Fix Your Hearts or Die

Can you care too much?

Tavi Chhay

I care about everything. How could I not care? I always care! I wish I could care less, but I can’t help it. The world we live in teaches us to be individualistic and not care about others and the world around you. It’s cool to not care, to be nonchalant, and to protect yourself with cynicism. But would anything ever change? What would happen to the beauties of life—art, music, literature—if no one cared enough to think deeply, philosophize, create? There would be no humanity as we know it if no one cared. Caring about others—about plants and animals and rocks and water, about everything in the world—is what makes us human. Be curious about others and about the world that surrounds you. We shape it and it shapes us in return.

My compassionate heart worries my mother. She taught me to keep my head down, follow the rules, and to not question authority. I’ve never met someone as fearful of the world as she was. I was told the world is filled with bad people, but ever since I was a little girl, I knew that wasn't true. You see more hatred than kindness if it’s the only thing you know. You’re afraid of me becoming my own person in a world you don’t trust. I refuse to live in a perpetual state of fear like you.

We’re Buddhist, and my mother explains her suffering as something she earned in a past life and is now paying for. She tells me to study hard so I don’t have to work as hard as her. A lot of immigrant parents end up working themselves to death in pursuit of the hope of the American Dream. In order to do this, they must deny themselves their pain, but that pain does not disappear. It was passed onto me. Being denied your pain is the worst kind of suffering. My parents deny themselves their pain more than anything. I am not only grieving my own losses, but also everything they’ve never been able to feel.

Paulo Freire, educator and revolutionary, once expressed a truth in “Pedagogy of the Oppressed” that I have carried in my heart ever since: “Love must generate other acts of freedom; otherwise, it is not love.” Loving someone isn’t enough. You need to actually engage with and understand their oppression and trauma in order to support them. That is actual love and care. You cannot love someone and choose to be ignorant, apathetic, or oblivious to essential facets that make them who they are. Love alone is not freeing. Love is what carries us through the wreckage and reshapes the world. Love is a radical act.

My fragile bones and sensitive heart do not need to be shielded. I want to trust that the world can be gentle with me. I want to feel the grass between my toes, let my skin be scraped by sharp rocks, and feel the scorching heat of the sun. And when I get bit by a snake, I will not hate it for that because that is the cost of being alive. We are both capable of hurting and getting hurt, but we will never know peace if we only see each other as enemies—see survival as malice. I offer my tenderness to all the creatures of the forest, my heart worn openly on my sleeve. I am unarmed.

To love is to care so strongly that you never want to carry forward the violence done to you. Lessons on love come from places in which you were not loved. Love is the only way out. Stay tender despite it all. Sometimes people want to be loved so badly that they pour their whole heart into everything and everybody, hoping that someday the world will one day be kind to them in return. But it doesn’t work like that. You need people who care about you as much as you care about them.

The desire to know more is the most divine expression of love. Be thoughtful! Be curious! Know the world around you and try to understand it as it does us. To quote the late David Lynch, “fix your hearts or die.”