I’m sorry to say that the only thing I can afford to give you besides unending and unconditional love and support is words. Because talk is cheap and it’s more impressive to walk the walk than simply to talk the talk. That, and you’ve spent who knows how long listening to me talk already. But if you haven’t ever really listened to me under the teacher-student context, consider listening to me now. Because I’ve been where you’ve been. I’ve feared what you fear and I’ve wondered what you wonder regarding what the rest of your life might hold. And I feared and wondered what you fear and wonder not too long ago. So while I am technically offering you words, realize that these words are full of pain and experience and failure and success and love and loss and fear and uncertainty and confidence and hope. So I suppose, in that sense, these are so much more than just words.
I begin with hyperbole, which I hope by now, after four years of high school, you know to mean that I am about to drop an extreme exaggeration upon you. A character from the movie Fight Club, the best movie ever, can be quoted as saying, “You are not a special snowflake.” The hyperbole here is not the quote itself, which I firmly stand beside as being completely accurate. The hyperbole is that Fight Club is the best movie ever, because while it is great, it will always be second to The Lion King as the best movie ever. The movie debate, however, is neither here nor there.
The quote is what I like, because it is true. You are not a special snowflake. You are nothing different than the person sitting on either side of you. And you’re probably internally consoling yourself, promising your internal psyche and self-esteem that you are, in fact, special. “Not me, Miss P, surely you don’t mean that I’m—”
Yes.
I do.
You are grey matter and tendons. You are muscles and blood and 70% water. You are 10:1 more bacteria than human, and it’s funny to me that we forget that so often. You are poop and piss and phlegm. You are bone and marrow and dead hair that never seems to do exactly what you want it to. You stink, literally and sometimes figuratively. You are flawed on a fundamental level, and you are weak. You were born crying, and you’ll die—hopefully—old and ugly. You can be broken.
Conscious adulthood and mature thought is great, isn’t it? Really uplifting?
There was this thing circulating the internet a while back that I saw, and it claimed that every living thing had approximately one billion heartbeats, give or take several thousand. One billion. That seems like forever, right? To the healthy, it could be about eighty years. To people like me, eh… sixty-five. But the concept is interesting, and to some extent, it’s rather logical. Whales live for a long time and have slow heartbeats. Birds… not so much. Alligators can slow their heart and have been known to live without food for sometimes as long as two entire years—it’s how they supposedly survived the extinction of the dinosaurs. So if that’s true, if you have one billion heartbeats—no different than the birds or the whales or the alligators—it really only reaffirms the idea that you, sorry to say, are not special.
Too often nowadays, we are rewarded for existing. You know what I mean, right? You show up to class on time after sixteen consecutive days of being tardy and you are bold enough to ask for extra credit? You help your mother clean dishes you dirtied and you want money to go out? Honorable mentions? Awards for participation? You suck at Tee Ball but you get an All Star Ribbon at the end of the year banquet? WHY? It teaches us that we are inherently valuable, and that is false. Not only does it warp our reality, it sets us up for terrible, terrible failure.
We create around us an ego. We believe by birthright that we deserve to be respected. And that is a lie. The most important thing I can teach you is this: RESPECT IS EARNED. You have to prove that you are valuable. You have to work hard for your rewards. You have to recognize that the people who are above you in life are there because they have proven their value and done the hard work that is necessary. You cannot get into the NBA without a lifetime of experience. You cannot get a painting in the Louvres without practice and time and failure!
If I reaffirm that you are special, that you are inherently valuable, that you are good enough as you already are, slap me. I give you permission to slap me, hard, right across the face. Because I would be setting you up for failure. I would be instilling in your still maturing brain that you are perfect, that you can do no wrong, that you need no further guidance or coaching, that you cannot learn from the people around you. I would be insisting to you that you are done growing, that you are “finished.” I would be stunting your potential by convincing you that you have reached it already as fully as potential can be achieved.
No.
Work for it.
FIGHT for it.
