Truth and fiction

When you were a little girl watching cartoons, you believed everything they told you. Everything will be okay if you just believe in yourself, you can fix anything with the power of love, and your personal favorite, just be yourself, nothing else matters. A few years later, you knew better. It was a story, like the adventures you read about and the mysteries you solved before the big reveal. Beautiful but fictional. Believing in yourself wasn’t going to make you prettier or more popular, your love was restricted to the things that didn’t have to love you back, and being yourself was the most excruciatingly painful feeling in the world. Life wasn’t like the movies, and you had no plan because you’d picked up a novel instead of a guidebook. Somehow you got through it simply because you had to. You couldn’t see a light at the end of the tunnel, but your fear of the dark was enough to keep you moving and when you finally stumbled out of that tunnel with leaves in your hair, dirt on your cheeks, and a dog-eared novel in your hand, you had no idea what to expect.   

The sunlight was too bright for you after all those years of living in the dark so you kept moving. Maybe you’d find a place that was just right, not too dark and not too bright, but you didn’t really entertain that thought for too long because you’d learned your lesson. Life isn’t a movie, either you’re lucky enough to have the things you need to be okay or you’re not. You couldn’t actually believe it when you first saw it. The place the little girl in you wanted and the teenager in you gave up on. Your first step in was scary, what if the floor suddenly opened up? What if this was another sick twisted attempt at character development? As the months went by you realized it was character development, you’d just never realized that character development didn’t always have to hurt. You opened up your novel again that day because the little girl wasn’t as stupid as you thought she was. Maybe the secret to life was buried in fiction, you just needed to dig a little deeper.

Believing in yourself didn’t make you prettier or more popular but it could make you realize that you didn’t need to be. That the finish lines were always going to be moved further and further and you’d be running a race that wasn’t meant to be finished instead of sitting on the sidelines with a coffee and a good book. The power of love couldn’t fix things because things that were created with love never broke, not completely at least. As you turned the pages you finally realized that being yourself came naturally to you and you needed to give that little girl more credit because she’d done it, she’d become the person she always wanted to be and you owed it to her to treat that person with the kindness and respect she deserved.  

So now when you sit in front of your laptop, watching teenagers fight the system and win through sheer will and hope, you don’t roll your eyes anymore. Your art is a product of your experiences and all art reflects someone’s lived experience for better or for worse. Believing in yourself may not end with you winning a gold medal but you may find that you’re better than you thought at something you love. Truth is stranger than fiction but fiction may have some slivers of truth in it.

For all the 20 somethings who need to believe in themselves