Dear Hanna,

A few days ago, I got coffee and tea with a close friend from high school and we sat reflecting on the years gone by. One thread of conversation was a reflection on how optimistic and idealistic we were in high school and how we had grown into realistic, borderline cynics in our early 20’s. I had spent a couple of years as a journalist and met people around the world and the country and she had spent time as a journalist and an organizer working directly on different political movements. Both our respective passions and jobs had placed us directly in contact with a multitude of issues and hearing stories of folks being worked over by different systems and inequities. So of course, we would end up realizing how harsh the world was.?

Since that day, I’ve been reflecting a lot about the moment in which I shifted from an idealistic teenager into a hell of a cynic of a young woman.?

In 2018, I wrote a love letter to the world formatted to fit an Instagram and Facebook caption. Written right before my first finals season of college, I was overwhelmed by the experiences that I had gained and felt excited by a world that had yet to prove to me how harsh it could be.??

Here is the letter I wrote below:?

Dear Friends,?

As my first year of college dwindles to an end and I approach the halfway mark to two decades of my life on this Earth, I wanted to reflect and share what I have learned about myself before my brain dissipates into a pile of goo during finals season.?

As most people I encounter know, I’m a journalist: I love to tell stories just as much as I love listening to them. I am and have always been attracted to life, people, laughter, conversations, books, ideas, knowledge, culture, people’s differences, and every other shade of grey that filled in the collage of humanity.?

My whole life, I’ve been influenced by the people around me. They say it takes a village to raise a child, and I was blessed with the best village of all.?

And objectively speaking, if you were to look at my life as a case study, I should not be where I am today. Yet one thing I have going for me that many others do not, is the privilege of being surrounded by people who have seen something in me and fought for me.?

I bring this all up because I am a firm believer that by acknowledging and understanding your past as opposed to letting it control you, you can learn about what made you YOU, learn from that and become who you want to be.

My childhood and adolescence is something that resided on the outskirts of my consciousness. It wasn’t until I opened the door, beckoning for it to come into the light, that I realized I am who I am because of the people I have been surrounded by, not the aspects of my life I could not control.

I diverge now into the anecdotal portion of this letter featuring a certain someone most of you know:??

One day in high school, my friend Jackson Santander was giving me a ride and we were talking about our future. I told him about how I loved history and how I had this unrealistic dream that I wanted to read every single book that ever existed and learn every bit of history that was recorded.?

Our conversation and excitement escalated as we began to wonder at what point in history did it become where one could no longer learn every single event that happened in the past? Jackson - being the mathematical god that he is - referenced G?del’s Incompleteness Theory (a fancy theory which I googled and will probably never understand) that essentially reflected our conclusion that it was impossible to ever learn everything or read everything that existed.?

I’ve never let anything stop me before, no matter how “impossible” it was. But this was something I could not find a solution for. And the fact that math backed that up pissed me off even more.?

But it wasn’t until later in life that I discovered a loophole.?

I realized that books and history classes could only get you so far: the key to learning history and the making of it, was people.?

Every interaction, every conversation, every dialogue you have with someone is an opportunity to take a bit of them and learn history. From one person, you can learn every idea, stereotype, or emotions that encapsulates and defines them.?

Oftentimes we forget this when we read or think about history. We focus on the events but we forget the individual stories and people that resulted in those events.?

We forget this as we generalize an era into three bullet points of “why” – economic, political and social events.??

And even now as history writes itself, we enclose ourselves in a bubble, believing that because we are receiving education, we are smarter than those who did not. In our privilege as a country, we assume that we are the smartest just because we possess land, power and riches.?

And yes, this has some truth to it. But I cannot tell you the number of times my mom has shut me down and spit truth in my face. And she only has a high school education.?

And how many times has history proven that the ones who come from continents or areas of perceived weakness are the ones who are able to transform societies while scholars and authority figures struggled for solutions?

Through one person, you can learn all of this and more. What was lacking were their stories.

That was when I decided that I would help become a part of that. I wanted to record stories of the rich, the poor, the well-known to the abandoned.?

After Will’s success at Campus Movie Fest (see last post), we sat down together at Wendy’s and made a promise to each other that we would tell people’s stories and give them the attention that they deserve.?

And with y’all as my witness, I promise to do so as best as I can.?

If you’ve made it this far into the caption, first of all Kuddos to you and thank you for taking the time. In return, I leave you with a beautiful quote that Jackson sent to me by Oliver Wendell Holmes:?

