Yours

December 4th

Dear Sophia,

I love you.

Some days I think you’re the only person I ever want to see.

I know you saw them today. I saw you drop some change in the tins on your way out. It’s unfair that they set up there. Most people can ignore them once on the way in but on the way out you can’t even pretend to be caught by surprise because you had to have seen them on your way in.

The pink ribbon thing just annoys me. They say it’s for awareness. Everyone knows the pink ribbon and what it’s for now so we don’t need to be made aware of it anymore. I bet if you worked out what percentage of money given to charity goes to them and what percentage of cancers they actually support they would get loads too much of it.

I’m always wary about giving money to charity anyway. Especially on the street. Just because someone has a tin doesn’t mean the money they collect is going towards anything useful. You hear awful stories about how some famous charities hardly give any of the money they get to the people that need it.

I’m not saying it was bad of you to put your change in the tin. I know it was just the easy thing to do and you want to help. I just think it’s important you know. I think the first woman who used the pink ribbon was actually trying to raise awareness for how little money was going towards fighting cancer. Now it’s just got sucked up into big companies who put it on adverts and stuff like that.

I think they were trying to get people to sign up for one of those midnight walk things that they do. I saw the woman in the Santa hat before I saw the table or the posters or anything so I was already ready to avoid them. Once I noticed the pink t-shirts and everything else I could guess what they were there for.

I don’t know what use a midnight walk is. It’s like they’re hiding what cancer is by trying to pretend it’s about fun. Women all doing pointless things to raise money while they all ignore what the cancer is actually doing to women. Cancer isn’t about wacky ideas. People should give the money anyway and not try to make themselves feel important by showing off how much they’re doing.

I know that’s not why you gave the money. I bet you do lots for charity and you’re definitely smart enough to not get taken in by dishonest people. It just irritates me sometimes. People try and force it on you and act like if you don’t get involved you must be a bad person. But they’re the ones avoiding the issue. I’ve read lots about cancer and people getting ill. I know what it’s like. People get ill and people die and that’s what people should focus on. Not ribbons and fun runs and colourful hats. People need to focus on what’s real and what’s important. Standing in the street with a clipboard probably does more damage overall to all the people in the world than the people it helps anyway. They just get in everyone’s way.

I don’t mean to sound so annoyed. It was just really annoying today. It made it so much more difficult to focus on you with all that other stuff going on. It made it really hard to see you when you came in because there were so many people around the door. They almost made me miss you and that’s not ok. That’s not helping anyone.

I love you.

Yours,

Andrew