Find what you love and study it every day. And don’t be afraid to choose doing what you like over what can make you the most money. Don’t let your GPA (a highly skewed measure of worth) tell you that you’re not good enough. That just means you haven’t found the subject or the career path to which you are most committed. In fact, ignore the GPA altogether, because that number doesn’t have any indicating power over your future success. What matters to your future is that you’ve chosen a path that excites you. If you are intrinsically motivated to succeed, you will do better than any GPA could ever predict. In fact, it is not a grade point average, but an intrinsic passion, that makes an individual successful—an intrinsic passion fueled by insanely hard work and the occasional failure to keep you modest. Like what you do, or stop doing it. Love what you do, or find something that makes your heart of one billion beats beat faster.
But, here’s where I contradict myself, which is good preparation for the real world because the real world—whatever “real” turns out to be—in most instances, almost always contradicts itself. I contradict myself because while I wholeheartedly believe that you are not special, I just as emphatically believe that you are miraculous.
You are grey matter and tendons, just like the person next to you, but you are beliefs that you have concluded for yourself after intense research and personal inquiry. You are muscles and blood, but you are tied to people who have shaped your entire existence in a way that no one else could ever understand. You are 70% water, and you weep it out of you while remembering inside jokes with friends, or at the funerals of those you love most and have lost. You are bacteria, but you remain alive and healthy. You are poop and piss and phlegm, but you are ideas and imagination and dreams, too. You are bone and marrow, but you are morals and ethics formed through trial and error. You are dead hair, but you are beautiful. You stink, but no one can fill the space you occupy with the same grace and wonder with which you occupy it. You are flawed because you have experienced trauma that has put worries in your mind, experienced pain that stirs motivation in your soul. You were born crying in fear, but you do not have to live that way. You can be broken, but that does not mean you can’t also be repaired.
But you will die, just like everyone else.
So I challenge you to really contemplate what that means.
We don’t like lingering on that part of our eternity. I sure don’t. It makes my stomach do this weird flippy swirl that makes me want to throw up. And I think the reason most of us get so upset by the idea of death is because we have no idea what it means to live. Cliché? Absolutely. But most clichés are so because they are, in one way or another, true. We are so afraid to waste our time that we never start anything. We refuse to do something unless we think we can do it perfectly, and the world is cruel because for so long you’ve been told you are a special snowflake and when you fail the world does not pity you. It makes it hard to be brave.
We should be motivated by death. It should be the catalyst for everything. We should always be asking ourselves, what am I going to do before I can no longer do anything? How am I going to spend my one billion heartbeats? How will I impact my corner of the world for the better? Who might I irreparably hurt? How will I be remembered by the people who knew me best? What would be said of me by people who have only observed me from afar?
And I hope you care about those answers, because the most productive and inspiring people are those who live each second as if they were immortal. If you do life well, you live on long after you are gone, and you live on in the lives of those you’ve made an impact upon. And when you undoubtedly die—because you are not special—you live on when those people you’ve touched teach their children what you taught them. You live on in the mindsets you influenced, maybe without even realizing it. You are the heartbeats you have, but more importantly, you are the heartbeats of everyone you’ve touched.
It’s not forever, but it’s enough.
And that is an exhilarating responsibility.
Rise to that challenge. Work hard at that. Don’t assume that just because you are alive that you are important. Miraculous? Absolutely. But important? Valuable? That’s the hardest work you’ll ever do.
Tyler Durden reminds us that we are not special snowflakes. We are one of billions. We are forgettable and average. And if you haven’t figured out by now that I believe he’s right, you’ve probably been lobotomized. But what Brat Pitt’s ridiculously handsome character forgets to add is that, though we are not born special snowflakes, we can most certainly become them. And we become them through hard work and determination and a will that cannot be wavered by momentary defeat. We can be brilliant works of art if we work to become them. We can become amazing if we dedicate ourselves to surpassing the expectations set for us by others. You have to earn your place in this world; those who think it is handed to them will spend their lives waiting for their future to be delivered—gift wrapped, with a bow on top—and they will do so without realizing that someone else has already taken it.
So no, you are not a special snowflake, but if you can accept that… my god, you can be extraordinary.
All my love (impossible to measure or quantify),
Miss Pretzer
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