My childhood was beautiful

IS THERE SPACE FOR JOYFUL STORIES?

Nothing you read in this piece will be negative. Everything I’m about to tell you in this story is filled with happiness and joy.

Do you still want to read?

We’re in this weird space now (not just now...we’ve been here for a while) where it feels impossible to write stories that aren’t steeped in trauma or significant adversity.

And yes, trauma is part of life, and so is adversity. But if I just wrote about the bliss I feel on my regular walks through the woods or about how proud I am of my daughter for what she’s about to do, how popular would those posts be?

I was born in Trinidad and spent my first five and a half years of life living in a home that my grandfather built. My aunts, uncles, cousins, brothers, and both grandparents lived in that home. They raised us until my mom made a home for us in Canada.

What I remember about that house on top of the hill is how much love I felt. I was both of my grandparents’ favourite, so I got a little extra. My aunt walked me to school every day, my uncle brought me to watch him play basketball, my grandfather taught me how to tie my shoelaces.

This was my life.

More specifically, that is the story I tell myself about my life. Because we all tell ourselves stories, right? And we believe those stories. It’s part of the reason I love being a writer so much; stories are our common language.

But if I wanted to tell a story of a young boy growing up with no father in a “third world” island where we had to walk to get water, I could do that, too. And that story would be just as true as the story of love.

But the love is the story I choose to embrace. It’s the story I more often choose to recite; to write. It’s the story I tell myself and have told myself every day since I left Trinidad for Toronto.

And even though we moved into community housing in Toronto, where my two brothers and me slept on a single bed, the story I tell myself is that I built a community of friends and had the most fun I ever had in my life.

My point is that we’ve tilted so far over to the trauma side that the scale of storytelling living in that space far outweighs anything resembling joy. In books, movies, TV shows, social media; trauma has taken over.

And let me give examples so you understand the difference between trauma filled content and joyful ones. A trauma filled show would be something like Euphoria where a joyful show would be Fresh Prince. It’s the difference between Silence of the Lambs and House Party.

I think there’s space for both, and I recognize that you can’t control what stories writers or directors or artists choose to tell. What I would tell these creators, though, is to make sure you’re creating what truly inspires you and not just what you think the world wants out of you.

My childhood was beautiful. That’s my story. And I’m sticking to it.