Am I "you"?

“You were born to accomplish great things in the world”, these are far from comforting words to tell a child. However, I was “not like the others”, never. From an early age, my parents made sure that I understood the necessity, the pressure of becoming part of the elite. They shaped my ideals, and I grew up with an appreciation for the sublime, a taste for distinction, and dreams of infinite power. 

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In my eyes —and mostly through what they told me — there were excellent people who deserved to be admired and talked about. The rest would forever remain unknown. For my family, this was not solely a matter of integrity, or “moral excellence” but rather of fame and importance. “Our world is cruel; this is the hard truth”.  As long as you could learn to appear to others a hero they would look up to — “one that would fill their hearts with admiration and be a reflection of their better selves”— you could dominate the world. 

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How unfortunate that the same people who promised me a grand future were the ones who hindered my access to the summit. Those of you who were as young as me at the time, might not remember the event that changed my life forever, or only through fragments of conversation. As for me, everything happened in a blur : the accusations, the online articles, the words “scandal”, “embezzlement”, “illegal”, and “prison”. Even these memories are powerless against time. I might have been devastated back then. Now, the only thing I know is that my parents were good people, until they were not. 

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 Their humiliation followed me everywhere. Later, I learned that what I had always thought to be intelligence was manipulation to others. To alter the meaning of words was to lie. To befriend only for personal advantages was to deceive. To become someone you were not was to hold a facade. Each of these words carried a new signification in my mind. For the first time, I learned that my parents were not in possession of the absolute truth, then that there were many truths. My moral compass was broken. 

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Young and alone, I adhered to the opinion of the majority. Rightfulness, honesty, devotion ; a mission. By showing how different I was from those who had raised me, maybe people would regard me as a hero. It was like killing two birds with one stone. By creating my own path, I would also demonstrate the strength of my mind in resisting immoral ideas. Unfortunately, the better I was, the more people believed I was trying to hide a great flaw (for my parents also had a good reputation at some point). With nothing else to do and close to no chance of joining a governmental office again, I turned to non-profit work. Especially because they were in need of more people during the war.

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At night, I continued to long for the top of the mountains, the exhilaration I had imagined upon contemplating the valleys under me. These dreams slowly turned towards exploration…Years before my parents were out and they left their office open, I sometimes peaked into the forbidden “books”. These artifacts were the only sources I could access without being monitored. I learned about the time “before”, the wonders of the ocean, the mystery of the forests and beauty of fields of flowers ; world-peace. They contrasted with the destroyed landscape, filled with chemical waste. In my mind, success became the moment where one is above everything else, gazing alone at the aurora borealis. 

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I felt betrayed. You might not understand and might view this as pretentiousness coming from a place of privilege. Reality is, I suffer because I would rather not have been fed impossible hopes from the beginning of my life. So as now, anything else, any reduced version than that “extraordinary” future was now tasteless. I saw myself as someone lost in a desert, who had walked for days towards what seemed like an oasis, only to find it empty. 

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I wondered for as long as that short time could be if any of her words were real. 
Whether this was a fiction or not. Nevertheless, it reminded of myself, in an odd way…
Not that our stories were anything like each others. There was humanity in her struggles ; having someone to connect to made me nostalgic. 
It was a « variation » from the day to day routine, I had been keeping so far.