You Don't Have to Be Fearless to Do Scary Things

A few weeks ago over Christmas holidays I went for a hike to a waterfall with a group of about 20 other people. Some were in runners (like me), but most were in flip-flops.

The hike was fairly treacherous. There wasn't a nice gravel trail. We basically had to climb over rocks the entire time, and since it had rained the day before, the rocks were slippery. There was one part of the hike that was straight climbing up the side of a cliff. Then, once at the top, you had to walk on a ledge that was barely wide enough for your own foot. My heart was definitely pounding for the entire hike, in anticipation that I would slip and kill myself.

I figured I'd rather look stupid and be alive than the opposite, so I did a lot of crouching and bum-scooting on that hike. While I was bum-scooting my way along the path, the high school boys and tough hikers were way ahead, nimbly climbing over all the slippery rocks like monkeys.

There was one couple on the hike that I had heard lots about, mostly about how daring and adventurous they were. From what I'd heard, they loved to take risks and travel, and they had just backpacked around Indonesia for a month before visiting the Philippines for Christmas. Based on the things I'd heard about them, my perception of them was that they were tough, crazy backpackers who weren't afraid of anything.

Well, I was wrong. Once we'd arrived at the waterfall everyone stripped down to their bathing suits and jumped into the cool fresh water of the waterfall. The 20 of us were swimming or wading in the pool at the base of the waterfall. The girl of this backpacker couple was swimming near me, and all of a sudden she shrieked and held her tanned feet above the water. "Was that a leech?" she shrieked. "There better not be leeches in this water! I hate leeches." She shuddered.

I'm not really sure why, but in that moment I realized that, for one, I once again judged someone wrongly, but mostly that you don't have to be fearless to do scary things.

Sometimes I feel like I want to be at some level of bravery, where I'm not afraid of anything and I'm willing to do anything and everything in the world, no matter the risk. However, I still have tons of fears, whether they be big or just little things. It's definitely the act of overcoming those constant fears that is courageous, I think.

I definitely think this applies to writing. First, I'm too timid to try anything risky with my writing, for fear that it won't go over well with the people who read my work. Then I decide that I'll just wait until I get over this timidity and I'm fearless and have the freedom to write from anything to everything. But then I'm stuck in a rut, because I will never be fearless. I will always have doubts and hesitations about my writing. I just have to try to overcome those fears daily. I have to daily break out of my comfort zone, in life, but also in writing. I have definitely seen evidence that if you take risks and be unique, you or your writing is loved the more for it.

Maybe I'm afraid of leeches, but I can still backpack all over Indonesia...

"Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the judgment that something else is more important than fear." -Meg Cabot

The Fear of Writing Diversity

My sister has Down Syndrome. She has a hilarious personality, gets grumpy when she watches too much TV, and says funny things like, "[Bro], I have some advice for your driver's test. Cut your hair." She's a big and special part of my life, and I always sort of had the intent to write either a book about her or a book about a character with Down Syndrome.

But I couldn't, because I was sure I would get it wrong.

I was worried that I wouldn't be able to represent her properly as a character in a book. My thought always went along the lines of "I am not someone with Down Syndrome, therefore I can never accurately portray someone with Down Syndrome in a book, therefore I will not write them."

And I didn't.

But then I realized a few things.

1. People with Down Syndrome are still people.
2. Everyone is different.
3. I am a person.

I know writing a character with Down Syndrome would require some amount of research just because of the way a life is affected by that, but what I realized in realizing these things is that I'm not writing "Person with Down Syndrome", I'm writing "Person".

And I can do that.

I became unstuck from the thought of "what if I can't get my sister exactly right?" because I realized that yeah, my sister has Down Syndrome but she isn't THE representation of everyone with Down Syndrome, just like I'm not THE representation of 18-year-old white Canadians with curly hair. 

My sister is not a representation; she's a person. And if I chose to write a character with Down Syndrome, that character isn't a representation either. They are a person who is different than others with Down Syndrome and that's OK because people are different from each other.

The #yalitchat on Twitter the other day was about diversity in YA. And I think part of the reason why there is so few books with POC (Person of Colour) MCs or anything other than Caucasian MCs is because of this weird fear writers have (including me) that they're going to get it wrong or they're going to misrepresent someone along the way.

We have this mindset of "I'm not that, so I can't write that."

But I think that we need to stop worrying about that because people aren't just lumped into one huge group of White Canadian Females with Curly Hair that all have the same personality and charateristics and likes and dislikes, or one huge group of People With Down Syndrome who are all clones of each other and we've got to get our character-clone exactly right.

Stop being so afraid, and just write people who are different, because every person is different.

Because really, that's exactly what diversity means.



What do you think? 
(Also check out this awesome post by @ravenamo on writing POCs!)
(Also just so you know I did eventually succesfully write a short story that featured a character with Down Syndrome. ;) )