The privilege of not knowing yet

I love this world.

I mean that earnestly, unironically, in a way that sometimes embarrasses me. I love the way morning light falls across a room I've seen a thousand times and somehow still catch as if for the first time. I love that there are songs I haven't heard yet, cities I haven't walked through, people out there right now becoming exactly who they're meant to be. I love being twenty one and alive at the same time as all of it.

And then, almost without warning, I feel impossibly small.

It happens in random moments: scrolling too long, taking a walk with my headphones on, sitting in a class full of people who all seem to know exactly where they're going. A thought will surface, something I actually care about, an idea that feels like mine. And right behind it comes the other voice: who do you think you are?

Because here's the thing that gets me every time. Every person whose name we still say out loud. They started exactly where I am. Before he was Elvis, he was just a boy in Tupelo with a guitar and a feeling he couldn't explain. Before Taylor Swift was a name that fills stadiums, she was fourteen with a notebook, writing songs nobody asked her to write. Kubrick had one shot he wanted to get right before he had a filmography. Audrey Hepburn had one audition before she had a career nobody could look away from.Bhagat Singh had one conviction before he had a movement. Lincoln had one letter, one speech, one decision to stand up in a room where it would have been easier to sit down.

All of them, at some point, were just a person with a thought. Nothing had happened yet. Nothing was guaranteed. They hadn't been anointed as great. They were just quietly, privately, maybe even a little embarrassingly certain about something small, before anyone else was.

That's the part I keep circling back to….. Because if that's all it takes, if greatness really does start as one unremarkable, unproven idea sitting in someone's chest, then why does mine feel so flimsy in comparison??!?!?!!

Why does it feel like their leap of faith was made of something sturdier than mine, like they were given a heavier rope to hold onto before they jumped?

I think, if I'm honest, it's because we only ever meet these people after…….

We meet Elvis after the hips and the voice and the legend. We meet Taylor after the eras and the arenas. We meet the directors after the retrospectives, the authors after the syllabus has already decided they matter. We never get to sit next to them on the day the idea first showed up, small and uncertain, with absolutely no evidence yet that it was worth anything at all. If we had, I don't think it would have looked golden. I think it would have looked exactly like EVERYYYYYY idea I've ever had and doubted. Ordinary, unproven, easy to talk yourself out of.

So maybe the question I keep asking, does my idea carry the same weight as theirs did, isn't actually answerable. Not yet. Maybe it's not even the right question. Because weight isn't something an idea has on its own. It's something that gets added to it, slowly, by every small, unglamorous choice to keep showing up for it anyway. Their ideas weren't born heavy. They were MADE heavy. It happened through the years, by the doubt they walked through instead of around, by choosing, again and again, to bet on the small and uncertain thing.

I don't know yet if what I'm carrying is anything close to what they carried.

I don't think anyone gets to know that in advance. But here's what feels true tonight, sitting with this feeling instead of running from it: I get to find out. That's NOT nothing!!!!!!! That's not small.

Most people never get the chance to even ask the question: whether their one thought is worth a leap. I get to ask it. I get to be twenty one, feeling too small for the world and too in love with it to stay quiet, and I get to try anyway!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Not because I know it'll turn into something. But because the only real difference between me and everyone whose name we remember is that they didn't wait to feel ready before they found out.

Maybe that's the whole privilege of it. Not the certainty. Just the trying💕💓💞🎀🌷

xoxoxoxo