100 Galloping Monsters

This girl I know, she gave up too quickly. She was a kid living in a depressed area, she had few skills and was looking at low pay. She said, "I'll never be able to afford it here."

Her mom moved to Oklahoma, that dustbowl of dead opportunity. So she moved to the same tiny town not close to anything. Or anyone. Or any future bigger than the reality right in front of her.

No 21-year-old who lives here ever has enough money, and always gets low pay. I wish I had told her that. You stay and work it, because this is where opportunity lives and without opportunity, life will always be the same. No movement. No growth. No risks. No learning.

To live here at 21, you have to adjust to not eating much. You find a home that will let you split the rent into two payments a month, a place with included electricity. You move into a closet, one big enough just for a futon on the floor and a place for the door to open.

She didn't have a dream, she didn't think she could do it. But what about me? I had no confidence either, but I was filled with the juiced-up anger of 100 galloping monsters. That anger burned like a fever, forever moving me forward. Bad decisions led to mistakes which led to learning, far reaching discoveries, and devastating humiliations.

Just the right amount of insanity is a very good thing. I'm so grateful for the fire inside. I worked San Francisco and I won. 16 years of struggle. Nonstop struggle, with no net, no backup, no parents with a handy check to send. I worked my way up in a creative industry that paid a lot, because of the raging fever. Because I held tightly to the conviction that mediocrity must be avoided at all costs. I could stop eating and I could live in the ghetto and I could survive a nervous breakdown all by myself. And get back up and work more and be abused more, just to make it past the next rung. 

And then, 16 years later, I left the boiling cauldron of City culture. I had won.

And when I won and I was done, I said goodbye and good riddance and went on to have a peaceful life in a quiet town on the other side of the bridge. 

When I was done I put that City in a headlock and threw it down on the ground and stepped on it. "Thank you, tar pit trap, for making me a person I can respect."