Imagining A World Where Everyone Is Born Famous
Dreaming big about what the media tries to convince us is small
I have this dream of one day writing a fictional story about a world in which everyone is born wildly famous and grows up with big dreams of having a very different kind of life. At a school where the hallways are lined with diamonds, the lunchrooms stacked with actual silver spoons, where health class grades are determined by how viral one’s tweets go, teachers ask what the children aspire to be when they grow up and the kids throw their hands into the ever-filtered air and proclaim:
I wanna be a hospital janitor in Topeka, Kansas!
I wanna be a seamstress in Shreveport, Louisiana!
I wanna wash dishes at a diner in Lincoln, Nebraska! The water will wrinkle my hands, and my hands won’t be on the cover of the tabloids the next day!
When I grow up I will be allowed to age! I’ll work at a mannequin factory and won’t recognize myself in the plastic molds!
When I grow up I’ll be a hero only if I want to be a hero and if I want to be a hero I’ll be an EMT in Boston! A single mom in Kentucky! A protest organizer in Minnesota! A teacher in a world pandemic!
Now, I know it’s annoying for me to say anything that suggests I think the most financially privileged people in our world have it rough. The tiny bit of “fame” I have absolutely correlates to my capacity to pay for food, shelter, and health insurance. That’s never ever lost on me, so I know the advantages afforded folks whose Instacart deliveries come via helicopter are haunting, to say the least. But my particular curiosity in this discussion is a bit more simple. The question I’m actively contemplating is this: What in our world might change if we were dreaming big about what the media tries to convince us is small?
And by media I mean the productivity machine that has us racing to become something “more” than what we are, which suggests who we are right now is not enough. Which dominoes into a false belief that love we receive from those who know us well, or even better––the love we give ourselves––is lacking in its capacity to sustain our sense of worthiness.
There is a song by the Weepies called, “Simple Life”. It begins:
. . . . .
Can I get up in the morning, put the kettle on
make us some coffee, say "hey" to the sun...
Is it enough to write a song and sing it to the birds?
. . . . .
It is enough. In fact, I think a song sung to the birds may be just as good, and sometimes better for the spirit, than a song sung to a stadium full of people.
Here’s a question to carry with you this week: What is the most simple pleasure in your life? Mine is a call with my mother in the summer when we are both weeding our gardens at the same time. I describe a tree or flower I can’t name, and she can almost always tell me what it is without even seeing it herself. When I was a kid, instead of emptying her wallet to buy plants for our yard, she would walk into the forest with a shovel and carry back what would one day bloom outside our windows.
Today I was looking through photos of both my mom and I’s gardens from past summers. The photos will never go viral. They will never get a standing ovation. I looked at them and I wrote:
. . . . .
I don’t need you
to look at me through
rose-colored glasses.
-the rose
. . . . .
What I meant by that is –– we don’t need to be held up on a pedestal or glorified in other people’s eyes to be the stunning wonders that we are.
Love, Andrea 🖤
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