Honestly Speaking

Another new weekly addition:

I have been told continually to be thankful that I missed the pitfalls of being a [young] [black] [woman]. Meaning that I didn't validate a stereotype: not a teenage parent, not a high school or college dropout, not a drug addict, not dead or in jail. To think about how far I've come from where I started: graduated college, lived abroad, traveled through Europe, apartment of my own. And what I think is, why should I be grateful for what I've earned, for everything that I fought not to be. Why should I be grateful for the minimum.

Do I hold myself to standards that seem impossible based on where I've come from, maybe. Yet to define myself on where I've started, instead of where I want to be, seems to be defining my milestones based on what others think I can achieve. It feels like I'm undermining the concept that hard work and determination can lead to great things. It seems inhibiting, demeaning, like the achievements that people stop dreaming about because they limit themselves to only what they think they can accomplish based on where they have been. It's living in the past, when the future is the only thing I have the power to effect.

I look at progress based on where I should be and where my peers are regardless of my race, gender or class. [should] operative word - perhaps a bit idealistically.  I know after much reflection that the reason I didn't hit the pitfalls is because I was paddling so hard to achieve something else, not by chance or luck.  It's this same ideal, that made me view taking a chance as the way, because the chance didn't seem like an option, but the only method to get what I wanted, while friends of mine looked at me as if my course of action was  certifiably nuts. Yet, to me it seemed the most logical route.

I guess what I'm saying is -- if I defined myself based on what people tell me to be grateful for or begin to look at everything from somebody else's perspective - then I fear I would never actually achieve what I want, because it's that same perspective, that validates being stuck in mediocrity, that can justify failure as a result of circumstances with or within your control: your childhood, your income, your family. Am I being hard on myself, probably. Could this be self-destructive, perhaps. Yet I think to myself, my mentality could push me to achieve beyond what I've ever fathomed, because I continue to see the world as if I'm an equal to everyone else, and strategically try to determine why peers or mentors have achieved more. More so, because I refuse to see the world in a way in which its gaze demonstrates that my indefatigable ideas should be tamed and that I should look for what is comfortable, convenient or more "realistic."

I'll admit it - I get disappointed when it seems that hard work doesn't actually mean I won't end up exactly where I don't want to be [as in where I sit right now], particularly in a world where you can continually prove yourself but not progress merely on the wimps of others. At this very moment, I refuse to accept that I should be thankful for my current situation because it could be worst and refuse to dwell on it and become bitter in the same breathe because it should be better. [the end]