Wish

If I could have one wish, tonight it would be this:  to live free of superlatives.  Better than, worse than, best, last, these words ricochet in my head endlessly, and I would love to be free of them.  Even when I don't want to be thinking about it, some part of my brain is always feeding comparisons back to me, like a personal ticker tape:  that girl is younger than me, that one is prettier, that one is fatter, that guy writes better and that one is cooler.  That one is much much nicer.

And these comparisons nearly always stop me from doing whatever I'm doing.  Because there is ALWAYS someone better.  No matter who you are, what you do, there's better out there somewhere.

I imagine what it would be like to be wholly freed of superlatives, not to think that you were better than anyone else but just not to think about where you are in the scheme and strata of experience - not to be so very aware of what percentile of knowledge or beauty or wit you inhabit.  I think it would feel wonderful.  I think I would listen more.

Every so often I find a little space where no one else is, or at least where no one invokes this sort of petty classification of myself, and I just get to be.  It's not the same as just being alone.  I can be alone and still unable to halt my mind from its endless rifling through who's-better-who's-best.  Like tonight, when every clever thing I read just strikes the gong in my head saying, "Yep, you'll never be as clever as that."

It's true, I won't.  But maybe someday I'll pick my way past caring and just be me and that will feel like enough.

I suspect it will still take a while.  Maybe you should check back in a few decades or so.