on worrying, doing good, & worrying about doing good
in a grade twelve english exam we were asked to come up with our own example of metaphor. i confidently wrote one down and moved on. when my test came back, my metaphor had been given a zero, with some version of nice try… written beside it. i approached my teacher about, and he informed me that my metaphor was the more colloquial version of a metaphor in whatever Shakespeare text we had just finished. this startled me more than the zero i was receiving for the question (unusual for me at the time).
there are two facets to this experience of mine that i think have rocketed around my brain since, but one more than the other. the one i have more willingly accepted and set aside is that pretty much everything has been said and done before. we are merely rehashing the same feelings and experiences with different tools and words over and over coming to different conclusions. at least that’s how it feels to me.
but what bothered me about this experience was the fact that in the moment i felt so surely about my answer. that it fit all of the requirements: a metaphor, in english, of my own creation. i wasn’t swayed by my teacher. i had to read through the text and find what he was talking about to see that i was wrong. if i could unconsciously write down the words of shakespeare and think they were my own, what else was i capable of doing without knowing it, or worse, do and think they were good/correct even?
this was around the time my brain seemed to be taking its first proper crack at existential crises and what was simply a question on an exam became a full blown spiral.
a large part of my personality is defined by my relationship with others and taking care of them, or helping them. regardless of your faith in them or not, this tends to play out in my results in things like the enneagram or astrology (a 2 on the enneagram - the helper; a cancer sun & moon - often defined by their emotional relationships and love/need for “mothering” those around them). i tend to feel my best when i am able to make things better for someone or be a part of a community doing good (whatever that means). as a child i was taken with the idea of activism and had a keen interest in greenpeace, john lennon, and betty williams to name a few.
all nice on the surface, but it also makes me wonder why. am i driven by some strange sense of altruism or am i drawn to helping because of the power it holds? why do we do good? is it just because… it feels good? and does that take away from the act itself?
i would like to think that the power of a good deed outweighs the intention for the most part, but how can i know? who am i to think i know?
mostly i subscribe to the school of thought that the small acts of kindness and goodness are the stitches keeping this whole thing (life? existence? me??) together. i hope we can keep doing good instead of drowning in the exact why.
if you’re also an overthinker, i hope you can find a moment within the present to just be doing, to be confidently writing the metaphor and feeling the electricity of the words in your body and not worrying too much about where that came from. someone will probably point it out to you later, anyways.
five songs, fear not
i love to be comforted by the work of fellow worriers, especially those also seemingly consumed by morality. one of my consistent comforts is the work of We Are the City (self-described as explosive prog pop, and once infamously described by a youtube comment as “pop, in a bad way”). Just last month they released their fifth album, and so it seems only fitting to share with you a song from each album, all of which have quelled many a fear, calmed many a spiral. so here’s a very small playlist just for that. if you like what you hear, i can recommend from personal experience listening to their entire discography, EPs and all, from beginning to end on any given road trip or flight, for the perfect blend of melancholy & hope (pretty much how i operate on any given day).
(disclaimer: it has come to my attention in making this playlist that their earliest release is not on spotify, but also! i have a lot of weird feelings about spotify anyways, so here’s their bandcamp. if it had been, you’d be listening to “there are very tiny beasts in the ground”)
a poem not by me, but for you
i wish i had a more apt poem to share, but honestly, i think all of my favourite poems & all the poems i am making are, in some way, related to worrying about being a good person as well as the why. sometimes i think poems in general are just self reflection as self obsession. whether that’s a healthy and helpful form of processing or just more useless shouting into the void, i’ll leave for you to decide. anyways, belief in magic by dean young is a poem that’s stayed with me since i first read it. i offer it to you in the hopes it serves as some sort of existential balm, too.
You know what it feels like to hold
a burning piece of paper, maybe even
trying to read it as the flames get close
to your fingers until all you’re holding
is a curl of ash by its white ear tip
yet the words still hover in the air?
That’s how I feel now.
consider donating to the vancouver writers’ exchange
i spent nearly two of my three years in vancouver volunteering with the writers’ exchange as a literacy mentor. the writers’ exchange uses play and creative writing as a way to work on literacy with inner city kids. no matter how long, cold, and wet the bus ride there and back were, i always felt completely lit up by the time i got home. kids have that magic thing. that raw optimism. that thing that makes the future feel possible and exciting.