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A Decision to Face Before Turning Thirty
On dealing with our personal histories
For years I had believed that one’s brilliance and relentless hard work, and maybe just a few drops of good luck, could outweigh the burdens and constraints one is born into. In my late teens and twenties, I carried the weightlessness of potential, that marvelous currency of youth that seems inexhaustible until suddenly, it isn’t. Now, as my thirtieth-year approaches, I find myself confronting the one truth I thought I had evaded: we are all, in the end, tethered to our personal histories.
The realization came like a slow, persistent dusk. In the half-light of my late twenties, I began to discern the outlines of my limitations — not the imagined ones that had haunted my youth, but the real boundaries formed by decisions made or unmade, by privileges granted or withheld, by the lottery of birth and circumstance that shapes us before we can shape ourselves.
I had chosen art.
With the conviction of someone who believes they are exceptional enough to defy probability, I pursued creation and expression over security. There is beauty in this choice, or so I told myself during the lean years when possibility still outweighed practicality. But beauty provides cold comfort when faced with a grandmother needing a crucial medical treatment I…
