More welcome than you know, less important than you think.
On letting down your community and realizing that all of you will be okay.
I remember the first time I read Yining Chiu, on a lunch break, in the summer of 2022. I was on an unsteady lawn chair in the backyard with an iced coffee, reading her essay “Like & Subscribe for a Chance at Eternal Life.” I was reading it slowly, and my mind was twisting around her ideas about social media, self-mythologizing, Hillsong and Zadie Smith. I had the distinct pleasure of reading someone else articulate my own hunches with a precision I couldn’t get at from the same angle. I paid attention.
Yining’s Substack description tees up her writing well: “Every stereotype about California progressives + Every stereotype about American evangelicals = Now you know everything about me.”
In Yining’s words, you’re about to read, “a personal essay about visiting a college fellowship after my friends and I quit our roles in public and religious life, and about the relief and joy that comes from discovering the limits of a single person’s importance.”
Whatever we can do to lift each other up, to raise fresh up voices like Yining’s, let’s do it. What does that literally mean? Follow Yining’s Substack . Engage with her work, comment here if you’re into it, share it with your people.
Speaking of sharing with my people: I’m halfway through the manuscript for Nervous Systems, writing towards a September 1 deadline. I’m hoping to knock out the conclusion in a focused stretch during this June’s “1,000 Words of Summer” hosted by
. Think of me, in the basement at the desk, cloistered away from a dreamscape world of sprinklers, Arnold Palmers and lawn games. Think of me, happy-stressed and freaked out with the particular pleasure and pain of writing.I’m pleased to share a new piece from Yining here on Bitter Scroll. Take it away, Yining!
More welcome than you know, less important than you think.
On letting down your community and realizing that all of you will be okay.
I visited my alma mater last week for the first time in a long time. I felt a little sad when I arrived. There is probably always a shock when you go back to a vantage point from which you used to stand and make predictions about the future, knowing now how that future unfolded.
I should say here that my personal life turned out better than I could have predicted. My emotions during this visit had to do with the collective outcomes I was expecting for everyone I met during my time in school, and everything I thought we would do together. Most of my friends aspired to work in public sector or social sector jobs, and just as many planned to go into ministry. Many of them did, and were so good in their roles that I believed completely in their power to do everything they intended. I wanted to do what they were doing because I believed in the goodness of what they would build, so when some of them eventually changed their plans, I felt stupidly, personally wounded.
The reasons for these changes are self explanatory: most of the things we said we would do during college required a level of emotional stamina that most of us, including me, maxed out before we reached the end of our twenties. Everyone who stayed in the running absorbed the financial and psychological toll of idealistic vocations until it became obvious that they needed to bow out.
Even so, I was sad when they did. My friends felt indispensable to the future I imagined. They are all smart and visionary, and it seems impossible to me that their dreams have not yet materialized exactly as they expected, that I am not working alongside them like I said I would, and that time is passing anyway.
I was moody for all these reasons when I reached the campus. I was there to guest speak at a college fellowship led by someone who started working in campus ministry at the same time as me. Nearly a decade later, he is still there.
I moved several times as a kid, and I think this has given me a narcissistic concept of people and time. I was always changing schools, with the result that I never really watched friends grow up or witnessed the kind of continuity that is visible when multiple generations of a single group are gathered in one place. It felt like living in a roving spotlight with people illuminated when I was present, out of view forever once I left. I have a hard time imagining what happens to people and places once they are out of my sight, which is why I felt slowly dazzled as I walked deeper into campus and saw new forms of life making it beautiful in unfamiliar ways.
Why did everything look so extraordinary to me? Maybe because believing that you and your friends are exceptionally prepared to do good in the world also means believing that all of you can only do harm by abdicating your responsibilities. Your beliefs leave no room to anticipate that following your departures, something else, good in a different way, will grow in the places you all left empty: new students in old rooms singing songs you’ve never heard, assured community leaders you remember as freshly minted graduates.
Everyone was being so nice to me at the exact moment I was having these realizations. These students clearly would have enjoyed their evening with or without me; no one really needed me to be there; they were accomplishing so much together already; I was inessential here but welcomed. They received my talk politely and offered to buy me boba before I went home.
It was too much. I stood outside the boba shop and thought about how the assumptions underneath my sadness were all wrong. Thwarted college ambitions, vacated ministry roles, burnt out public servants sound like sad stories only if you have a deluded sense of your importance. Everyone that I remembered as being central to this place was gone, and yet here it was, doing fine.
These are the facets of community I don’t often think about. I am usually thinking about how people don’t take enough responsibility for each other, which I suppose is the effect of we-can-do-it, empowerment rhetoric—the world would be better if we stuck to our commitments, if we all stepped up, etc. I still think these ideas are valid, but I can also see how flawed they are. They assume that we are competent and reliable, and never suppose that we could overestimate ourselves, or that we could need others to do the work we started and couldn’t finish.
If there is any form of universal post secondary education it probably comes in the form of getting schooled by the reality of your limitations—finding the shortcomings of your vision, your fortitude, your self-assessments—and growing humble enough to understand that the future you projected was never within your power to accomplish, or fully within your right to dream up. It feels like an affront to realize that you are not a spotlight in the dark. It also feels like a comfort to know that you are one point of light among many, the member of a constellation you are only now beginning to perceive.
Yining Chiu writes
, a newsletter about the frustrations of life in community, and the reasons for pursuing it anyway.
Thanks for making space for me on Bitter Scroll, Sara. I'm excited for the release of Nervous Systems! I have a hunch that after an election year, we'll be more than ready to read it.
I relate so deeply with that confrontation of limits. Thank you Sara for sharing and Yining for writing! I wonder, is the trait of outsized personal ambition and “we will change the world” energy unique to young evangelicals? It certainly was the case in my circles... and so many of us have reached those limits of our emotional and financial stamina.