I’m not a main character

…and I don’t want to be

Apr 29, 2025

I spent tonight with my parents, and my partner, celebrating my father’s 74th birthday by watching one of the most historic Canadian elections I have witnessed in my life.

Let’s back up a ways, shall we?

When I was 10 years old I wanted to be prime minister. I speak both official languages fluently. My Dad is Métis and francophone. My mother’s father was the first born Canadian child of Ukrainian immigrants, and her mother was from a long line of British settlers. I’m a jumble of identities. My dad started me on a political diet early. I listened to the news, did political quizzes on both Canadian and American politics at the dinner table. I remember George Bush Senior running against Michael Dukakis…and I was sad when Dukakis didn’t win. I remember when Kim Campbell was handed a dud prime ministership that she couldn’t possibly come back from. That was the first woman who was prime minster in Canada, and she was never elected by the country. She was also the last.

I remember how horrified…devastated I was when I watched bombs being dropped on Iraq during the Gulf War.

It was then that I decided I didn’t want to be a politician. I wanted to help people. Somehow. I thought I might be a social worker. I went around the playground trying to fix things. I wanted to stop the bullying problem. I tried. It was so much bigger than what I was capable of. I ended up however, being dissuaded by my father. So instead I became a poet, and trained as a teacher. Those two years of teaching were some of the most impactful of my life. After that…I decided to parent my own children and love them and teach them to be gentle and kind and fiercely protective of others.

I’ll never understand what drives people to hurt other people on purpose. I remember people bullying me, at most stages of my life. I removed someone inviting me to take revenge. For three months in grade 9 I was a part of a concerted effort to make the person who I’d perceived as having ruined my life…to hurt as much as I did.

But it felt terrible. Hurting that person didn’t make me feel better. It didn’t fix what she had done. So I stopped. I begged my friends to stop. I didn’t want to be a part of the problem. I wanted to be a part of the solution.

I have met a lot of main characters in my life. I have often helped them do the things that made them main characters. But I really didn’t want that for myself. I didn’t want fake, or infant or notoriety at any cost. I just wanted to world to be a better place. For there to be clean air for people to breathe. Clean water to drink. Trees to hug. For there to be peace. No hunger. For people to have shelter. For nature and her creatures to be respected. For the world to endure for future generations.

That stuff isn’t one person’s job. It never has been.

Tonight, as I watched the election with my parents, knowing that each and every person who went out to vote did it because they care deeply about what’s happening in today’s world. That my brother and I could have very differing opinions on who we voted for and still care. That at the end of the call we could still say I love you, and mean it deeply. That it is easy to let ourselves be divided and to put up fences and scream across those spaces at each other. That there is a system above us wanting that desperately to happen. To erase our humanity. To limit our ability to build diverse communities bubbling with ideas for how we could work together. The current system thrives on separating us into echo chambers, buckets of opinions and fear. Where we stop listening. Stop caring about each other.

I hope so very much that this country can go back to being a place where various concerns can be tackled by different peoples. That we can all choose a beautiful something to work on, and find some more people to work on it with us. That we don’t have to be at odds with each other. That some of us can work on hunger, others on the climate, others on education, and healthcare. That our teams could work collectively. They instead of focusing on what divided us…we could focus on what connects us.

*sigh* I see it. How naive all of the above might seem. But tonight I said I love you to my brother, and he said I love you back. And that means something. We do not agree on everything, but we both care very deeply.

Because love is something we haven’t really tried as a whole world, not in earnest.

My friend Armida explained better. I wish you could talk with her, her family.

The conversation I had with them gave me such hope. When I start to feel disheartened I think of myself at ten years old writing protest songs about love and peace deciding I can be a helper.

I think about my friend Celeste who is turning 13 this year…and how they wrote a poem about how fighting hate requires stretching, that love is stronger than hate. It has to be.

All these years later I still believe that. I hope I always do.

Heart,

Wake