Reflections on the First Sentence of My Novel

Mama and Daddy spent their Sundays in silence, and if that don’t prove God exists, I don’t know what does.

I first wrote that sentence in undergrad, and it remains untouched as the first line of the novel I am starting to shop around. To this day, that line remains one of my favorites. Though it is an awfully straightforward sentence, I believe it relays a lot of truth. It depicts the six days a week dysfunction of this family, while retaining the hope that something will make it better.

I feel like that emotion is one we all have to experience at some point in our lives. We spend the majority of our weeks working tirelessly, tediously, physically, emotionally, all in hopes of a reprieve. Whether that be retirement, a life of comfort, or simply a Sunday, we all know this feeling. It’s one of the most tragic parts of human existence, yet it is necessary to enjoy the lifestyle that we lead as a society today.

This duality, this good and evil construct, is true on both micro and macro levels as well. Any individual person has these good and evil sides, just like communities, countries, and the world. That’s what my book hopes to unearth: just how much evil can a person have inside them before they aren’t mostly good? That boundary is a line we all understand. We get to set it ourselves. We judge people daily who we think are evil (or more evil than we are) in one way shape or form or another. Maybe they aren’t attractive to you or friends with the right people to you, so you judge them.

Being a teacher for six years though, getting to read students’ behavior, has informed my opinion that nobody is predominantly evil until somebody messes them up. Without fail, my students who struggled with behavior problems in class had much bigger issues outside of the classroom. In many cases, my students came to me to discuss these issues, and it became very apparent that every poor behavior had a remarkably clear cause. That cause, unerringly, was other people. Friends, family, significant others, it all went back to somebody else.

This observation led me to an important shift in my own personal perspective. When I realized this dynamic, I stopped judging people. I am human, so I make mistakes, but I am not nearly as bad as I used to be. Yet, more importantly, I realized that we all start in the same place. Everybody is a good person at birth (with rare, scientific, usually neurological disorder exceptions), but we have all been subjected to others. The only difference between us all is the luck we have with our evils. Some of us get child soldiers in Africa. Others get neglectful parents in the U.S. That’s not to equate the two by any means, but to point to how much bearing people have over our own internal beings.

This perspective offers a unique hope, though. If we can all just realize that others’ behaviors (again, excepting neurological abnormalities) are the consequence of others’ actions, that gives us a lot of power. How you as an individual treat other people becomes the solution. It’s the foundation of many religious and spiritual ideologies. Then making the decision yourself, deciding to be less judgmental, you can be a part of the solution. In essence, to conquer a problem, all you have to do is make the decision to refuse to lose to it. That’s what I’m doing with my mental health struggles, it’s what I’m doing with my art and writing, and it’s what the world needs to do to move out of its current era of egotism and exclusionism. Hopefully when my book is published, it will contribute to the dialogue in a positive manner. That’s the intention.