i want to be one of the greats

i have wanted to be great since before i knew what greatness meant. since i was a kid sitting in a school library reading about art, about people who made things that lasted, about numbers on wall street that moved like weather, about films i watched late at night that made me feel like the world was larger than the one i was living in. something in me would go still in those moments. not peaceful still. hungry still. the kind of still that is actually everything in you leaning forward at once.

i am the eldest child. and i think that is where it started, if it started anywhere. you are the first attempt. the experiment. you see your parents before they have figured out what they are doing, before life has softened them or taught them what actually matters. you see the good and the bad and the things you will spend years trying to unlearn. and you love them through all of it because they are yours and because you are young and because you do not yet have the language for what you are witnessing. people say forgive your parents, it was their first time too, they were just human. and i believe that. i do. but believing it does not make everything they carried into that house okay. both things are true at once and living inside that contradiction is its own kind of growing up.

but i think the pursuit of greatness stopped being about them a long time ago. the older i get the more i realise it was never really about their validation. it was always about mine. i want to breathe without feeling guilty for it. i want to look at my own life and feel like it is enough, like i am enough. i want to feel it without needing anyone to confirm it.

and i think about songs a lot when i think about greatness. the ones that stay. not every song stays. most of them pass through you and leave nothing behind. but some of them find something in you and they hold it. they make you time travel. you are nineteen and heartbroken or you are ten years old in the back of a car and the light is doing something through the window and suddenly you are back inside that moment so completely you can feel the temperature of it. those songs were made from something real. from a memory, a loss, a love so specific it should not have been able to reach anyone else and yet it reaches everyone. that is what i want to make. something that finds people in the middle of their own lives and makes them feel less alone in it.

i remember everything. every moment of the past twenty two years of my life sits in me like a archive i never asked to keep. i remember being the kid who wanted to be great and not knowing where to put that wanting. i remember it being both the best and the most exhausting thing about me. the way it made me read everything, watch everything, study the people who had done it, pull apart the work of the greats the way you pull apart a clock to understand why it keeps time. i was obsessed. i am still obsessed. i do not know how to be otherwise.

mastery is not a gentle thing. i have never believed that it is. it is immersion, full and total, it is letting something consume you until it becomes the thing your mind returns to without being told. it is practice past the point of comfort and study past the point of tiredness and a love for the thing so unreasonable that other people look at it and call it too much. let them. everything worth doing has looked like too much to someone standing outside of it.

i want to be one of the greats. i know people do not usually say that out loud. it feels arrogant or naive or like you are setting yourself up to be humiliated by your own ambition. but i am saying it. i have always wanted it and i am done pretending the wanting is smaller than it is. i am inspired by the greats, by everyone who sat in their own smallness and refused to stay there, by everyone who made something from nothing and left it behind for the rest of us to find when we needed it most.

i want to be remembered for love. for greatness. for the work. for something that mattered to people who never knew my name. i want someone to read what i wrote twenty years from now and feel the thing i felt when i wrote it. i want to make the song that stays. something that finds people when they need it, even if i am no longer around to know that it did. i think that would be enough for me, to have left behind something that made another person feel a little less alone.

i know i look for problems in the solution sometimes. i know i worry about worries. i know there are days when the ambition feels like a weight instead of a wing. days when i wonder if wanting this much from my life will eventually break my heart. but i am still here. still reading, still watching, still pulling things apart to understand them, still up late with something turning in my mind that will not settle. there is still so much in me that wants to become something.

i have a dream and i am protecting it. because nobody else is going to do that for me. and because it is mine and it has always been mine and i have carried it this far and i am not putting it down.

not for anyone. not even close.

if this was useful, a coffee helps me keep writing <3