Living with the Burden of a Fighter

Thoughts on that nagging feeling and the urge to do more.

I’m convinced, now at the ripe age of 32, that you’re either born a fighter or you spend your life wondering why everyone else is trying so hard. On the latter, we call that blissful ignorance.

I say fighter, because if you’re not living your days exhausted from the sheer effort of it all, then what’re you doing? And if you are finishing your days feeling like you’re on the verge of solving world hunger, or your version of it, then why? Or rather, why choose the struggle? Why not feign ignorance?

Let me clarify with the words of a rapper, The Rapper: “Why am I fighting to live, if I am just living to fight?”

That was 2Pac, for the uncurious and uninformed. But that question he poses, about fighting to live and living to fight, is one that I’ve considered more often than I’ve realized. Granted, that song was nothing about what I’m talking about here. But it fits, and it relates.

When I look around my apartment, I see dozens of books. Books on my kitchen counter with titles like, It Was Vulgar and It Was Beautiful and War Trash. On the TV stand, books on the American Civil War and the Vietnam War (as we call it here in the States). On the dresser in my bedroom, I have everything from a novel about the The Emergency in India during the 1970s in A Fine Balance to a fictional account of Kenya’s emergency in Petals of Blood. And those are just a few. A trilogy of the war in the Pacific during WWII is tucked away in my sliding television cabinet, sitting next to a detailed account of the fight against AIDS during the 1980s.

I mention these books because to one degree or another, they all revolve around the struggle. The struggle for freedom. The struggle for equality. The struggle for equity. A wrong occurred and someone, or a lot of someones, fought to make it right. James Baldwin called it the “moral question.”

What I often think about is why things have to be like this — why are others filled with so much hate? Why do so many people care how I live my life or how others live their lives? Why don’t more people care about the struggles of others, those living without freedom, without equality, without equity? Thinking too long on those questions triggers the exhaustion. They also trigger a frustration that ultimately sits, stirring in the souls of other fighters wanting to do more in the world. Dr. Paul Farmer is someone who immediately comes to mind.

A quiet but relentless nagging goes on inside a corner of my mind every day. Care less, it says. Be more selfish, it encourages. Stop trying, I hear. And it’s exhausting, because the louder voice, the one that’s only become more prominent over time, begs me to do more, to help more, to solve more problems.

When confronting others with this exhaustion, often looking for room to vent or maybe some guidance on how to do better, what I hear more often than not is disappointing advice from those living in blissful ignorance, from those who don’t struggle daily with what feels like the weight of the world on their shoulders. The same people often wondering why you’re trying so hard. The ones saying out loud what that little voice in the back of your mind keeps whispering. “Care less.” “Stop trying.” “Just move on.”

The boring truth is, without that incessant nagging pushing me to solve a problem or fight for someone else’s struggle, I probably wouldn’t know what to do with my time. In the beginning, I occupied myself and satisfied the hunger to fight by working countless and tedious hours in television journalism. Afterward, feeling the need to survive on more than just bread crumbs, I chose a road more traveled, the field of software development. What started out as a gratifying way of expanding my mind, both through developing a new skill and learning how to think differently about problems, became a monotonous career that felt, at its core, completely pointless. For those with short term memory loss, yes, I quickly forgot that I had started down that road in order to live off more than just bread crumbs. Which is why I left that career to work in a field that paid me…absolutely nothing. At least for a short time.

The field that paid me nothing was a volunteer position on one presidential campaign that turned into a full-time role on another. Despite seemingly good intentions, presidential campaigns taught me that politics is more than just caring about doing the right thing, it’s even more than just doing the right thing. It’s about making sure everyone around you knows that you’re doing the right thing, and if you’re not doing the right thing, making sure everyone around you thinks that you’re doing the right thing. The sad and infuriating thing about it all is that you spend most of your time on the campaign convincing others that what you’re trying to do is improve the status quo, make their lives easier, give them more skin in the game. But we all have trust issues, and voters are the first to let you know.

Years past those campaigns and now working for The Man, I’ve wondered, to what does all of that amount? In the same vein, what do all of those changes say about me? My inability to settle, my dissatisfaction with the status quo — am I restless or am I blind to reality? After all, solving world hunger in my tiny corner of the world is hard enough, much less solving actual world hunger.

Where this quest for solving my own version of world hunger now seems to be taking me is a life lived through words. What I put on the page, through essays like this and in novels with more creative license, becomes, to some degree, my worth. What I choose to talk about, what I choose to bring to life through my own work as a writer and teacher, becomes a representation of what I stand for in this world. People, hopefully, read that work and then either receive enjoyment from it and move on, or their reality is changed, even if by some small degree. Both are enormous compliments. But that impact, no matter how small, has a compounding effect. And that compounding effect, much like a 401(k) with its interest, can pay dividends in someone’s life. There’s a reason Albert Einstein called it “the eighth wonder of the world.”

It’s not lost on me that this new path, the one lived through writing and teaching, also leads to a life living on little more than bread crumbs again. That because I’m choosing a less traveled path, or one not as well respected in this country, its pay must also match its prestige. But that’s okay, because no one joins the community of writing and teaching for the pay. And this essay isn’t about the unequal pay scales in our economy.

I’ve quoted James Baldwin in this newsletter before, but he and his work are always worth repeating. In the 1970s, he gave an interview to the New York Times where he talked about his work as a writer and the civil rights movement. In response to one question on the state of the black writer in American literature, he said the following:

You write in order to change the world, knowing perfectly well that you probably can't, but also knowing that literature is indispensable to the world. In some way, your aspirations and concern for a single man in fact do begin to change the world. The world changes according to the way people see it, and if you alter, even by a millimeter, the way a person looks or people look at reality, then you can change it.

I’ve thought a lot about that quote since the first time I read it, sometime in 2023. It left me wondering, after all that I read, especially of the Times, why I hadn’t come across it sooner, why I hadn’t sought it out earlier in my half-dozen career changes.

At the end of the interview, Baldwin is asked about how he views his own writing in relation to that of other contemporary writers. His answer resonated with me and became my north star, in a sense. It was a lightbulb moment for me, because I had spent years trying to figure out why I cared so much to put words down on paper. For the longest time I believed the order of words, the subject and the context of words, and the specific words themselves made some kind of difference in the world. “English major” many of my employers have called me, alluding to the degree I should’ve obtained. I understood the reference, but I never understood the minimization. I had been trying to figure out why I cared so much, why I felt so exhausted at the end of each day from the sheer effort of it all. Except, that is, when I was writing, when I was transposing thoughts into material. That felt freeing. That feels freeing. It feels like progress.

I care about putting words on paper because of the compounding effects, the ability to reach others in far away places who potentially need to read something I’ve written or someone I’ve quoted. The potential alone is enough to fuel the fight, at least for now. And as a fighter, as corny as it sounds (and it does sound corny), you never quit. You can’t quit, because that voice in your head, the louder one urging you to do more, only grows louder the longer you ignore it.

So, to express that louder, nagging voice in my head, I will leave you with another quote, not by 2Pac but by Baldwin. Because, despite my love of music, and despite the poetry of so much music today, it’s literature and words by Baldwin that have had the biggest compounding effect on me, pushing me to keep fighting.

You are speaking to an old rat. I find much of so‐called avant‐garde writing utterly trivial. If there is no moral question, there is no reason to write. I'm an old‐fashioned writer and, despite the odds, I want to change the world. What I hope to convey? Well, joy, love, the passion to feel how our choices affect the world ... that's all.