A woman flips the bird to a massive, faceless, government building, with the sky above it. — Waving goodbye to the job I hated. Photo by Craig Hooper.

Hi, I’m Rafia.

I’m going to start with the question that haunted me, because if I go back far enough, this is why I’m here now:

“Is this it?”

A scary question. Do I have to explain why? What it means to ask yourself if this is the entirety of what your life is and will be until the day you die?

•••

Imagine hearing it like a chorus in your head, day in and day out:

is this it.

Is this all I can expect out of life? Believe me this question was attended by a great deal of shame, because I’m aware enough to know there are many people in this world who would look at my life and think, if only. I’m not ungrateful.

But I have to believe I am here—in this place, in this consciousness—for a reason, a purpose, even if it’s only clear to me. And I had lost it entirely.

When the question first began looping, I was in a job I passionately hated, and which not coincidentally hated me back. It was the end of the pandemic, everyone was exhausted: even if you didn’t suffer the worst outcomes, living through it felt like being put through a washing machine, and coming out of it disoriented and dizzy. Vertigo from the effort of managing, enduring, forget the pretence of any sort of sanity.

The world’s insanity became unignorable then; it wasn’t new, but it became undeniable in a different way.

I remember watching Station Eleven during the pandemic. I had been reluctant to at first; there was something masochistic about watching a mini-series about a catastrophic pandemic while we were still in the middle of one. But a message within it—one I later found out actually came from Star Trek, of all things—was uplifting and resonated deeply in a way I’d never felt before. A sort of ‘a-ha’ moment.

I’d graduated from university with a bachelor’s degree in fine art and a minor in art history; apprenticed at a fine art foundry to learn sculpture techniques; gone back to study graphic design and technical writing. Doing all the things circling a career in art, but never the art itself. I had struggled for years to articulate why art was necessary, why it was something I needed to do. (The reasons for this would fill another long post.)

But it was this phrase that hit me in the gut: survival is insufficient. Nowhere other than during a pandemic does such a phrase land. Survival is insufficient. It’s not enough just to get through a day, manage, endure the worst. There has to be more: once your needs are met, once survival isn’t dire, but even if it is, our humanity and our shared existence on this planet means nothing if we have nothing to show for it but consumer goods and trash.

•••

What are the experiences that help us envision a future, something better, even when there’s little sign of it around us? Stories, films, songs, art. What are the experiences that make us feel less alone in the world? Stories, films, songs, art. What are the experiences that take us to otherworldly and transcendent places, to timelines and worlds we feel fully ourselves in, but have otherwise never seen? Stories, films, songs, art. What are the experiences that speak to us in ways beyond language, beyond image, that grasp at something in our very souls, in an instant? Stories, films, songs, art.

•••

Survival is insufficient. We sing to hear song, to express our undeniable humanity, not to make cogs turn. We read books to enter worlds unlike our own, or akin in ways that can shift our sense of what is possible, shift our self centred notions of what and who is important, push us to understand the world from different perspectives, different cultural contexts. We watch films to be transported to other worlds, to float in the space of a being that is not us, but could be.

All of these things are created by artists, writers, painters, actors, musicians…their work is immeasurably valuable. They bring us the prospect of another way of being, they help us dream another world into existence.

And when the world is at its most upsetting, its most ugly form, art gives us the other side of the scale to counterbalance: the beauty, the joy, the delight in living. There is no point in fighting to survive if you’ve got nothing left to live for.

So, my answer to is this it became: no, because you’re here to write. Write your family’s stories, write all the crazy ideas you have, write what you have to say in that opinionated brain of yours, and put it out there, and don’t stop. Just keep going. Keep reading, keep writing, the trick itself is just to keep going.