change

As a child, I went to bed at eight-thirty every night. I carried a tiny brickish Nokia and a Tamagotchi. I played in the yard in the afternoons and spent the rest of my time reading. My parents took me to the library every weekend and I would come home with six books to demolish in seven days. The only computer in the house was in a shared space and I could be on it for half an hour a day. YouTube didn’t exist yet, and neither did Wattpad, so I wrote all my stories on Microsoft Word 2003.

These days I write on the go on my iPhone. There are no talking animals in my work. There are no treasure hunts or mafias or boybands. I hole myself up indoors after 11AM because it’s too hot to set foot outside. I’m up at odd hours — eleven, twelve, two, often going over some notes, sometimes on YouTube, often worrying. About how my dreams seem further and further away every day. About my family. About how the world is burning, in more ways than one.

I cried when I turned thirteen. Part of me didn’t understand why I was so sad, or what I was losing. Part of me must have.

Because even then the ground was already shifting beneath my feet. I should have seen the signs. Today the tremors never stop. Britain leaving the European Union. The Amazon on fire. An old man in the hospital diagnosed with cancer for the second time and who might not have the money to beat it again. Trudeau in blackface. Children dead in classrooms in the United States. Me crawling under a table, practising for the day a terrorist walks in with a firearm. Protests in Hong Kong. Protests in France. Protests here at home. Children on the streets holding signs and begging to be heard, because one day all the politicians will be gone and they will be living out the movie 2012.

When did this become the duty of a child? I remember when grownups held up the sky. When they had all the answers. When I didn’t have so many questions. When the duty of a child was not to protest or to campaign or to hide from gunmen or to memorise textbooks but to live and grow and laugh and be free.

They are too young to vote or to marry or even to buy alcohol, but apparently not too young to see the problems in today’s politics. The children should not have to be right about this, but they are. Change is no longer something to look forward to. It must happen now.

The way forward is not the way back. Things were, perhaps, easier in the early 2000s, but they were not necessarily right. If they were, we would not be here now. Those days look as rosy to me as they do to anyone else; but problems under the carpet are not problems solved.

There is only one way forward. I do not have all the answers. I might not have a single one. But there are seven billion of us – nearly eight now. I’m sure we can come up with something.