My best friend killed himself when I was twenty five. Somehow, this Columbia student with a perfect GPA, this gentle and brave and accomplished young man, this ideal of perfection, had secretly become a junkie. Why? What unendurable pain was he carrying? I was too young to see then what I understand now: he was caught in an irreconcilable tension. His family wanted him to live the American dream, yet, being a minority, America only had one thing for him. Rejection. For every last aspect of him. His love, rebellion, defiance, truth, grace. All of it. It wanted him not to exist. What does that mean?

There’s a myth. It says: “it gets better”. I’m here to tell you that, existentially, psychologically, relationally, deep down in your soul, it doesn’t. It never gets better. If you’re a minority, America has no dream for you, no consolation, no shining reward. It only has the price of all those. Not just any old pain, but the truest kind of wound of all, the wound that never heals. The wound of not existing. It doesn’t get better for minorities in America. So what should you do?

I’ll tell you my own story. Growing up in America, from the very earliest memory I have, I felt just like my best friend felt: like, in some true and profound way, I just didn’t exist. Couldn’t exist. To say that a person who doesn’t exist can have friends is wrong, only little mirrors reflecting the darkness. So us wounded minorities — little puzzled kids with broken hearts — would hunker down in a lifeboat, while the people in the great ship weathered the storms of adolescence in comfort. We could watch the party through the windows — laughter, dancing, pleasure — but only that. I’d bet nearly every minority would admit that’s their American experience too, if they thought about it. Dehumanized, denuded, stripped of meaning, purpose, and truth. Not existing at all.

And so my tiny life in America became something less than a nightmare. Just emptiness. A void. Blank. There was nothing there at all. Belonging is being seen and held and valued even for the mask one is forced to wear. The majority did that for each other — that is what youth is. We go from existing to living, crossing the canyons of identity and belonging. For us? There was talking, working, gossiping, playing sports, and so on. But that isn’t the same as existing, is it? It’s only pretending to exist, which is like planning one’s own kidnapping. It is laughing at one’s own none-existence in order to please those who have magically disappeared you, hoping, that one day, they might let you exist. But why then would they?

So I did what many minorities do. I retreated into a life of the mind and the soul. I played my guitars and read my books, where at least, if I didn’t exist socially, culturally, relationally, then something other than non-existence existed to me. And I planned, carefully, one day, to have a life. That day came, but it didn’t come in America. It came the precise moment I left. I began to exist the very instant that I stepped on a plane.

Elsewhere, in Canada, in London, in Egypt, in Sri Lanka, in France, in Spain, in Italy, in Holland, in Sweden, in India — anywhere else, really — I discovered something strange, magical, impossible. I existed. I was seen as a human being, over and over again, for the first time in my life. Really just seen as someone with possibility. I was held and loved and lifted and allowed to fall, and to laugh, with grace, for every moment of it. Not in big ways, not literally, not even by anyone in particular. Just as a way of being seen. But that was enough. I discovered: when one exists, then one lives.

The existentialists were wrong. For them, to exist was to live. But in a human life, if one does not exist to the society one lives in, one doesn’t live at all. Only Camus, the great outsider, knew otherwise. If, like Meursault in the Stranger, one is estranged absolutely by merely existing, seen not to be at all, then nothing holds meaning, and therefore one doesn’t really live in the first place. That is why Meursault screams at the Priest from his jail cell, calling God a pathetic joke, a cruelty, a futility. God is us, in this little way, and those we do not allow to exist we have already murdered.

Now it’s decades later. I’m not that little boy anymore, but he’s right there in me. Psychologists say that we need inner “objects” — representations of people who support and love us, internalized in early life — to be healthy, happy, and sane. I don’t think that I have any, still. How could I? Where would they come from? I would have to invent such inner objects, and then I would be psychotic. So there is the choice for those of us who don’t belong: to be sane, and admit one’s own nonexistence, which is to wound one’s self over again every day, or to be insane, and try to be happy. The wound and the abyss. To choose between them every day.

In America, where no one has ever accepted me, to this very day, that still is my choice, too. No matter, I’ve learned, how successful or famous or admired I am. I am still right where I was, as a little boy, standing between the wound and the abyss. Between nonexistence, and not living. Only now I know why. And yet. It doesn’t get better. I still don’t belong, count, matter, resonate, endure, inherently, as a condition of simply being here, as the “real” people do. Remember my best friend? He killed himself because it doesn’t get better. Because he couldn’t make this terrible choice between nonexistence and not living. That is what psychologists say, too. For people torn between the wound and the abyss, there is only the void. In American, that is the hollowness of the soul left behind by slavery, white supremacism, hate, spite, fear, greed, that causes minorities to be rejected, forever. And in that void, what living thing can grow?

So. I want to give you three pieces of advice. One, if you’re a minority, especially with kids, leave. Do you want your kids to suffer this way? Probably not. Life is better elsewhere. Really. Way, way better. Two, if you’re a minority parent, talk to your kids about whether or not they feel like they exist. Their answers will probably shock you. Listen patiently. Cry. Suffer with them. Accept their experiences of exclusion and marginalization, don’t deny them. Don’t try to erase them with accomplishments and money — it doesn’t work. Three, don’t just replicate the pattern. The majority will never accept us. But that doesn’t mean we should be like them. Vengeance is only the wound and the abyss carried at the glittering point of a knife. So we must be brave and wise enough to do what they cannot: to see and to hold every human life, no matter how strange it is to us. But we must begin with our own.

It doesn’t get better. Maybe if you’re a majority minority — a gay white, a white woman, and so on — it does. But if you’re a minority minority — brown, black, Chinese, whatever — it doesn’t. You will always have to choose between the wound and the abyss. Between nonexistence and not living. Every day is a choice. And you are going to choose how you wish to make a truer, wiser, and more beautiful choice than this.

Umair

October 2017