You Don't Have to be Wonder Woman...

I think these walls are collapsing around me because I'm not smart. I don't think with my head, I think with my hands in terms of what I can make, what I can break, and how to put back together what was previously given up on.

No, I don't always have a steady grip on reality and sometimes my abstract sight, the only one I can really see with, wavers and I'm blind to everything around me. So I feel my way through the thorns and the storms and put my friends in poetry so that way, when they leave, I can still say we're gonna be best friends forever.

It won't really surprise any of you to know that I auditioned to be Wonder Woman. They told me I had great spirit but that cape was way too big and those boots were too tall and I just didn't have the look, you know, that superhero look. But I had great spirit! And if I just stuck around long enough, they were sure I could change the world.

But even if that doesn't quite work out, even if the world is exactly the same fifty years from now, I want to change a life. I want to pull someone out of a burning building, or at least stop the man who set the fire in the first place. I want to give out chocolate on street corners and I want to hold an umbrella for a complete stranger on a rainy day.

Don't listen to what those big people tell you, they grew tall on deceit. I'm here to tell you that it's the little things like picking up my keys off the ground and pausing to tell me that you're glad that I kept breathing one more day than planned. Those are the things that change lives.

So don't worry about trying to fly, because every time you do people are going to be standing on your cape, hoping you fall face first into the ground. You've got to start small. Go up to a stranger and thank them for being beautiful. Go up to a single mother and thank her for bringing light into the world. Tell her everything I've just told you, let her know that she's not expected to change the world, just her daughter's life.

It sounds hard, I know. It sounds impossible and society says it can't happen but don't worry. If you just try you can't do any worse to the people who have already been given up on. And it's not the world, no, it's not everything they said you had to do growing up. But it's a start.

Yeah, I might like to think in terms of creativity. In terms of making and breaking and building new homes for those given up on but in the end I close my eyes and I like to think in terms of saving you.