In Defiance of Reality

         I hear it all of the time. I've even said it, myself: “You can be anything you want to be if you try hard enough.” Once, I believed that. Once I believed that I had the intelligence, talent and motivation to create the life I wanted. I was even close a few times, but then after all of my hard work, things fell apart.

         I've made the right choices. I've made the wrong choices. I am sadly, just human. I'm flawed. Once, I believed I could overcome these flaws, or use them to my advantage. I'm beginning to realize that all the positive thinking is just that. It's thinking. It's dreaming. It's not reality. Reality claws at you like a demon, and there is nothing you can do to shake free of its grasp. And for all of that, I still keep trying. I still get up every morning determined to make the new day different than the day before. Determined to succeed where I've failed previously. Despite the evidence to the contrary, I fight reality, and refuse to believe that I will forever remain as I am now. My life will get better. I will be who I want to be. I will have everything I need, and much of what I desire.

         With each new day, I take inventory of where I am. I set goals. I make decisions that are difficult, but necessary. I break hearts. I mend hearts. I find friends. I lose friends. I give up one thing for another. Each day is an effort to continue on the path to my personal success. I get distracted by other people's desires for my life more often than not, but I always find my way back to myself.

         Sometimes, I envy my friends who have already achieved so much. I wonder what they have that I don't. I worry what they must think of my many failures. I want to ask them for the magic key that will unlock my potential. Sometimes I'm jealous, and I scream at the Universe about how unfair it is for them to have everything while I have nothing. I feel inferior when I compare myself to them. I am not them. I must find my own way. I could follow their exact path and never succeed because their path is not mine.

         Sometimes I think that fate has planned for me something very different than I have planned for myself, and that if I surrender to fate, it will all be over. I refuse to let my life end that way, so I never stop trying.

         On my death bed, I want to look reality in the face and tell it that I won. That my life mattered. That despite its efforts to break me, I succeeded beyond even my wildest expectations.