SUCCESS TO ME (Part I)

What are your goals?  How will you succeed? What do you plan to do once you’ve achieved it? 

I heard these questions so much in high school and by the time I had turned Nineteen I was flat out sick of it.  19.  The number, that age seems so foreign now.  All through my teens, and afterwards every college mock interview, the same thing: “So where do you see yourself 5 years from now?” in one some variation or another. When they finally stopped asking that told me two things:  1) I was finally “grown” and 2) No one cared.  I’m sitting here now, practically punching my keyboard because I’ve finally made a choice. What that choice is…I don’t know.  Not completely anyway. But it has been made.  Ironically, it started with the aforementioned dumb-ass question:

What would happen if you succeed?

Age 35 I realized I couldn’t answer that question.  I didn’t want to.  I don’t mind feeding bull-shit to the stuff-shirts, but I’m not about to kid myself.  Life is WAAAAY too random, and your mindset can change without you even knowing it sometimes.  Whenever I try to capitalize on an opportunity (and believe me I’ve had plenty), something comes along and kicks the chair out from under me;  Finances, family, some hang-up that I can’t deal with, or I just flat out got passed up.  Self-sabotage isn’t out of the question, a while back I wrote about being afraid of success.  I just expect to come up short now, ever since I moved to North Carolina it’s been one ‘L’ after another; after 13 years, the upshots of living here can be counted on one hand.

Success is a foreign tongue to me.  I don’t hunger for money the way much of the world tells us we should (financial stability yes, but money for money’s sake, never.)  That kind greed is a trait I despise and tends to breed cruelty along with the reptilian instinct to fuck over just about any and everyone in an unending, unwinnable contest for resources, money and any kind of fame.  People don’t have names anymore; they have brands and corporate identities. That’s not the success I see for myself.  Never have.  I’m not a ‘boss’ or ‘shot-caller’, I’m just a dude who wants to do what he’s always done.  I want to tell stories; JK Rowling, Jack Kirby, Stephen King, Jim Lee…any person reading this recognizes at least two of these names.  My goal is to be numbered among them.

A similar question proved to be fairly profound, probably because it was the first time I had asked it to myself and really REALLY thought on it:”How would you feel if you reached that success?” 

How would I feel? Proud maybe?  Dumbfounded?  Totally numb to it?  How did Superman feel when he learned he could fly?  How did T’Challa feel when he became King?  Anxious maybe…  As I said before, it’s not a taste that I’m used to.  I once wrote of the possibility that I may be afraid of success.  The kind of success everyone wants an educated black man to have, where you carry everyone until you break and when you finally do, there’s no one to pick you up.  No.  I’ve decided that my success would be the weird and nerdy self-indulgent success I knew as an athlete.  That taste of personal accomplishment, knowing that I can do it because I’ve done it.  That’s the success I want.  That’s the feeling I love, when someone asks me “Hey can you handle this project” and I can say, “Yeah, no problem…" with no problem.

I think I’m gonna stop here for now but I’ll definitely be writing more about it.