Imagining A World Where No One Makes Mistakes

Cancel culture makes me wonder about my future self. Would I forgive the person I was?

I’ve been thinking a lot about cancel culture. Not because of Ricky Gervais’ Golden Globes speech. Or JK Rowling’s comments on transwomen. Or for that matter Josh Denny or Milo Yiannopoulos or Dave Chappelle or all the others. I think about it because I think about myself. I think about my words, my actions, my past. Mostly, I think about it because I worry. I have this fear that I might dislike the person I am right now years into the future.

So, sometimes I wonder what the world might be like if no one made mistakes.

Who would I be in such a world?

Early this year, my husband helped me go through my memory trunk. I inherited it from my dad in the early 90s when I went away to boarding school. He’d taken the same trunk to school when his father sent him away. It became our special bond, his and mine. I kept the trunk with me wherever I went. By the time I graduated in 2003, the galvanized iron began to roughen at the edges, making the latch harder to pull and open. It didn’t matter to me. It always remained closed, its secrets bolted away behind a fat Godrej lock. When I moved to the US in 2015, I left the trunk at my uncle’s home in Chennai, where it sat forgotten under a pile of cardboard boxes and old quilts. I lost the keys. The lock stayed. One summer, when I visited India after my wedding, I broke open the lock, pried open its rusting lid, and threw all the contents into a big red suitcase to carry back to America.

By the time I sat down to sort through the stuff at our new apartment in Reston, I had only a vague memory of what I’d locked away. There were letters, broken door handles, curios, magazines.

Who was this person?

I was suddenly staring at the many lives I’d lived — and grieved and lost and made and unmade — laid bare on my carpeted floor.

My discomfort with cancel culture comes from my discomfort with the idea of collective virtue. The idea that something falls short of our idea of morality, it becomes innately tainted. That if someone is flawed, or has ideas that are disturbing, we must push them away. Punish them with erasure. That if the person is well-known and influential, a boycott would teach them. If there’s anything that my childhood has taught me, shame isn’t a teacher. Shame sows the seeds for self-doubt, for indignation. Reflection, on the other hand, guides us. For the most part, I think it’s because of choices I’ve had to make — loving the unlovable, hating the unhateable, reacting, withdrawing, standing up, falling down — that has made me the person I am. It has given me a lens to look back at my own life, magnify those moments that shook something in me, woke something up.

It has given me the tools to untangle complexity.

The truth is, if I’d met the person I was I might have disliked her. I might have said her words were harsh, her emotions too strong, her principles too rigid. I might have also hugged her, asked her what hurt her, told her that she would find love, that she had a future to look forward to. I’d have known that she was fiercely loyal, she stood her ground, and never wavered. I’d have loved the mess she was.

I think about this person because long before cancel culture existed, public shaming did. And it was especially reserved for women. Especially young women. My childhood was a time of stomping down and shaping female morality. The year I turned twelve, the Monica Lewinsky scandal broke. It was the year that I learned what a blow job was, and what it meant if a girl did that.

There is a photograph of me wearing a black college t-shirt and my hair tied back in a bun. I squinted when I saw this among the hundreds of photo prints I’d saved over the years. This was taken in 2006. Behind me is an aphorism I’d lazily painted with poster colours on yellow chart and stuck on the wall of my room: Ignorance is bliss.

It made me cringe.

But I remember the year perfectly.

It’s the year that my mother was finally on the road to recovery. Our family struggled to adjust to new realities — one where my mom worked — and embrace new beginnings. City life was thrust upon us with her cancer diagnosis. She took up work at a call centre doing long shifts. It was the year I graduated college, and applied to jobs in advertising firms and random local companies. It was the year I attended my first job interview, and turned down an salary of $28.31 per month to design logos and website content. Disillusioned. It is the year that I drifted from one dingy office to another, unsure if I wanted to pursue a career in art and design after three years of training in those subjects. It was the year I became depleted. I was in love. I didn’t know if he loved me. But I gave so much of it that I had nothing left in me to give. It was the year that my hair began to fall, I lost touch with friends, I had no money, and I had no hope. In one desperate attempt, I signed up to intern at a community newspaper, only to be shouted at every day by an editor who was maniacal. Two weeks later, I walked out of the office and went home. I never returned.

I was twenty one.

It was the year I wanted to run away from myself.

It was the year I chose ignorance.

Hidden in the depths of my memory trunk were figments of this person I had forgotten. This was a person who knew about shame. And erasure. This was a girl who learned that people disappear from her life just as quickly as they invited themselves in. I sifted through a small pile of letters from old friends — or people I’d called friends once — and went over their words.

There were apologies that I never returned. There were people I hurt. There were phone calls I never made. There were promises I couldn’t keep. In each of these letters, there were memories.

Of me.

The memorabilia spoke more words than I could imagine. Dan helped me sort them out. We stacked the postcards, gathered the inland letters, birthday cards, photos, and memos neatly into a box we’d bought from the Container Store. I had journals that I’d written from 1997 all the way up to 2018 — yes, over 20 years of journals — that I arranged inside the box. I shuddered as I flipped through the pages. Within these pages were the ghosts of my past self; a girl that had been hurt — and hurt in return — unintentionally and intentionally. A girl that wrote about pain and discontent and anger. A girl whose self image was so fragile that her personality had worn thin.

I wondered what I’d say to this girl now. Would I tell her that she would be okay? Would I forgive her for the mistakes she’s made?

Or would I simply cancel her?

A world where no one makes mistakes frightens me. It would be similar to the world I grew up in. It would be a world where saying or doing the wrong thing can result in expulsion — from a home, a family, a community, a school, a friendship.

In my mind, it is the world of my childhood.

If I could go back I’d forgive the girl I was, I’d believe in her ability to grow, to learn, to mould a personality that is capable of forgiving, healing, and loving. I’d tell her that she‘d be okay.

I am okay.

If I made a mistake today, I hope my future self is able to see that what I did was wrong and learn from it. When I watch celebrities falter and fumble with apologies after they’ve said something wrong, I wonder if it’s possible to challenge their ideas by engaging them. In some way. In any way. When I watch social media erupt and demand that shows must be cancelled, and careers burned, with the fire of righteous indignation, I wonder what it might be like if tables were turned. When I read about the lives of my favourite writers — especially figures like Naipaul or Roald Dahl or Chimamanda Adichie or JK Rowling — I’m often torn between admiration for their talent and unease at their thoughts. Of course, violence and systemic oppression don’t leave ground for civil debate. It didn’t when more than half the world bore the burden of colonization on their shoulders. It doesn’t when bombs fall or bodies break or lives are lost.

My simple hope for the woman I will remember many years from now is that she has some room for kindness. That she offers a good argument, fights for what she believes in, but also takes a little time to listen.

I write two blogs a week. If you’d like to read my essays, simply click on Meera Vijayann and follow me on Medium.