A scary thought….
That subject line was a lame attempt to participate in the Halloween madness. Don’t hold it against me!
I just finished reading They Called us Exceptional and Other Lies that Raised Us by Prachi Gupta, and these few sentences struck me as being relevant to No.1s….
I was just another product of inherited trauma, unresolved grief and reactive survival mechanisms, like everyone else who came before me. We were mortals who felt ashamed when we failed to appear omnipotent. Now I see that my job was to release my ancestors from this burden, to allow those who come next the freedom to be ordinary.
And that’s my scary thought. What would it be like to embrace being ordinary? Is it available to us as No. 1s…even as we are in the fight of our lives, for our survival, for our communities’ humanity, for our right to exist and have agency over our own bodies?
I want to invite us to take our foot off the pedal, to say no to many things, to do just enough rather than all that is possible, to say yes to being ordinary rather than striving to be exceptional at every moment of every day. It’s an invitation to be human. You and I deserve it.
Sayu