It Is What It Is

I wrote about murder for my first Creative Writing class. Ms Anita, my English teacher, gave me an A. Then she said she had not expected such a grim tale from a simple picture of a sad young boy looking back over his shoulders. I didn’t understand it then but maybe now in retrospect, the undertone might have been: ‘Are you OK, child?’ Ms Anita was a nice, kind, gentle soul. I was thirteen. She might have been concerned.

But it was not like I dwelt in dark thoughts. The boy in the picture just looked guilty to me and Ms Anita had said: Be imaginative. So I got to imagining. It was just what it was.

I don’t know if my love for fiction fuelled my interest in Sociology but I strongly suspect it. Sociology likes to think it fills up blanks left by fiction by science-ing things up: pick up an ideal, tear it apart, put it back together again but this time, propose a hypothesis. But fiction does this too in a similar but different way: pick up an idea, create a scenario around it, tear the idea apart and then put it back together to resolve it. I love both. It is interesting to me that Sociology dealing with real life is vague but fiction dealing with imagined life is definitive. Strong juxtaposition. I learned that word from Sociology.

Both have taught me this: it is what it is.

I it-is-what-it-is my way through life. What’s the point hurting over something you can’t control? Grieve for what you lost; then heal. Be angry if you must; then get over it. Laugh, but remember it can’t last. It is little mystique that my favourite book in the Bible is Ecclesiastes.

In adult life, you find so many things that make you want to maim some people just a tiny bit. I can honestly say I don’t have murderous thoughts but a little laceration and emotional damage thoughts? Those I have plenty. People are fake. It is what humans learn to do to get along with society. Some people overdo it, though, and other people judge them. I judge a lot of people. I hope when people judge me and find me wanting, they call me egotistic than cowardly. Vice for vice, I’d hate to be called spineless more than most negative judgments. Call me a Leo!

Here’s my parting observation: when children get caught red-handed doing wrong, they often try to save themselves by saying they ‘didn’t do it’. Some adults never grow out of this habit except in adult life, people don’t often get accused directly of wrong-doings. So just listen to what a lot of people brag (and humble-brag) about the things they don’t do, and you might see that that it is exactly what it is they do do.

You may disagree. I say: it is what it is.