In Which I Expand On Progress
If 1 vote every 2 years gets you even a single piece of legislation...
When I was 19, I left my parents with $1,200 in my pocket and went to Washington D.C. in the middle of the worst economic crisis of the past century. D.C. was a city where I had no family and no friends. In fact, I'd never lived in a city before.
I had no car. No savings. No work experience. No college education. No credit. No self-esteem. I didn't even have a cellphone. & I had no fucking clue how to be an adult.
I didn't speak to my dad for the first 8 years of my adult life. I couldn't even call to ask a single question about how adulthood worked. It's been 16 years since I've been on speaking terms with my mom.
But the thing that I did back then to survive and achieve anything that I have now, is I committed myself to making progress. I committed to the massive amounts of labor it would take to become a happy, fulfilled human being in a super fucking tough world.
Most importantly: I worked on therapy and self-progress. And it took endless amounts of labor to achieve what I achieved in emotional and mental peace.
Because nobody made progress easy.
And that’s why I feel that if someone had taken my 22 year old self and promised that I could achieve even one single aspect of progress to better my life by taking an hour out of my day every two years... I'd do it EVERY. SINGLE. TIME.
If I wanted to lose 10lbs and it only took me one hour every two years - I'd do it. If I wanted a $3 raise and it took me only 1 hour every two years - I’d do it!
Because one single piece of progress is worth the labor of one hour every two years.
And what blows my mind is that people who exist in this very tough world want to do even less work than that - and they still have the audacity to want all the progress in the world handed to them.
We don't live in a fair world! Nobody does!
Nobody ever did.
So maybe it's time we shape up and start working for progress. Cause nothing is going to come easy to us.
