Dear Sugar Letter #1

The Truest Story Is Always The Widest One

First published November, 2020

Dear Sugar,

I’m consumed by despair. Over the ugly turn our country has taken. Over the president and those who support him, seemingly without care or compassion for their fellow humans. Over my potential to, as they say “be the change” I want to see in the world. I’m a 29-year-old woman of color and for the first time in my life I don’t know how to feel optimistic about our nation’s future. Instead, I feel rage, sorrow, fear, and most of all, despair.

Maybe it’s because I’m still grieving Hillary Clinton’s loss in 2016 and everything it represents and led to. I worked so hard on her campaign, Sugar! I put my full heart into getting her elected, not to mention many hundreds of hours, and it was all for nothing. And now, after witnessing so much hatred by my fellow citizens over these past four years, I find myself feeling a profound sense of defeat, even though Biden won.

I want to significantly contribute toward creating a better world, but given how divisive our country has become, I don’t know if that’s possible anymore. Is it? I used to think working in the political realm was my calling because I feel so strongly about helping others and impacting my community in a positive way, but perhaps I’m wrong. What do you think, Sugar? Does my despair mean I should turn away from this work? What is the meaning of our work for change anyway, if it’s all for nothing?

Love,

Despairing

Dear Despairing,

I got my first real job thanks to Ronald Reagan or, more specifically, thanks to the Job Training Partnership Act that he signed into law in October of 1982. One of its aims was to assist economically disadvantaged youth by offering them full-time summer employment, and the following June, at the age of fourteen, I was hired to work as a janitor’s assistant at the public school where I was a student in the tiny northern Minnesota town of McGregor.

The hours were seven in the morning to three-thirty in the afternoon, Monday through Friday. The job was to make the school beautiful again over the course of the summer, or as close to beautiful as it could be, so that come September, when students, teachers and staff returned, it would be the cleanest, best version of itself. Every floor, wall, door, shelf, counter, desk, chair, table, stool, and cabinet in the entire K-12 school was to be scrubbed, sanded, polished, and in some cases, also painted and repaired.

There were only five of us on the crew—me, two other economically disadvantaged youth named Jennifer and Susan, and our bosses, Dick and Larry, the gray-haired, chain-smoking men in late middle age who were the real, year-round janitors. Each morning at seven sharp, Jennifer, Susan and I would convene on the worn couches in the usually forbidden teacher’s lounge waiting for our instructions, while Dick and Larry drank coffee in their lair in the boiler room.

By seven-fifteen, we’d be off, Jennifer, Susan and I sent out to one room or another in the vast empty building, wielding what small non-mechanical equipment we’d been issued for our task: putty knives, paint brushes, squares of sandpaper, buckets and rags, aerosol spray cans of toxins that would remove marker ink. It was daunting in the beginning, working room by room as we did. It seemed unimaginable that we’d manage to get the school in order by summer’s end, given that a good part of the work we did was so small and its achievement so temporary. Prying gum from beneath the bottoms of chairs that would next summer again be speckled with gum. Sanding the word FUCK off ancient wooden desks in the very spot where FUCK had been sanded off before and would be again.

There was no way around the fact that no matter how good we made the school, we were only making it ready for everyone to come back and mess it up again.

I thought of the labors of that summer as I contemplated your question about how you go on in the face of despair, Despairing. There’s an essential truth I learned on that job that might be useful to you. It’s that the work you do each day matters. Even if it’s work that seems invisible. Even if it’s work that doesn’t lead to the outcome you hoped for. Even if others attempt to undo your work.

I’m in despair about the state of our country too. I’m sickened and enraged by the collective cruelty and the disregard. I feel every word of your letter in my heart. But I also know that this despair you’re feeling so acutely right now isn’t a sign that you should turn away from your calling, but rather that you must turn toward it. Your profound sense of defeat is evidence to me that you’re in the fight.

A few months ago, I was talking to my friend Dorothy about how miserable I felt about my writing—not just that day, not just that week, but almost always. I told her that every time I wrote it felt to me like I was a fraud, that I believed that no matter how many times I’d managed to do it before, I deeply doubted that I could do it again. Or even if I did somehow do it, the whole thing would be terrible. All those hours gone to waste. All that work for nothing. She assured me I was wrong and told me she wished I didn’t feel that way and after our conversation I went for a walk and I thought about it some more. What is wrong with me that I feel so defeated about something for which I have a clear record of achievement? I wondered. It seemed a sign of my weakness. It seemed a thing I’d need to rid myself of if I were ever to become the writer I want to become.

But then another thought came to me—the truer one: what if feeling this way about my writing doesn’t run counter to my ability to do my work? What if all those wretched feelings are actually part of what makes it possible for me to write? What if it’s a strength rather than a weakness? What if despair is my companion rather than my adversary? What if the negative feelings that surround me as I write contribute to my ability to stay humble and hungry, to give it everything I have, to trust that I can only write well if it feels like writing has almost killed me?

I wonder this about you too, Despairing. How has your sense of despair contributed to your desire to take action to positively impact your community? How have you countered ugliness by bringing beauty and hope to others through your work? In what ways has your rage, sorrow, and fear illuminated the path forward as you make change in the world? How might you embrace the less desirable feelings you have about the meaning of your work so they can serve rather than stop you?

It might help to take the long view. The fight for a more equal and just nation didn’t begin recently and it won’t end soon. All that good work you did on behalf of Hillary Clinton? It was made possible by the countless people who came before you who gave everything you did in the service of a dream that did not come true. All the people who believed a woman could be elected president of the United Stated before anyone took them seriously contributed to Hillary Clinton’s ability to be in the running four years ago. And your work, Despairing—the work that led to what you call “nothing”—was part of what made it possible for Kamala Harris to be our next vice president.

How would your perspective shift if you acknowledged that? Your sense of despair about the meaning of your work on the Clinton campaign sustains itself only if you believe the narrowest version of the story—the one that assumes your contribution to the greater good can only be measured by one result. But it can’t. You know that. Social change doesn’t work that way. It works the way I did that summer in the school. It sands the FUCK off, knowing that the FUCK will be back again.

We stand on the shoulders of those who came before us, even if their mission failed. Those who come after us will stand on our shoulders, even if our mission fails. We need you standing there, Despairing. We need your strong shoulders even when you feel weak. The meaning of your work isn’t measured by who won or lost. It’s measured by the world-altering power of your countless good deeds.

The truest story is always the widest one. It’s the one that folds in the highs alongside the lows, the losses alongside the gains. It looks forward and back. It runs in a jagged line rather than straight. It tells us we must go on, even when going on seems impossible.

You have the tools to make it beautiful again. Go.

Yours,

Sugar