I’ve always wanted to just be a part of something. To feel like what I was doing mattered. So, I constantly push myself to do more, to learn more, and to overall be more. I feel like I should, like I need to be doing all of these things and more to try to solve everything. It doesn’t matter what it is; if something looks broken, I want to do something to fix it.
I study the systems that govern us, read about decisions that shape my own life and the lives of others, and think about the person I want to become and the work I want to do. I want to be someone who makes a difference. Someone who pushes the limits of what they know, who keeps asking questions, who refuses to settle for simply understanding the world when there is so much left to change. Because nothing ever feels like enough, especially with the constant media in my face showing the injustices of the world that I wish I could correct.
But then there are times when my desire to do it all fades. The stacks of texts I cradle with me every day begin to loom over me, casting dark shadows over my wishes. Every turn feels like another battle waiting for me, until I eventually retreat to safety. The safety of solitude, where the ghosts of others’ words can’t reach me, calling to me in the darkness.
The world we inhabit was built by the millions of people who came before us, and we are constantly shaping it for generations who will follow. We inherit their decisions, their mistakes, their victories, and their unfinished battles. Yet lately, it feels as though the world is crumbling beneath the weight of the very problems we thought we had already begun to overcome. Political divisions continue to deepen, elections become battlegrounds in their own right, and wars rage on while the rest of the world struggles to make sense of them. Everywhere I turn, there seems to be another conflict, another injustice, another reminder of how much work remains to be done. Â
History continues to repeat itself; this is one of the many reasons it is taught in classrooms. We are meant to understand what came before us so that we might recognize the warning signs before they appear again. Yet the cycles go on. The same patterns, the same struggles, the same questions that generations before us have asked without ever seeming to find a lasting answer.
And these cycles spin endlessly through my mind, tangling themselves around one another until I can no longer tell where one thought ends and another begins. I try to untangle them, to make sense of it all myself. Because I want to be the solution, or at least part of it. Because I want to be something. Because I want to be the person who never stops pushing for equality and equity and the rights everyone deserves.
But sometimes I don’t want to be any of that.
Sometimes I want to sit alone with my thoughts as my hands move between stitches or pages. Creating things is the only time the endless webs and knots of these societal horrors seem to vacate my mind. It’s refreshing to feel as though a window has opened in my mind, allowing me to see things more clearly.
This is when I lose track of time; I get lost in the strings of fabric I’ve woven or the pages I live through. It’s a chance to just exist. A chance to just be, to not constantly be thinking about what I could be doing better, learning next, or fixing for someone else.
However, there’s still that voice in the back of my mind. The one telling me to drop my needle or put in my bookmark and reminding me again of everything else. The articles I haven’t read. The research I haven’t done. The things I could be doing instead of sitting in my peace. It’s as though enjoying my own life becomes something I have to justify when there is so much in the world that demands my attention.
And I don’t know when caring for the world became so closely tied to feeling guilty for stepping away from it. I don’t want to be so consumed by the world I hope to change that I forget to experience the good things that still exist within it and the life I am trying to make better.
I’m always going to want to do something. I’m always going to want what I do to matter. I just don’t know how to reconcile the part of me that wants to change the world with the part of me that sometimes wants to close the book on it all and simply be.