At first glance, nothing about me stays the same. I navigate the world, absorbing its many lessons and transforming my perspective over and over again. But if you look closer, you’ll see one constant: a golden pendant with a delicately carved compass draped around my neck at all times.
This necklace is an ever-present symbol of the moral compass that guides my daily life. Every day, it faithfully reminds me to approach people with curiosity rather than judgment, to walk away rather than lash out, and to reach toward people in times of conflict rather than create distance.
But more than anything else, my code of ethics is utterly black and white in its division of right and wrong. When I witness injustice, this code demands that all of my efforts and prayers be directed solely toward the victim, allowing no space to understand the other person’s perspective because, within this framework, empathizing with someone who has harmed another person constitutes an erasure of the victim’s experience. Because pain demands to be felt, validated, and honored, there is simply no room left for forgiveness.
And it is with this unshakable moral compass that I arrived, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, in New Hampshire just a few months ago ready to kick off my summer job as a tennis coach. As I drove through the gates of Camp Walt Whitman for the first time, I was sure I’d leave with nothing more than a few harrowing tales about my time coaching kids in the middle of a forest. Boy was I wrong.
The story starts the way all great legends do: on a tennis court.
Picture this: a 9-year-old boy with a buzzcut who ate, slept, and breathed tennis. A boy who came up for lessons as much as the scheduling office would allow and easily outpaced kids more than twice his age. Indeed, every time we’d ask for volunteers to demonstrate the drills, Conrad volunteered his answers with unyielding enthusiasm, regardless of whether they were right or wrong. He even practiced tennis in his cabin using one of the beds as a net.
This kid’s heart was much bigger than tennis, though. While he held a deep love of sports, he also adored theater—his hilarious rendition of Simba in the camp play will go down in history as one of the funniest things I’ve ever witnessed on any stage. Conrad also loved singing, dancing, and creating art. He was at that incredibly formative age where he was exploring whether or not it was okay to simultaneously find joy in traditionally “boy” activities like sports and traditionally “girl” activities like the arts. This duality was something Conrad spent the summer grappling with, particularly because back home, his dad drew a pretty strict line that boys should only like strictly “boy” activities.
Fast forward six weeks into the summer. Conrad had proudly painted the nails of all the boys in his cabin in addition to his own, even washing off his counselor’s nail polish just so he could repaint it. He paraded around camp happily showing everyone his artistic masterpiece, but he’d been waiting all day for the evening tennis activity so he could finally show the coaches.
In particular, he wanted to show his two favorite coaches—Z and B. Z had traveled all the way from Zimbabwe to coach tennis at this camp, B from Barbados, and both had that indefinable charisma and humor that made little kids instantly gravitate toward them.
As soon as he arrived, Conrad immediately ran over to Z and B, triumphantly showing them his painted nails. “Do you like them?!” he asked excitedly.
“No,” came their definitive reply. Their message was clear—painting nails is not something boys should be doing.
Devastated, Conrad immediately ran to the nearest bathroom to wash off his nail polish. And just like that, six weeks of work spent teaching him to embrace everything he loves regardless of their gendered connotations shattered.
The sorrow I felt for him was matched only by my anger toward the two coaches.
Right away, I knew I had to do something drastic to reverse what had just affirmed all the negative messaging Conrad had grown up hearing at home. Indeed, I knew that once Conrad left camp, he’d continue facing pressure to shut down the parts of him that didn’t fit into his dad’s vision of how boys should act. So I spent hours crafting a letter to Conrad, first to tell him how special he is, but most importantly, to impress upon him how the human experience is meant to be one of infinite possibilities, not of limitations.
This is the letter I wrote to him:
Dear Conrad July 30, 2024
I’m writing this letter for you to read if you ever start to forget how special you are. You are witty, funny, and you always crack the most perfectly timed jokes. You have such a fun, competitive spirit that has already turned you into a tennis champion at age 9 years old, and you’re an amazing actor—you truly brought Simba to life on stage. But most of all, you never fail to make all the tennis coaches smile because you have an inner light and joy that I’ve almost never seen before in my life. There’s a reason we always choose you to demonstrate the drills!
