We’re not told enough that it’s OK to not be OK, and that sometimes, it’s OK to be mediocre. That it’s OK to have days where our chins aren’t up high and our brains aren’t filled to bursting with innovation, where our heads droop and our eyelids follow and the comfort of our bed seems about a thousand times more inviting than class or work or basically anywhere else. We’re told so many narratives about pulling ourselves up by the bootstraps and shaping our own destiny and chasing after that ever-elusive American Dream -- capital D -- that we so often forget that we aren’t actually dream-chasing machines, and that there are times where just getting through the day seems the most difficult challenge of all. Or even that, if we truly needed to be extraordinary and prepared and bright-eyed-bushy-tailed every day of our lives, we’d all have been smothered under the weight of it centuries ago. What great leader didn’t take an hour to wallow in self-pity? Probably none of them, because they were human (debatably, according to some historians).
But no one talks about it like that. No one tells us that Hemingway had days where his “embellished” drinking habits had him in such a stupor that whatever words he managed to put on the page, they weren’t going to end up in any respectable anthology, or of Mark Twain’s debilitating struggle with depression. No one tells us that Abraham Lincoln considered himself to be the “most miserable man,” or that he used humor just to keep himself going. We’re expected to memorize the “Gettysburg Address,” but most of us don’t know a single anecdote from Lincoln’s more miserable hours, where the weight of the world fell completely on his shoulders and he hunched underneath it. It isn’t explained to us that our scientists suffered, that our artists cried, and that our strong, unwavering leaders had moments of doubt and, I’m going out on a limb here, numbing fear.
And if we do, they’re criticized for it.
Maybe our bad days won’t end up in history books, but that’s not the point. Anyone who ever did anything struggled to get there and, at some point, took some time out of their day to curl up into a ball, metaphorically or not, and feel sorry for themselves. Some of them probably woke up cranky in the morning. We expect so much from ourselves and others that we set standards that none of us can possibly reach, and want so much of our futures that we forget that we have right now, the this, is just as important. There are going to be days we can’t get out of bed, or where everything we do turns out to be pretty off. So what? Forget the ever-unobtainable American Dream, because no one actually gets there. Let it die with Gatsby, and go read some of Lincoln’s jokes. There’s no better than this – there’s just this, and us, and we’re extraordinary for living at all.
