What's the point?

The world is shit. Why write?

Dear Sonal,

The world is so shit right now. Maybe it’s always been shit, but right now it seems like never ending horror everywhere.

How am I supposed to write when everything is falling apart? Am I even supposed to write when everything is falling apart?

What’s the point of any of this?

Sincerely,
Fuck It All

Dear Fuck It All,

The world these days is indeed a particularly pungent dumpster fire.

I don’t know if you are personally connected to the current horror show in Gaza in some way, or are simply a regular human being with feelings and a heart, but yes, things are a lot right now. Yes, it’s a privilege to be able to say “things are a lot” from the outside compared to being inside and trying to survive, but the outside experience is the only one I can speak to.

Normally, when I write this column, my answers come together fairly quickly, but for this one, I kept changing directions.

In my first draft, I started writing something along the lines of yes, everything is awful, but keep writing, because it feeds your soul, but I didn’t finish writing that one. Partly, because I am lazy but partly also because it didn’t feel entirely honest. There’s truth in it, but it was also too cheerleader, too sunshine-and-roses, too simple an answer.

Then a younger friend of mine asked if things are worse now or if it has always been like this, and my answer to them was very depressing. So I tried writing something along the lines of, the world has always been shitty somewhere, even if we didn’t always know about it. But somehow in the midst of all the war and killing and horribleness, we still laugh and smile and melt over impossibly tiny baby shoes and take comfort in hugs and eat delicious baked goods and are moved by art, and maybe that all seems really insignificant in comparison to dead children, but it’s what we’ve got, and we have to hold on to that. But this also felt so inadequate, even if there is some truth in it.

Then I looked at a friend’s social media, actually more than one friend, and it is no longer about writing but is now all Gaza, all the time. Some of these friends have connections of some kind to the region, and they are fighting for lives. And yes, it is fighting through social media and letters to politicians and petitions and perhaps protests and donations to aid organizations, and maybe this, too, seems inadequate and small, but it’s what we’ve got. And I started to write something about it being okay to take breaks from activism, but I stopped, because how can I tell them to pause and do some art? What’s a short story when people are dying?

And then I remembered another friend, who is also connected to the region, who can neither write nor be on social media, because her oldest child was doing a gap year in Israel when the current crisis broke out, and after much debate about staying to volunteer with humanitarian efforts, they collectively decided that the adventure-turned-nightmare was over, and they found a way to get her kid out. And of course, her brain is too full of worry to do anything at all. There is no point is saying anything about writing to her. Writing is not going to happen, she’s just trying to get through the days.

What can I say, Fuck It All? Keep doing what you’re doing? Looking or not looking, writing or not writing, protesting or not protesting? There’s no good answer to this. That the question exists and recurs so often is disheartening.

And then someone posted a message in our school Parent Council WhatsApp group, a kind message asking for empathy for members of our school community who are affected by the current crisis and going through a lot, in a group that is normally full of friendly messages like “Has anyone seen Liam’s water bottle? It’s blue and green.” But somehow this almost immediately turned into an entirely self-righteous argument between a few parents that mostly boiled down to “I don’t like the specific words you used.”

This carried on until someone (me) told them to take it elsewhere. And then it carried on some more. But in time, it quieted, and things returned to offers of used ice skates and looking for volunteers for pizza lunch. But it was a fight among people who probably agreed more in spirit than they disagreed in letter, and a fight that helped no one, not the people in Gaza, not the people over here who are watching the atrocities with their heart in their mouth.

But it worried me about writing this, and in earlier drafts, I tried writing without ever mentioning the specific crisis in Palestine, thinking I could claim that this was a deliberate choice so that I could bring out this column the next time the world went to shit. Because there will be a next time, and a next time, and a next time.

Fuck it all, indeed.

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What it comes down to, I think, is that everyone is feeling helpless right now, and our ability to cope with that feeling is so varied. The people affected are many, and the people who can actually stop this are few, and most of us are here on the sidelines, not quite knowing what to do.

