Skytalker

… but I’m gonna write some lines anyway.

There’s a poem by Pablo Neruda that begins, “Tonight I can write the saddest lines. / Write, for example, ‘The night is starry, and the stars are blue and shiver in the distance.'” You can read the whole poem here. I came across it in high school and have liked it since.

Tonight I can’t write the most punchy lines because such well-crafted, impactful writing takes practice, and I haven’t been writing in a while. Write, for example, this prize-winning microfiction piece (250 words), which I read on NYC Midnight a few days ago. The piece made me wish I were still writing regularly. I have, in fact, been meaning to write for a while now, but my problem is that I’m short on time.

No, the problem (which, in a sense, is not really a problem) is that I have lots of time. Let me explain.

There was a period of my life, from about 2008 to 2014, when I was dealing with a medical (psychiatric) condition and was so sick of it (pun intended) that I simply wanted to die. I was actively suicidal in those years. Almost all of my energy was going toward just coping and surviving every single godforsaken day. I did not have the luxury of time; there was no room for me to do any long-term planning for my life, because merely dealing with my day-to-day existence exhausted all of my capacities already.

Things are different now. My psychosis disappeared in 2017, and I’m no longer suicidal. I now have room to consider questions such as: What kind of life do I want? I feel like I have a genuine choice in the answer to this question now, whereas I didn’t have any real choice when I was in survival mode before. Since 2021, I’ve: switched careers to become a mental health professional; gone back to school to pursue a master’s in counselling; completed four triathlons; and gotten into trail running. I am now shaping my life in a way that I previously couldn’t.

That’s why I say I have lots of time. I have my whole life ahead of me to consider now. Simultaneously, in a sense, I’m also short on time, because I’m working + studying + training for triathlons and road/trail running races. It’s a good problem to have, though I’m finding it difficult to balance everything. There are also more things that I’d like to do, such as: write regularly; learn to drive; spend time with my partner; and spend time with other family and friends. I know that the simple solution is just to prioritize and manage my time well. It’s a simple but not easy solution. But this is definitely a good “problem” to have.

There’s a possibility that I might not finish my master’s in counselling. It’s a long story, but the short version is that I’m finding it too costly. I’m only a quarter of the way through the program, so I think it’s still early enough to decide not to finish it. If I do make that decision, I’ll pursue something else that I can combine with my current job in hospital psych wards. My options include becoming a paramedic or some kind of writer/editor/proofreader. I have 11 years of experience in financial writing and copy-editing, as well as some background and experience in creative writing. I wonder how viable an option something like medical writing is.

Tonight I can’t write any award-winning lines, but oh how I’d love to write about the following topics at some point in my life, hopefully within the next few years:

(a) Many churches have ostracized the LGBTQ+ community, even though there are only six verses in the entire Bible that allegedly speak against them. Meanwhile, there are at least 160 verses about greed, yet we don’t see churches turning away the rich people in their pews who do not give to the poor, who do not pay fair wages to their employees, or who live far above their means while other people struggle to eat. I want to flesh out this juxtaposition in a narrative.

If you’re interested in discussions about the LGBTQ+ issue within Christianity, you can check out these videos: (1) either this one or this one, which both tackle the handful of alleged anti-LGBTQ+ verses in the Bible; and (2) this one, which gives a couple of great examples of times when the church changed its stance on a major issue. Many anti-LGBTQ+ Christians essentially argue that because the church has always taught (for 2,000 years, they claim) that homosexuality is a sin, then it must be right, since it has gone unchallenged for that long. Well, they’re forgetting that the church can be wrong for a very long time. In 1633, the Catholic church condemned Galileo for heresy, when he explained that the Earth revolves around the sun. Let me spell it out. For 16 centuries, the church incorrectly taught that the sun revolved around the Earth, based on verses such as this: “[The Lord] hath set the world firmly in place, so that it cannot be moved” (Psalm 96:10 WYC).

In addition, before 1946, the word “homosexual” or the concept of homosexuality (as we know it today) did not appear in any version of the Bible. Recall that the Bible was originally written in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek, and it was completed around the year 100 AD. It was first translated into English in 1382. For more than 500 years after that, homosexuality was simply not a part of any of the dozens of English translations that were produced at the time. It was only in the 1946 Revised Standard Version that the word “homosexuals” was first used, thereby starting a trend of putting into the Bible an idea that was not originally there. This is called eisegesis: interpreting a text by reading into it one’s own ideas instead of what the text is actually saying.

(b) I’d like to write a story about a villain. Specifically, every one of us is the protagonist in our own individual lives, but we’re also probably villains in other people’s stories, even when we don’t mean to be. This can be quite tragic, if you think about it. But it’s also very normal.

(c) I’d like to write a story involving the socioeconomic and sociopolitical systems in our world today. (There’s actually one line of dialogue in my head already, and I want to build the story around it.)

I was looking outside my window the other day, watching cars, trucks, cyclists, scooter users, and pedestrians, who were all crossing a busy intersection that had no traffic lights. The fact that that intersection is not an accident-prone location gives me some hope for humanity. Yes, car accidents happen all the time in other locations, but I’m going to let this one intersection remind me that there’s hope for the human race, even when fascists and oligarchs are ruling our societies to the detriment of many.

Jane Goodall, the anthropologist, recently died. In a brief tribute, her friend Dave Matthews wrote, “Hope is an act of resistance in a world run by greed and cruelty.”

(Between 2008 and 2014, if you asked me for a quote about hope, I would’ve immediately recited this cynical one from The Matrix Reloaded: “Hope. It is the quintessential human delusion, simultaneously the source of your greatest strength and your greatest weakness.”)

Tonight I can’t write despairing lines, because I have hope — not just for my own life, but also for life in this world in general. Suicidal ideation is invariably fuelled by hopelessness, but I have hope now. There were times when I absolutely did not believe that things could get better, and I can’t force any currently suicidal person to believe that (just as nobody could have forced me before), but things did get better for me. I waited/fought/endured for a long time, and it wasn’t an easy journey, but things did get better. Tonight I can’t write the saddest lines, because I’m happy.