You sit in the back of the class because you’re ashamed of your hand-me-downs. You can’t afford glasses so you can’t see the board. You don’t have enough money for your own art supplies, and your school doesn’t supply them because all that money goes to the jocks, so you guiltily shoplift them. The entire machine you’re being pushed through is engineered to ignore you in favor of the elites. The athletes. The rich kids.
If you choose, right now will be your lowest ebb. And right now will be the highest pinnacle of the elites.
If you nurture it, if you are tender with yourself, your suffering now makes you strong in the future. It lights a fire in your heart. This fire fuels you. As the elites lazily drift from one free opportunity to the next, you’re being given the gift of hardship. You’ll have to be harder than them. You’ll have to be smarter than them. You’ll have to be faster than them. Make yourself be these things. Use the gift of the shadow you’ve been placed in to forge new and striking ways of thinking, doing, and being.
The elites will become cogs in the machine. You will become a bright, silver, indestructible wrench that breaks it. You will become the creator of your own machine, and they will envy you your purity.
And the money they inherited, they will give to you. And unlike them, you will have earned it.
They will buy your art. They will pay you for your ideas. They will line up outside your club, behind the velvet rope you have a former athlete guarding. They will beg for backstage passes to your show. They will pay you for VIP access to your company. They will always ask themselves, “Why didn’t I think of that?” And you’ll know, “Because you didn’t have to.”
Hang in there. It will happen. The present belongs to them. The future belongs to you.
Love,
Clayton