Odds are, when you were a kid, your parents told you that they would do anything to be your age, stressed out over a family tree project with glue entrenched in your nails and the thought of one of those cups of dirt that had pudding and gummy worms constantly in your thoughts. And odds are, this pissed you off because truth be told, they were right, but they didn’t fucking understand the amount of childhood anxiety that comes with trying to find a crayon that best represents white people when the peach color went missing from the box or whatever ambiguous pigmentation you identify with. Life is like a game of 2k. You start off on rookie mode, and eventually, you get to Superstar, where even fucking Terrence Ross can drop seventeen points on you. Life is unfair, cruel, and confusing, and we complete all of this work hoping that one day we can spend our last dying years on a golf course in Florida.
Maybe you can’t land a job, or maybe you feel so hopelessly passive with the job you currently have that for those seven minutes you are sitting in your bed, staring at the wall and rolling a booger, you feel like a hungover passenger on a neverending Spirit airlines flight.
Odds are, you’re a decent guy. You aren’t fucking Dalai Lama, but you’d like to think that you’ve been a good enough guy that most of your friends would cry if you tragically passed away. You feel like you’ve done enough to be farther than you are at this moment. I mean, you spent those nights in the library until 3 AM, and you never intentionally try to ruin anybody’s day; on occasion, you get a little too drunk and maybe take a joke too far, but you’ve done nothing that would be compared to Jimmy Saville’s life’s work. Things should be better than this, but you’re single, your LinkedIn is about as dry as Mike Greenberg’s significant other, and sometimes every few weeks, your shower thoughts get darker than Justin Tredeux’s face before going to a party. But if there’s one thing you are not, it’s the only one feeling this way. All of us have no fucking idea what we are doing. Everybody is insecure. The only people who don’t check those two boxes are psychopaths and people with enough money to get away with doing deeply disturbing things with children on private jets for years.
Just like the app Tiny Wings, life has peaks, and it has valleys. If you’re riding high, continue to do so and help your friends that can’t catch a break. And if you’re at the bottom of the hill right now, it will get better. It might not be days, months, or sometimes years, but if you work hard and continue to get up every time life swings at you like an NFL player in an elevator with his wife, you’re going to beat this. If Terrence Ross is torching your ass, don’t give up and unplug the X Box, work on your post-game and try to sneak in some fast break points.
