Unlearning fear

I sometimes wonder if humanity is just a series of badly edited takes. Some people march, some legislate, some argue online like prophets with Wi-Fi. Me? I prefer the slow way. The kind that happens over burnt coffee, years of awkward silences and the steady work of trying not to mistake love for agreement.

My mother once bought me a book of quotes for 25 cents at a garage sale. On page 32, Desmond Tutu whispers, “My humanity is bound up in yours, for we can only be human together.”

That line should have been printed on every family dinner table, especially ours.

I think of Richard whenever I read it. Richard with the kind eyes and doomsday opinions. He still calls his mother every Sunday, remembers birthdays I forget and once drove through a blizzard to fix my broken mailbox because “it looked sad.” But for years, he carried stories about people who looked like me — old myths that clung to his good heart like cobwebs that refused to burn.

And I carried my own. Different myths, same stubborn dust. I thought people like him couldn’t change. That certain hearts were welded shut. Turns out, I was wrong. Turns out, welding can be undone with time and laughter.

We never had a grand confrontation, no PowerPoint on privilege, no emotional exorcism. We just stayed. We argued. We built trust one terrible cup of coffee at a time. The myths between us began to lose their grip, dissolving like sugar at the bottom of a chipped mug.

Nonno, my grandfather, would have hated that kind of patience.

He was half Archie Bunker, half saint, depending on the hour and the moon. If you’ve ever watched Archie grumble his way through an episode, you’ll know the type: convinced the world was ending because someone changed the channel. My nonno wasn’t adorable about it. He was loud, stubborn, and loved me like a man trying to wrestle God into submission.

He once told me I was too brown to be Italian, and I told him that was fine. I wasn’t trying to be. I was just trying to survive Sunday dinner with my grandfather. We argued until our throats gave out, until tears replaced words, and then he’d make rigatoni as a peace offering. That was his theology: repentance through sauce.

And yet, I knew he would have taken a bullet for me.

I’m not saying stay and reason with cruelty, the world has enough ghosts from that mistake. I’m talking about the Richard kind of stubbornness, the kind that believes friendship can survive disagreement.

During the pandemic, Richard and I stood on different shores of the same storm. We couldn’t meet, so I sent him tiny drawings each day, small pieces of light in an envelope. He said they made his walls feel less lonely. I told him they were breadcrumbs for finding his way home.

Maybe that’s all we can do for one another. Leave crumbs of compassion and hope someone’s still hungry enough to follow them.

Because sometimes “other” doesn’t mean stranger. Sometimes “other” is your friend, your grandfather or the version of yourself who still believes the world can’t change.

Fear, I’ve learned, is a miser. It makes us small, it hoards our humanity like loose change in a jar labelled Not Today. But curiosity, that’s the thief that breaks in at night, and leaves a note that says “Try again.”

When old myths die, the world gets bigger. Streets exhale. Neighbours wave longer. Children grow up curious instead of cautious. Even the air feels different, like it’s finally forgiven us for breathing wrong.

Fear costs more than we think. It eats the art, the joy, the second chances. It turns our hands into fists when they were meant for holding. Ending those myths is the slow work of reclaiming our own reflection.

And the magic is, you don’t need a revolution. You just need a conversation that goes better than expected. You just need to stay a little longer after the first awkward silence.

Because as Tutu said, we can only be human together, fumbling, learning, laughing in the dark, still arguing about nothing and somehow finding each other anyway.

And maybe, just maybe, that’s what healing sounds like. Two old friends chuckling through the static, ghosts and saints and Archie Bunker watching from the couch, waiting to see if this time we’ll get it right.

Bella Luna Zúñiga is a Winnipeg writer.