But you need to know that people are going to try and put you in a box. They’re going to try & tell you things you should and shouldn’t like, and tell you who you should or shouldn’t be. So my message to you is this: don’t let them. Don’t let anyone make you feel bad unless you’ve done something wrong. If anyone ever tries to guilt or shame you for liking theater or wanting to paint your nails or play tennis or anything you’re doing that doesn’t harm other people, please please ignore them. The whole point of being a human is to try everything, and decide for yourself what you like. Everyone is different, so don’t let anyone tell you you have to be the same. Don’t let anyone dim your inner light. Always be your amazing self, and you’ll go farther than you ever dreamed. We’re rooting for you, Conrad!
– Brooke
After I gave Conrad the letter, there was only one course of action left to take. I had spent the entire summer experiencing mounting resentment towards Z and B for their casual sexism and homophobia, but this finally pushed me over the edge. So I was geared up and ready to tear into them, and my moral compass was more than willing to open the floodgates, because, of course, no mercy should be spared for those who harm other people. Shaming an innocent 9-year-old child was top of the totem pole in that regard.
There was just one problem.
The previous six weeks had passed in a whirlwind as I began befriending a person who, unlike me, had infinite capacity in her heart to give everyone love and acceptance. A person who had every right to be angry and bitter at the world for all it had put her through but instead chose to remain open and give grace to everyone who had wronged her.
It wasn’t that she felt she deserved any of it—she was well aware of how wrong it all was. She simply allowed two things to be true at the same time. It could be true that what happened to her wasn’t right, but it could also be true that the people who hurt her were simply using the limited tools they were equipped with, given the cycles of trauma they had to endure too.
Something in her words must have lodged itself deep within me, because the next time I saw Z and B, I did not feel even a shadow of the anger that had poisoned my heart the whole summer. Instead, all I felt was an overwhelming sense of grief for them.
For Z and B to have arrived at a place where they see a young child running up to them brimming with excitement and respond by instantly snuffing out their happiness, the only possible explanation is that they must have experienced that same suppression when they, as children, tried vulnerably showing the truest parts of themselves.
And at last, I arrived at a place of understanding. Not of justifying, or excusing, but of real, raw understanding. A place where I could look at them as human beings operating with the only tools and equipment they had been given.
But beyond understanding, I felt called. I felt called to see them, to really, truly see them as more than their worst moments. I felt called to extend the same love and grace I had witnessed my friend give as she, again and again, took the sourest lemons life had to offer and transformed them into something far sweeter than lemonade.
And so I began a tradition called “Tennis Coach Kudos,” in which I’d write down all the beautiful moments of hard work the coaches put into their jobs every day on a giant whiteboard. The first two people I highlighted? Z and B.
This is the story of how I learned that two things can be true at the same time. All at once, I could pour love and wisdom into a letter for a boy who had been unfairly shamed by two people he looked up to, and at the same time I could see those two people with grace and understanding.
Too often, we view the world through the lens of scarcity. We stay in relationships or friendships that no longer serve us because we worry we’ll never find anything better. We reserve compassion for a select group of people because we believe we have a limited capacity for empathy. But with this perspective, we will always remain confined, never able to grow beyond our constructed, false sense of scarcity. It’s like what I told Conrad—the human experience is meant to be one of infinite possibility, not of limitations.
So instead, the world must be understood as a world of abundance. It must be seen as a place with infinite capacity for love and forgiveness, one where we can extend grace without discounting pain, one where the human heart can endure complex realities instead of the binary, black-and-white moral codes we are socialized to abide by. We can hold people accountable and decisively denounce their actions while remaining open to understanding all the factors that led them to their worst moments.
Deciding to see a person as more than their worst moments, to send them your prayers and well wishes even as you choose to walk away, makes all the difference.
This is how retaliatory cycles of hate end. Not with a big speech or a dramatic showdown. Instead, it ends much more quietly. It ends with one person sitting alone, perhaps looking in a mirror or putting a pen to paper vowing to become one small part of a world slowly but surely inching its way toward a place of abundance and infinite grace.
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