History-in-the Making.

Journaling at the time, I knew that I wasn’t doing it justice, the same way I knew that I was watching history unfold on my screen. In this entry, I sounded like what I was: a scared teenager, reckoning with the beginning of a big grief. 

I’m telling you this, because if you are a young person, you too may be sitting at the edge of emotions you don’t yet have words for. That’s okay. 

Some days, history-in-the-making is not for writing about. Some days, history-in-the-making is for feeling into. 

I’ll explain what I mean: 

On 9/12/2001, I walked into my algebra classroom, still cracked open from the day before. I threw my backpack on the floor and myself in my desk, and then I overheard one of my classmates in the back row say, “We should just nuke them all.” 

There is no reason why I should remember this—except for the silent event that took place next. 

A tide of grief swept in and cleared out everything else I had been worrying about, and my thoughts crystallized. 

I immediately understood a couple things: 

• My country was going to go to war, because the feelings of a sophomore boy weren’t too much different from the feelings of a politician (even if the latter dressed up their words into strategies). 

• There was no army to fight, so this war would be messy. 

• Those who would be hurt the most would be the regular Afghani people, villagers just trying to live their lives, who had nothing to do with hijacked planes, who were just as afraid of armed zealots as I was. 

Then I realized something else: No wonder the environment is in so much trouble. Humans don’t even value other humans, much less other kinds of life.

This may sound extraordinarily depressing. but buried under these thoughts was a deeper belief:

If a problem is created by humans, it can be solved by humans. 

And with all the optimism of an idealistic fifteen-year-old, I believed that even this was a solvable problem.

The fall of my senior year, I wrote a novel for fun. It was a Romeo-and-Juliet-style fantasy romance between two kids from factions that had been warring for millennia. It was driven by the central question: how does an ancient war get started? What would it take to end it?

That spring, I also took an elective course from my AP US History teacher called “War and Peach.” I titled one of my essays, “Choosing Your Battles,” and I reread it yesterday.

Here’s the conclusion of that essay:

“War is…a distraction from the conflict that we only notice during peacetime, the only worthwhile conflict: ourselves. Right and wrong are not external forces; they are internal forces. 

“We fight invisible foes (individualism and unity; selfishness and generosity; evil and good) that churn our insides and boil our own blood without spilling it. We are—in fact—our own battlefields, the only ones we need.”

Since I thought I knew everything at seventeen, my tone in the essay is judgmental, as if the problem only existed outside myself. College would later teach me that I was ignoring my own internal battlefields. (FYI, the teachers on this weren’t my classes or my professors, but the problems I created for myself when I first lived away from home.

But I still believe a version of that conclusion. Slightly revised and expanded to include other forms of conflict, it was become one of the guiding beliefs of the past decade and a half of my life. 

For example, the Ever Afters—the series I started at 23—was born from it.

In those books, the main heroine and main villain are markedly similar, but the heroine has an inner journey she values as much as her exterior battles. The villain, on the other hand, never paid much attention to her interior battlefield, instead just attacking in as many ways as possible as if survival depended on it. 

Writing some novels is obviously not a complete solution to war and/or humans not valuing life. But these books have helped people—young readers have written to tell me so.

So, if you are feeling deeply today, remember you can always do something, even if you aren’t able to solve the events playing out on your screen right now, even if it takes longer than you expect to know what to do.

Long-standing problems require long-range problem-solving as much as immediate action.

Notice what bothers you the most in what you’re seeing, and resolve to be part of the change. 

One person trying to help doesn’t always make a dent in the problems of a globe.

But change can come from a globe of individuals each taking on a piece of the puzzle, each helping in their own way, chipping away at a problem together until something better is left in its place.