They tell you, when you’re young, that you’re a block of marble. A clean, perfect, untouched slab of potential. You can be anything, they say. Anything you want. You don’t know what it is yet, and if you think you do, you’re probably wrong. It’s just this big, beautiful block, and the world is your oyster.
What a load of horseshit.
The truth is, the second you’re born, they hand out the goddamn chisels. Your parents get the first crack at you, knocking off a few big, clumsy chunks with their own fucked-up ideas of what you should be. Then comes the school, the church, the government, your first girlfriend, your dead-end job. All of them, standing in line with their little hammers, eager to chip away at you, to shape you into something that fits neatly into their world.
You have some control, sure. You can pick up your own little chisel and hammer. You can start chipping away at the things you know you don’t want to be. “I don’t want to be a goddamn coward like my old man.” Chip. “I don’t want to be a bitter, resentful bastard like my boss.” Chip. That’s the only real control you have: the power of refusal.
The other choice is to just let them have at it. You decide to be a Mormon, and the church comes in with its own set of tools, starts chiseling away all the fun, jagged edges. You decide to have kids at seventeen with no goddamn education, and the environment you just created, the poverty and the desperation, it starts hammering away at you, day after day.
And here’s the thing they don’t tell you, the part that should keep you up at night: once a piece is chiseled away, you can’t ever get it back.
Every day, a little piece of you is gone. A little bit of compromise, a big chunk of a dream. It just chips away, every week, as the clock ticks and ticks and ticks. You don’t want to be married anymore? Too bad. That part of your life, the part where you were a free man, has been chiseled away. You don’t want to work at the post office for the rest of your goddamn life? Should have thought of that before they chiseled away your youth.
The key thing to remember is this: you can’t recover what’s been chiseled away. Ever.
And then, one day, you’re fifty-six years old. You’re standing on your porch, watching a beautiful sunset, the city lights starting to flicker on, a cool breeze on your face. And you look down at what’s left of your statue.
Is it the thing you wanted to build? Is this the job you wanted, this 9-to-5 grind? Is this the wife you wanted to grow old with? Are these the kids you sacrificed your body and your money and your goddamn time for?
And you realize, with a cold, quiet certainty, that you’re never going to be a ballerina. You’re never going to be an astronaut. You’re never going to be twenty years old again, with the whole world in front of you. All those possibilities, all that beautiful, untouched marble, it’s all gone. Chiseled away by a thousand different hands, most of them not your own.
That’s the universal humor of it all, isn’t it? They give you all these opportunities, all this potential, and then they watch as you and the world around you just chip it all to shit.
If any of that makes any goddamn sense to you, if you can see that marble statue standing there in your own head, then I challenge you. The next time you’re sitting on the toilet, hiding from your kids, take a pause. The next Sunday night, when you’re dreading going back to that job you hate, take a pause. The next time you’re nursing a hard drink after a night of fucking some ugly, desperate person, take a pause.
And ask yourself, “What the fuck happened to me?”
Then watch. Watch as your own ego, that little coward in your head, starts to make the compromises. “Well, he’s not that bad. Look, you’re doing okay. Maybe next year will be better.”
Or maybe you’ll finally see it. You’ll look at that little, half-finished statue you’ve let the world carve you into, and you’ll ask yourself the only question that matters.
Is that the monument you want to be remembered by? A monument to a lack of achievement? A monument to fear? A monument to a quiet, comfortable, and completely wasted life?
Or are you going to pick up the goddamn hammer yourself and start smashing the parts you hate before it’s too late?
