Some part of me knew they were right, you know? That I wasn’t going to be great.
I wasn’t going to be great at all. They’d keep telling me it isn’t that easy, and they’d keep putting me down asking me to be better, and they’d just keep being right all the time. Maybe, I didn’t even want to be great in the first place, and what was greatness anyway?
Still, there was something in how I felt, something that I couldn’t stir or shake off, and I knew there were others like me. As much as I knew that it wasn’t true, I couldn’t not believe that I wasn’t destined for greatness. It didn’t serve me to not believe in the myth of myself, and by extension, it didn’t serve you.
So, for your sake and for mine, I have to keep believing. I have to keep doing what I do. I have to continue this little war of mine that I wage from a desk in a tiny apartment, sitting down until the myth rings true or until they admit that it is, in fact, easy. Until they acknowledge that you just sat upright every day, and you put in the work, and that was great in itself.
I think they keep telling us to stand down because they don’t know what we know: that greatness comes from the legend of you, the one you keep telling yourself over and over, every day. That it has nothing to do with them. That greatness has nothing to do with monuments and relics. It never did, and it never will.
Greatness was all about the every day. It was in the myth of you that you kept telling yourself even when nothing made sense.