Meeting my inner Radiant
I’ve been thinking about the end of the world, and the meaninglessness of human existence, and what to make for lunch tomorrow, and what I’ve found is that there are no answers.
Everything around me seems to be a swirl of activity: journalists tracing the rapid progression of this country towards a fascist dystopia, doctors fighting tooth and nail to contain the coronavirus, teachers struggling against bad internet speeds to reach their students, therapists drowning under an insidious mental health pandemic, farmers marching in protest through the heart of an empire, fresh graduates feeling their way through the corporate darkness. Me, a recruiter for an edtech company, looking at Excel sheets and slipping in existential questions to kids who are probably as confused and lost as I was a year ago.
And the realisation that I don’t want to be a hero. All I want is to read, and watch movies, and play with cats, and smell wet grass, and laugh at silly jokes, and – of course – sleep.
Of course, every time I scroll through Instagram, I feel this faceless mass of humanity staring at me, yelling: “Care! Do something productive! Spread awareness!” And there are times I bow under the pressure, and wonder if someone out there hates me for allowing myself to be placid.
Honestly, though, I don’t want to rush, or be constantly fiery, or make a show of being smarter or more socially aware than I am. What I want is to catch up on my own life – a life I feel I haven’t really enjoyed for a long time.
And this is why the memoirs of Nohadon, ancient king of Alethkar, come back to me, shielding me from the despair that sometimes spills out of my eyes and squeezes my guts, leaving me curled up into a ball for hours upon hours:
“The question,” she replied, “is not whether you will love, hurt, dream, and die. It is what you will love, why you will hurt, when you will dream, and how you will die. This is your choice. You cannot pick the destination, only the path.”
Brandon Sanderson’s Stormlight Archive has been sitting on my digital shelves for years, but it’s only now, with the stillness of the lockdown, that I’ve had the time and energy to finally rediscover my old love for fantasy literature.
There is something so intricately human about Sanderson’s writing. It’s often been called a treatise on mental health, but I feel this could convey the wrong idea. Unlike most shows and books on the subject, which paint it as this irregularity in the human condition, Stormlight treats it as a fact of life. We’re all “broken”. We’re all flawed. We all have our demons, those bits of us we’d rather stuff away than love in the open: and by extension, we’re all Radiants in the making.
Caring, making the world a better place isn’t an end goal, it’s a process. A process that stays with us at every step of our lives, gnawing at us, pushing us to be more than what we are at the moment.
Back in university, I thought being a firebrand, a radical, a ruthless force of principled anger, would be enough to change the thousands of fucked up things in my life. I had little room for myself, for the voice that said I was as much as part of the world as anyone else – and this shut me off from feeling, from hoping, from caring, from simply being.
Much like Kaladin Stormblessed, I tried to channel all my efforts into shielding others from the existential pains I felt, going out of the way to be the sort of hero I wished I'd found in my own life. I attended protests; I raised slogans; I asked difficult questions - and I dealt with crippling bouts of anxiety (and maybe depression!), making it a struggle to even get out of my room on most days.
Like Shallan Davar, I masked my fears, putting on the face I thought would make me strong. Heck, I even gave it a name - 'the mantis.' I pushed my failures away, spent years denying that I could have done better, and isolated myself from the people that cared until - at last - the long awaited mental breakdown happened and my walls crumbled in on themselves.
The visceral pain that punctuates the sufferings of Sanderson's characters gave me a sense of home that I had been seeking for years. People who suffer from mental illness are usually told to cheer up, to run away from their problems and to be strong for others, but Stormlight allowed me to simply be - to show up to my life in the most authentic way possible for me at the time. That meant a lot of crying, scowling and feeling hopeless, but contrary to popular belief, it made me feel better, not worse.
Not going to give you any major spoilers, because I really want you to read Stormlight, but there's a line at the end of the third book that always stands out to me: I have found, through painful experience, that the most important step a person can take is always the next one. Reading this after what felt like a lifetime in the tunnels of despair, I finally felt the fresh air of openness, the possibility of redemption, the chance to forgive myself for my flaws and do better.
I still wish I could do more. I wish I could find a place to call my own, a headspace that lets me do more for the people around me, a path less fraught with fear and anxiety and loneliness. I still search. I still build what I can. But the difference is that I do it as much for myself as for the outside.
Life before death. Strength before weakness. Journey before destination.