“It is the province for intelligence to speak, and it is the privilege of wisdom to listen.”?

I encourage you to talk to strangers. Dance in the rain. Don’t just read a book, but READ a book. Start an argument. Say yes now and figure it all out later (I’ve done that a little too much). Share a smile. Do what you love and be who you want. Do it all for the sake of doing it.?

And above all, remember to listen, and to care. To love and to believe in each other. For we all are united by the common humanity and blood that beats beneath our skin, pulsing and keeping us alive.??

Thank you to every person I’ve spoken to. Every conversation I’ve had. To the roundabout arguments and the heated debates. From the shallowest of whispers to the deepest of the deep. You all have helped me reach this moment of understanding and for that, I thank you from the bottom of my heart. This is my love letter to you all.?

I haven’t gotten it all figured out. On the contrary, I am probably more confused now than ever. But I cannot wait to see where I go next and I hope that you all will find what you love as you make your own history.??

Catch me on the sidelines, recording it all.?

Love,?

Hanna Wondmagegn

Reading that letter now, I can’t help but simultaneously smile and cringe at the innocence of it all. And I can't help feeling sad. I don’t know at what point I lost that fire. That passion. Or rather, not lost it but understood that the world wasn’t a safe place to let it light up and thrive.?

And my goodness, this world is so harsh. I can’t find the energy to see the good when I realize there is no point. It’s hard to enjoy it all when you’re worried about the future of the existence of a planet Earth, your body as a Black women, your career that hinges on the whims of an economy and market that views you as disposable, your extended family’s safety that is affected by continued efforts of colonialism, the safety of your nuclear family who all work in or study in schools that are constantly at the threat of a school shooter, your mental health, your future family and whether you can or want to have kids because the world isn’t safe for them. And so, so much more.?

I don’t have the energy anymore to read the news (which is a bit problematic when your job relies on it and you ask others to do the same). I’ve become the person I used to publicly critique: the one that scrolls through quickly at any sign of bad news to instead find the entertaining and mindless joke that will give me a few seconds of a distraction from it all.?

I feel horrible feeling this way. And as a journalist who begs people to please take the time to read different stories of people I meet, I feel even worse feeling horrible when I know that isn’t productive to any cause or person or issue. I feel like a fraud sometimes: how can I ask others to care when I can’t bring myself to care because it’s all too much??

I also feel angry. So so angry. My anger as a woman, as a Black woman, as a Black woman storyteller is never-ending, always existing and easily summoned. And I get angry that I’m always angry. That the world is built in such a way that it’s a state that I naturally exist in.?

I recently read Sister Outsider by Audre Lorde and have been sitting on this quote a lot:?

“Yet anger, like guilt, is an incomplete form of human knowledge. More useful than hatred, but still limited. Anger is useful to help clarify our differences, but in the long run, strength that is bred by anger alone is a blind force which cannot create the future. It can only demolish the past. Such strength does not focus upon what lies ahead, but upon what lies behind, upon what created it - hatred. And hatred is a death wish for the heated, not a life wish for anything else.”?

I also think a lot about what Tarana Burke once said about anger and how not everyone has the access to receive someone’s anger. I have made changes in my life where I have put that into practice, prioritizing reserving my anger and protecting my peace. It’s allowed for me to move towards living a life of strength not fully “bred by anger.” I can only hope it leads a path to a different way of viewing the world.?

I know exactly what people will say in response to what I’ve listed above: don’t give up. Don’t let the light burn out. I felt just like this when I was your age, it’s practically a rite of passage. You’ll be ok. I get that all. I do because I used to be the person saying all that and more. I know the script. And I feel like most of us feel the need to deliver it often to comfort ourselves more than the person.?

I don’t write these posts for the messages of assurance I have been receiving in response to past blog posts. I don’t write these to stick an inspirational post in at the bottom or a call to action that I can't even follow. In truth, I didn’t know why I was writing and posting these, but I think I know now: I write this and all my posts for my future self. Maybe a couple of years from now, she’ll read this post reflecting on a letter she once wrote and she’ll have something new to say as the woman she is at that moment in time.

Here’s to pulling from my small reserve of hope that my future self will read this with a heart carrying less anger and fatigue and in a world that feels a bit safer to let my light burn a little more.

With cautious optimism,?

Hanna Wondmagegn