And many of us have been feeling helpless like this in different ways for a while now. Some of us, because of race or religion or gender or numerous other reasons, have felt helpless for much longer than others.

Some of us are dealing with this by trying to do something, because doing something feels less helpless than doing nothing. Sharing the images and news that comes across social media, in some attempt to feel like we are at least bearing witness, at least listening, at least staying informed and informing others. We click on the petitions, donate money to organizations, write to our elected politicians, go to protests. Nothing changes but we hope that it will. Maybe it will make a difference to at least one life. Maybe one person might take cold comfort in the idea that the world has not abandoned them. Maybe we can go to bed feeling like we tried in our own small way. Maybe we can ensure that when the dust settles, the few people who do have enough power to do something about this will be held accountable for their inaction. Maybe.

But ultimately, none of us can make everything stop this second, and it can become a spiral of helpless-feelings, where you keep looking for actions you can take to stop feeling so helpless and hope that these tiny actions add up to something, but unfortunately, the somethings are small, with long spaces of nothing in between.

On the other hand, some of us cannot cope with looking and not being able to do anything substantive, and refuse to look because it’s all too much right now, but this also doesn’t change the helpless feeling because we cannot single-handedly stop everything this second.

And some of us are flip-flopping between looking and not looking, because it’s too much and we can do so little. So we make efforts that feel a little half-assed but we’re not able to go in, uh, full-assed, and the whole thing can make us wonder if we’re some kind of privileged asshole who should do something more. Shouldn’t privilege mean you can fix things?

(Some of us are coping by arguing in a WhatsApp group for the parents of elementary school kids, because evidently it’s 2023 and some people still think that this is a good idea.)

Still, in the midst of all this, writing can feel a little small.

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There’s the pat answer, of course, about maybe writing a story that shines a light on all the horrors in some non-appropriation-y way, as if social media isn’t doing that already with pictures and news and the voices of people currently experiencing these horrors. But even if you could write that, and get it out for publication immediately (ha!), chances are slim that you wrote the next great smash hit protest novel that will change the world.

So here we are, with people dying and living through horrible times, and it seems like only yesterday you were wondering if you have the right to call yourself a writer, wondering if your novel sucks, wondering if you can really justify taking time to do this writing thing when at the end of the day it does nothing meaningful at all

So yeah. Fuck writing, Fuck It All.

Except… as I started writing in the first draft of this, for writers, writing is the thing that connects us back to ourselves. It’s the creative expression that grounds us, that centres us, that feeds our soul. It returns us to ourselves. And we need that to get through the worst of times.

Whether we’re trying to do everything we can to change things or whether we don’t have it in us to look or whether it’s something that feels a little half-assed in between those two, we still need to connect to ourselves. Perhaps after doing that, we can find the resources we need to either get more involved, or perhaps to draw a necessary boundary and to be involved while protecting ourselves from emotional exhaustion, or perhaps simply to be able to keep going however we are going.

Self-care has become very ‘white lady selling stuff’ lately, but it’s still a thing that we need to do, and it does not have to involve a buying stuff off Instagram although I don’t judge.

Perhaps this still sounds too sunshine-and-roses. Writing isn’t going to save the world. But neither is not writing. If you can find a few minutes to engage creatively, if you can find a little energy for creative work, do it. Denying yourself helps no one.

This doesn’t mean you have to work on a project. This is not about accomplishment. Maybe whatever you’re working on is too big for your brain right now. That’s fine, put it away. It will wait for you.

You can write about what’s happening right now or you can escape and write about something else entirely. You can write gibberish and nonsense, or write the same word over and over again. There’s no wrong answer here.

Maybe writing isn’t manageable right now, but some other form of creative expression is. Go for it. You don’t have to be good at it, and perhaps it’s better if you are not since you will have no expectations on yourself. Mold stuff out of clay. Build miniature houses. Doodle. Colour. Throw paint at things. Make it therapeutic and smash the shit of out whatever you made and them turn it into a collage and them smash the hell out of that too.

