer isn’t to try and overcome this by writing stories about the experience of those other groups. A white author might recognize the deficit of black characters, but trying to write a black character from the perspective of their struggles as a black person could go disastrously awry. No white person can ever truly know what it’s like to be black, and it would be incredibly difficult to come across as authentic and genuine.

When I started writing The Redemption of Erâth, I was heavily influenced by The Lord of the Rings, which, for all its fame and importance, is hardly the most inclusive of novels. I also wanted to write characters my then-young son could identify with, so I chose – perhaps subconsciously, even – to make the main protagonists young white males (well, I don’t specify their skin color necessarily, but that’s what I had in mind). I even killed off the only important female character as a plot device to kick off the rest of the series. But as I continued writing, I realized that this didn’t have to be the limit of the characters, and I started introducing far more diverse characters, including stronger female characters, different ethnicities, and even ages.

Of course, The Redemption of Erâth is high fantasy, and there are arguably only the limits of my imagination when it comes to the characters that appear within it. When it comes to my young adult/contemporary fiction that I write under my real name, I found myself in a different boat altogether: my first novel deals with teenage depression from the perspective of a young woman, which is – as a man – a perspective I have limited experience with. In writing from a female perspective, it was tempting to try and shove in as many ‘female’-centric characteristics as possible: dealing with boys, dating, periods, etc. But I soon realized that this kind of writing came off as ‘man tries to write women, fails successfully’.

Instead, I found myself following the above Redditor’s advice years before I ever saw it, and focusing instead on the emotional and human characteristics that are universal to all people: depression, sadness, death and loss, and all the things that affect all humans equally. When I had several female friends beta-read it, I specifically wanted them to see if it felt authentic from a female perspective, and to my astonishment, they universally said ‘yes’.

I took this concept further with my second novel in this genre, featuring both gay and black characters; again, not because I’m trying to force diversity into my stories, but because that’s who these characters are – how they appeared to me, and what their personalities were crying out to me to be. And again, I found myself wanting to write forced passages on racism, sexism and misconstrued sexual identity, and I had to stop myself. I don’t know anything about those concepts, except perhaps as the subconscious perpetrator of racist and sexist ideologies (I don’t think of myself as racist, but I know I’ve definitely said and done racist things without realizing it), so I tried hard to focus on the aspects of being human that transcend sexuality, race, and gender.

I have yet to see how successful this approach is, as this second novel is yet to be published, but I think it’s allowed me to write a story that deals with tragedy, love and loss from the perspective of people, rather than ‘black’ or ‘white’ or any other kind of separator of humankind. And if it turns out successful (to be determined by my readers, of course), then I would like to think that this could be a valid way of writing representation overall.

I think the lesson here is that we can all do better at representing minorities and traditionally unrepresented communities in our writing, and it doesn’t have to be in a way that singles them out – in fact, it’s probably better to write in these characters in an inclusive manner, to make them a part of the story and therefore a part of the world, just as they are in real life. I don’t know what it’s like to be gay, or black, or trans, but I do know that if I was, I would want the same acceptance that I already enjoy as a straight white male. It isn’t fair that there are entire groups of people who are ostracized and isolated because of some characteristic that they don’t even have control over, and I think the world – both in literature and in real life – needs more acceptance, rather than more divisiveness.

What are some of the best instances of minority representation you’ve seen from non-minority authors? Are there examples that make you grind your teeth at how stereotyped the characters are (Stephen King, I’m looking at you)? Let me know in the comments!