By MissGradStudent
As I listened to Ed Sheeran’s Divide for possibly the hundredth time, I had the stark realization that I will never actually get to meet him. My life, based on its current trajectory, will never rise to a level that will put me on his radar. I will forever be inconsequential; the world will never know me. I will go from my job to my house and have small problems everyday until the end of my days. And that will be my life just as it is the life of many others. Then I, like everyone else, will die having done nothing more than work and live a small life. And I hope there’s a God because if not, then what the fuck was the point of all of this.
I’ve always been slightly nihilistic in that I believe that life is meaningless and the concept of it is kind of cruel. But I’ve been able to find purpose in the idea that everyone deserves to have a decent life for the short period of time that they are here. So I’ve dedicated my time to civil rights and making life better for the upcoming generations. However, the more I work and learn the more I find this path in life disheartening. Black people have been oppressed for almost 400 years in America, if you count oppression as beginning with slavery, longer otherwise. What can I do in 40 to 60 years that will undo all that has been done, especially when we, as a nation, can’t even come to turns with that idea that something wrong has been done? Even if I managed to do something, what can I do that will last? Because Martin Luther King, Jr., Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, Thurgood Marshall were all great men who did fantastic things, but their achievements have been undone with time. And even if I succeed, it does nothing for my actual life. I’ll still leave my house everyday with the implicit fear that today will be the day that someone hate crimes me.
What’s more is that the other day I realized that if I want to abandon my current goals for something else, if I just want to be a lost twenty-something year old who is “trying to find” herself, then I’d have to cough up almost $200,000, the total of my law school and undergrad debt. In other words, I’m trapped in a life I decided to live when I was 17 years old. At 17, I think I imagined my life becoming something great, something transcendent and grand. I imagined that I would lead a life that would one day put me in the ranks of all those idols that everyone knows, even if I wasn’t a household name. I would “Be Somebody”.
But now I know that I will never meet Ed Sheeran.
Invisible Womanhood 