Don’t think too hard about it and go with your gut.

On the off chance you create something that you actually kind of like, wonderful. It matters. If you don’t like any of it, that is also wonderful, because you still created something. Go ahead and create more. We have the luxury of living somewhere safe and stable, where basic survival is something we can take for granted. We have the luxury of being able to make art.

Maybe creating any kind of art—especially terribly amateur art—doesn’t seems meaningful or worthy enough compared to all the pain in the world, but there is no enough compared to that. There will never be an enough compared to that. But that doesn’t mean that all the pain in the world must end before it’s okay for you to create anything. Creating anything at all is a deep act of your own humanity, and it matters, for its own sake.

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Let me tell you a story about why I write.

I found my way to writing as an adult of about thirty, when my life was falling apart and I was starting over and trying to figure myself out at the same time. I took my first creative writing course at Humber College, and my teacher was a wonderful man named Brad Reed, who also found writing late in life while trying to put his life back together. I remember he talked about what kicked off the changes in his life, which was watching a PBS documentary on Joseph Campbell and the hero’s journey, and thinking to himself “If I am the hero of my own story, this is not going to end well.”

He called us all writers, every single time. He had us introduce each other as writers. I don’t remember exactly what he said, but he made us feel like it mattered that to be in this room, to take this class, to be writers. That it was important, that it was brave, that writing mattered.

Because what is writing other than an act of magic, connecting one human to another, complete strangers across space and time, in a way that could make them feel heard, or seen, or comforted, or joyous, or simply less alone?

In any case, as Brad spoke, I remembered having this strange feeling that I was precisely where I was supposed to be.

I told two friends about it the next day at lunch. “Do you know that feeling?” I said, describing my first class. “That feeling you get when you are doing exactly what you meant to be doing?”

“No,” they said. “I have no idea what you are talking about. But it sure sounds nice.”

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As writers, and artists, we are lucky. We know the thing it is that we are meant to do, the thing that connects us to ourselves and feeds our soul. When the world is hard and full of pain—and when isn’t the world hard and full of pain somewhere?—we always have that.

That we are meant to do this doesn’t mean we are meant to succeed conventionally, or make a living from it, or even be any good at it. These things would be nice, but they are outside of our control.

The world at large is outside of our control. If we have the time and energy we can work together on changing things in tiny slow steps. We don’t have to wait until everything in the whole world is better before it’s okay to make art. We don’t have to work at fixing all of it before it is okay to make art.

When the world weighs down on us, it’s of course okay to take breaks from writing. There is only so much energy, only so much time in a day, and we get to choose how we want to use it. Maybe we can use it to make things better for others. Maybe we only have it in us to get from one day to the next.

But if you are starting to feel worn down, like there is no point to fussing over the right word to describe the smell of grass when the world is so full of pain, like the pain in the world is so unbearable that you cannot look at it even though others are going through so much worse, like you have frantically shared and liked and signed the petitions and written the letters but you still feel there must be more you can do.… take a moment to remember why you write. Why it’s the thing you are meant to do, even if you aren’t up for admitting that to anyone. Think back to those moments where writing made you feel more connected to yourself, when it has made the world make sense for a moment, when it has fed your soul. And try writing. Try creating something. Make that magic.

Maybe this still feels insignificant next to all the pain in the world, but it’s what we’ve got. And we are lucky that we have it.

If nothing else, it is far better than self-righteously arguing on WhatsApp in front of your child’s friends’ parents.

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If you have a story about how you found your way to writing, or something to say about why you write, please share it in the comments. I think we could all use a moment to remember.

PS: One concrete thing you can do to help the people in Gaza is to write or call (or both!) your elected representatives, and urge them to ask for a ceasefire. There are many templates and scripts for this online. If you’ve already done that, do it again. Public pressure can influence the people in charge.