Chayma Charifi

One morning, someone walks into your room and tells you that you have a slice of toast waiting for you for breakfast. After getting ready for the day, you walk into the kitchen, and to your surprise, you find a pitiful slab of char awaiting you.

What would be the reasonable thing to do? If I had to guess, it would be throwing away the piece of burnt toast and making a different breakfast.

Would it be reasonable to cry about the burnt toast, wondering what karmic debt led to this cosmic punishment? No, of course not.

Would it be reasonable to spend your entire morning wondering how long it took for the toast to burn? Definitely not.

Would it be reasonable to discard the burnt toast, start making another breakfast, and in the process, periodically go back to the trash can and dance around it, hoping the toast can see how happy you are now that you’ve discarded it and moved on? No.

So why do we respond in these emotionally reactive ways to the burnt toasts in our lives?

I’d like for us to imagine that everyone is a piece of bread and that life is the toaster. Our lived experiences toast us and give us life. But, for some of us, our lived experiences have scorched us. When a piece of bread is in a toaster for too long, it is burnt, inedible and less of a bread. When life bogs us down for too long, we might find ourselves cruel, apathetic and less human.

This isn’t the case for everyone. For some of us, our lived experiences have added color to our lives, making us a satisfying golden, toasted brown. We might not be untouched like we were before, but now we’re more interesting in our toastiness. Life’s radiation made us more enjoyable, even if it needed to apply some painful heat in the process.

But for others, this might not be the case. We, the toasted, might be inclined to mourn them, the burnt, pondering their potential, perhaps even fantasizing about tracking down the inconsiderate people responsible for burning them or ignoring them in the fire.

But this is all for naught. Once you’re cooked, you’re cooked. There comes a point of no return. If you accidentally leave a piece of toast for a little longer than intended and catch yourself, you’ll be able to scrape off the burnt bits and salvage it. These pieces of toast are those who might have become cruel at one point but were able to, with the help of another, salvage some of their lost humanity.

But when all that’s left is ash in the shape of a slice of bread, there is no point in saving it. There is no point in pretending that it is something that it’s not, that it is more edible than it is. I would never kid myself into lathering jam over char, and you should not deceive yourself into thinking that cruel, malicious people will change with the power of kindness. If I ingest burnt toast, then the worst that can happen is a stomach ache. But if I allow the human equivalent of burnt toast in my life, they could very well poison my livelihood.

This analogy can only extend so far. I’m well aware that there are those who do not require life to scorch them for them to be the inhumane, apathetic people they are; this analogy unintentionally gives them the benefit of the doubt—that they did not choose to be cruel, but life made them so. I won’t attempt to shape the analogy in a way to hold them accountable, because they are, again, not worth it.

I’ll leave them where they belong and so should you.

The reason why performing for a discarded piece of burnt toast sounds silly and irrational is the same reason why proving yourself to the “burnt toasts” you left behind is silly and irrational. Besides, you’re not in their line of vision anyway. All they can see is the other trash that cushions them in the trash can—the fleeting material items in which they take solace and the other burnt toasts in which they find comfort.

Spend time making a breakfast you enjoy, finding people who will nourish you. You’ll find the time spent centering these poor excuses for toast could have been spent making a filling breakfast, one more nutrient-dense than a piece of toast.

Besides, maybe you didn’t want breakfast anyways.

Maybe it was the promise of toast that enticed you and its burnt reality that destroyed you. Maybe we shouldn’t trust promises of toast and should, instead, entrust ourselves to make the breakfasts we enjoy and to eat when we’d like.

You don’t need breakfast, and no breakfast is better than one that will sicken you. You still need food though, so eat in your own time. We need people. But we don’t need them all the time and we definitely don’t need people who will poison us. Eat toast or don’t eat toast. Just make sure it’s actually toast, not charcoal.