I heard a line somewhere — I've never been able to track down who said it first, and I've looked.
What a privilege it is to grow into someone I used to need.
It sat wrong with me for a while. Not wrong like untrue. Wrong like a splinter. I couldn't figure out why it kept surfacing at odd hours until I remembered the list.
The list
When I was a kid I kept a list of who I was going to be. It lived in my head and I checked myself against it constantly, the way you'd check a scoreboard.
He was smart. He was funny, or funny enough. He was polite in the specific way that makes adults look at you a second time and say something about it to your parents. He was respectful of people who couldn't do anything for him. He was loving, which is a strange thing for a kid to be aiming at, and I aimed at it anyway. And the big one, the one all the rest of it was quietly in service of — he made people feel better about themselves than they had a minute earlier.
That wasn't a description of me. It was a description of somebody I had never met, and I worked on him every single day like a project with a deadline I'd invented.
I want to be clear that this wasn't cute. It was a kid deciding that whoever he currently was wasn't going to be enough, and getting to work.
The smile
Here's the part that sounds worse than it is.
Somewhere in there I noticed something. If I smiled at someone — a fake smile, one I felt nothing behind, purely mechanical — they'd usually smile back. And theirs was real. And then, because someone had just given me a real smile, mine turned real too.
Fake, real, real. Three steps, and only the first one was a lie.
On paper that's a kid running a social experiment on the people around him, and I've had the thought. It reads like manipulation. But manipulation takes something from somebody, and I wasn't taking anything. The person got a real smile out of it. So did I. The whole transaction created something that hadn't existed a second earlier, out of nothing, and the only cost was that I had to go first.
I've thought about that loop more than almost anything else I've figured out since. It's the reason I don't fully believe people who say you have to feel it before you can do it. Sometimes the doing is what manufactures the feeling. You act like the person and the person shows up.
The persona was never a mask. Masks hide something that's already there. This was scaffolding — you put it up around a thing that isn't finished, and it holds the shape until the shape can hold itself, and then one day you take the scaffolding down and there's a building standing where there used to be a hole in the ground.
What I was actually building
Which brings me back to the splinter.
The kid who made that list wasn't describing who he wanted to be. He was describing who he needed to be around. Someone patient with him. Someone who'd make him feel like he was worth being in the room. He didn't have that, or didn't have enough of it, so he did the only thing available to a kid with no leverage and a lot of time.
He built a draft of one and moved in.
That's what the line means, and it's why it doesn't feel like a victory lap when I say it out loud. There's no achievement in it. A kid needed something, couldn't find it, and spent twenty years becoming it by hand. The privilege isn't that I pulled it off. The privilege is that he was right about what to build.
He's ungrateful, by the way
The loop never stopped running. It just changed who it's aimed at.
Most of what I do now, I'm doing for a guy I haven't met yet. Tomorrow Kennedy. The workout is his. The email I don't want to send tonight is his. The hard conversation I have today so it isn't a crisis in March — entirely his. I make his bed. I take things off his plate. I try, most days, to hand him something slightly better than what I got handed this morning.
And he is completely ungrateful. He wakes up, takes every bit of it for granted, doesn't say thank you once, and immediately starts working for the next guy.
Which is exactly right. That's the job.
The list is still open, for what it's worth. I never finished the last item — you don't finish that one, it isn't that kind of item, it just renews every morning like a subscription I keep choosing not to cancel.
And I still can't always tell which smile started it.
← All writing