... well then okay, I won’t bother.
"WHY WON'T YOU LET ME BE GREAT!?!?!?" notorius ego-maniac Kanye West pleads with his fans on his blog. He needs to know why people are always trying to bring him down. As I close in on my quarter-life crisis, I’ve started to ask the opposite question of myself and my peers: WHY WON'T YOU LET YOURSELF BE REGULAR!?!?! In our lives why did people insist on building us up, when really we're just like everyone else? And why do we insist on believing in spite of all evidence to the contrary?
In college I babysat for a family with two little girls. I smiled when they told me what they wanted to be when they grew up: an astronaut, a gymnast, a singer, a veterinarian, a mom, and a teacher. I encouraged their unrealistic dreams and now I'm sorry that I did. I should have turned off A Bug's Life, sat them down, and told them the cold hard truth: you will not be all of the things you want to be. Truthfully, you might not be any of those things. Quit dreaming so big. Pick an average dream, preferably one that revolves around spending a lot of time in front of a computer, and then nail it.
One of the little girls was especially a dreamer. I should have looked her in the eye and said, “Listen Sally, I know that you're four and you think you're a good dancer. But you're not. Your technique is terrible and frankly, I don't know if the potential is there. So throw in the towel now before you actually start believing that you can be a dancer and a mom and a chef and a princess. Because you can't.”
Upon hearing this, she may have started crying, at which point I would have given her a cookie, teaching her another valuable life lesson: The easiest way to deal with disappointment is to eat your feelings.
Sure, deep down, I hope that one day soon Tina Fey will come across my humble blog and I'll be ‘discovered.’ However, in truth I know that the only people reading this are members of my own family and that I shouldn’t say anything too harsh about any of them or else my readership will plummet. So, while I wait for a call from Tina or, more likely, from my mom, I’m working on being content with never daring to pass the impassable fen or achieving anything that gives me a forum to ask thousands of fans: WHY WON'T YOU LET ME BE GREAT?!?!?!
I'm not Kanye West. I wear comfortable shoes when walking to work. I shop at a regular grocery store and frequently eat beans as a cost saving measure. Sure, famous high achievers put their pants on the same way that I do but just because we share this trait doesn't mean I'm anything other than regular. It just means there's really only one way to put on pants.
*This is the first line to Marianne Moore's poem I May, I Might, I Must, which I love.
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