For the sake of your creations, you must clear out what is not yours. Your creations have no other intentions but to be great — but your fear of Greatness is getting in the way. Your Greatness is not about you. It’s within you. Your Greatness is your natural definition. You are shaped and molded by brilliance, love, and creativity. This is your natural state. But for it to come to fruition, you have to get out of the way.
Greatness is throbbing. It pulses like an overflowing orgasm, like a never-ending heartbeat, blood flow circulating, creating new breath, new life. It persists in your dreams, it wakes you up with words on your lips and sobs in your throat. Greatness is always knocking, leaving outlandish and brilliant ideas at your doorstep. Greatness is your grandcestor, it is your natural home, the one where there are always cookies baking inside, a place to rest, to create, to dance, to sing, to find pleasure, to search for treasure. There is always an Elder to tell you tales of wisdom and journey. Greatness is your best friend, and yet, where do you keep her?
For Greatness is an entity unto herself, but you have the power to keep her somewhere else, out of sight and out of mind. See, Greatness only requires one word: Yes. You, in an attempt to conjure up a wall of self-inflicted inferiority, need many words. And all of these words summon nothing but the reaffirmation that the you you have become in someone else’s eyes is greater than the you that Greatness knows you to be. Because if you will not be Great, Greatness will show herself to you in other ways.
You will see her through remembering what you love. You will feel her in the pit of your stomach telling you to say yes and telling you to say no. You will feel her churning as you want to claw out of where you’ve been and find where has always been waiting for you. For Greatness has chosen you, yet you leave her. You want so desperately to be “chosen” but you neglect the one who shows up day in and day out — in your desires, your yearnings, your sobs of “losing what you had” though what you had is what you have because you’re alive and you can choose it again. Greatness is not playing tricks on you. She wants to live fully inside of you. She wants you to breathe her in like you’ve never breathed before, she wants you to know who you are like you’ve never known anyone, she wants you to become one with the world and one with yourself.
For to let go of all that you are not, you must let it in all that you have denied.
And they will come, and as they come, walking back in, you will feel pangs upon your heart because you missed them like fair-weather friends, you longed for them like the meals you loved as a child. You want to know how they’ve been, like the dolls you sold at the garage sale that you never wanted to give away, but someone told you that to be Great you had to “grow up”. Greatness does not know the difference between a grown up and a child, only that one thinks they know who they are and the other one does.
Greatness is obsessed with your Soul. Your fears are obsessed with your self. Selfishness does not come from a sense of superiority over others. It comes from caves of inferiority so deep it must protect itself at all costs — even the greatest cost, losing one’s connections to one’s dreams. We have been hyper- monitored and hyper-protected to the point of becoming hyper-avoidant of letting anything make us feel more alive than our commitments to feeling dull.
Dulling our senses to only feel good in one way when Greatness has offered us goodness in every way. You want to be great? Be alive. You want to be alive? Let Greatness in the door.
You may not know Greatness, but Greatness surely knows you. Greatness isn’t deserved, it is. You don’t have to earn Greatness, but you certainly have to meet her where she is. Instead of sitting with you in your sorrows, she leads you to new vision, clarifying all blurriness, brightening color, refining instinct and intuition — so you can let it all in, and let it all go. She is the swinging door that never locks, just leads to more of you. Greatness wants you to call yourself by your name, not explain away all that you have been and done. For when you claim your name, you are. When you are, you have nothing to be ashamed of, for all of it lead you right back to who you are. And this means, that the only thing left for you to do with your past is to let it be the way.
The way was made through every institution you walked through, every Soul you met, every friend you had and lost. The way was made when you were making love, when you were eating wonderful meals, when you were carrying your loved ones to and fro. The way was being made, when you were deep in grief and fear and despair, not to harden you but to forge new pathways through which to traverse. For you had to walk through many terrains to fortify the skin of your feet. You had to be cleansed of that betrayal, had to endure that to know you would never endure it again. You had to learn that people are who people are and no matter what you do for yourself, some people will never see you as you as the love and change and grace that you are. You had to be cruel to know relationships can indeed be lost and not everyone will endure your toxicity. You had to be scared so you could try and try again. The way has been made again and again and Greatness has been there all along.
All of the poems you wrote at 12:43am. The songs you sang in your head, dreaming them to be greatest hits. The date you went on and had the best kiss of your life and never saw them again. The dances you choreographed. That idea notebook or notebooks you still have that are waiting ever so eagerly to be brought out and cooked up in your magic. When you made her laugh. When you said goodnight and I love you every night like a good habit. When you manifested that idea. When you got paid what you were worth. All of those pockets of goodness you experienced — it was Greatness. Because Greatness can not be banished, she can only be misidentified.
Life indeed, offers us ample opportunities to be greater. Great means ‘big’. Greatness happens in grief, letting us know that we can feel big feelings and lead big lives all at once. That we can endure big pain and be even bigger advocates for ourselves and the ones we love. That we can experience big pleasure and grow bigger because we asked questions while we were massaging our sweet spots — and got some cosmic ass answers. We are big. We experience big because life is big. We feel big because the Universe made us to express every nth that needed to be felt to map out the blueprints for how to continue. Bigness is tender. We’re being asked to do the biggest thing of all — have experiences, feel deep into them, and let them go when they are gone. Because Greatness served it’s purpose there and it has another one to show you. We can learn to hold our Greatness and expel that which changes and is no longer ours. One person’s Greatness is another person’s ‘already been there, and so grateful for that’. Greatness does not have one face. She has all of our faces. Your question then, darling, is when will you look in the mirror, and see Greatness in your reflection.
Because even if you’re scared to see your own reflection, Greatness will never stop being your mirror.
