Recently, I was listening to the Slowdown poetry podcast when Maggie Smith said something that stopped me in my tracks: “We are imperfect, and the people we love are imperfect, and the people who love us are imperfect. [My children] know I’m only human, that I’m not always my best self, and they’re kind enough to give me grace and love me, anyway.” Even though I knew this, it was as if I were hearing it for the first time.
George is one of the hardest characters I’ve had to write. Perhaps because some characters ask more of us than affection. They ask us to stay long enough to see the wound beneath what is frustrating, selfish, disappointing, or damaging.
A character, briefly introduced: George
George—tobacco sales, husband, father—is the seeker: a man who wants to matter at home, but carries shame and a love that does not always know how to stay put.
He is not an easy man to love on the page. In some ways, I did not make him easy. I needed the reader to feel the force of disappointment around him, the ache of absence, the harm a person who does not know how to remain steady inside love can do. But as I lived with him longer, he became my greatest teacher. He taught me compassion.
It’s not the compassion that excuses and erases damage. But compassion that asks what shame does to a person. And how longing can become clumsy, restless, and destructive when it has nowhere honest to go. The kind that allows a character to be fully flawed and still fully human.
George reminded me that some people do love, and fail at love at the same time. They want to be good and still cause hurt. They want to stay and still keep reaching for escape. This does not make them guilty or innocent, but more complicated than our anger first allows.
A line George might say: I knew how to work for the people I loved. Staying still inside that love was the part I did not know how to do.
A small beauty I noticed along the way: compassion sometimes arrives late, when the sharpest edge of anger has passed, and what remains is sorrow, tenderness, and the wish to understand more truthfully.
A question for you: Have you ever come to see someone more clearly only after your anger made its full, necessary pass through you?
P.S. Distorted Is The View is coming out on June 9th, 2026.
Photo by Sheila Swayze on Unsplash
George sounds like a complicated character in deed, but one who’s teaching you along the way. Good luck with the June debut, Khaya!