born for greatness
on ambition, insecurity, and one very bad Friday night at Yale
Author’s note: I’ve never published fiction before. I’m not sure I know how. What I do know is that Olivia is both me and not me – which is maybe just another way of saying she’s the truest thing I could write on this topic without calling it a personal essay. I hope you enjoy it, even though it’s outside everything I usually do on here (maybe especially because of that).
Isaac was sitting cross-legged on the carpet when Olivia first noticed she was saying the wrong things. He had a joint between his fingers and a way of listening that made her feel like she was failing a test she hadn’t studied for. Around them, people sat in loose circles and, unlike Olivia, seemed both sure of themselves and uninterested in proving it.
“I asked you what you liked to do,” Isaac said as he took another long drag, the thick white smoke curling into perfect loops as it made its upward descent into the night sky.
Olivia looked away and tried to breathe through her mouth. The smoke clung to her hair, her sweatshirt, the back of her throat. She wasn’t sure why she was here. Olivia didn’t like the smell of joints, being in small enclosed spaces with other sweaty bodies, nor, particularly, talking to strangers. The problem was that it was her first semester at Yale, and she had been told that securing friends in the first weeks was crucial. And so, without thinking about what she really wanted to do on a warm Friday night in September, she had followed a group of other socially anxious freshman across the quad, past the darkened libraries and into a small apartment off campus.
Olivia had a habit of doing a lot of things without knowing why she did them. Her why always arrived late, if it arrived at all. The only thing Olivia really knew about herself was that she was born for greatness. This was a fact she had learned early, and upon learning it, wound tightly into her heart for safekeeping.
Over the years, Olivia would accomplish feats that served to reaffirm this early inkling. In second grade, she could read before all the other kids. She won the sixth grade spelling bee. At the end of middle school, she was awarded Valedictorian of her class. Mrs. Collins once told her parents she was a gifted child with an understanding of numbers beyond her years, after which her parents promptly enrolled her in calculus at the local community college. In her senior yearbook, she was voted most likely to be the next president of the United States. No matter that Olivia had thought the Electoral College was an actual place and that George W. Bush and George H.W. Bush were the same person – this particular superlative was, and had always been, rightly hers.
“Was being senior class treasurer your passion?” Isaac continued, unaware, or at least unbothered, by Olivia’s silence. The word treasurer landed somewhere between pity and patronizing, and Olivia felt her face warm.
“I was good at it.”
Isaac’s blue eyes lingered on her for a moment before drifting away.
“Everyone likes what they’re good at,” she added, defensively. She shook her head, embarrassed, unsure what she had misunderstood.
“I used to have this anxiety about success,” Isaac said. The word success rolled off his tongue the way someone would say cancer or death sentence. “I was constantly worried that everyone around me was working harder than me and that somehow I was going to get left behind if I wasn’t trying hard enough, or working long enough, or just being, I don’t know, enough.”
He let out a short laugh, almost embarrassed by how serious he had gotten.
“But then I kind of learned to say fuck that.” He waved a hand as if to brush the whole thing away. “At some point I realized none of it was actually keeping me safe. Or ahead. Or whatever I thought I was trying to be. So I stopped caring as much. About outcomes. About optimizing everything.” He shrugged. “I still do my work. I just don’t let it run my life.”
He said this lightly, like it was something anyone could decide on a Tuesday afternoon.
“Oh,” Olivia said.
She waited for him to elaborate – to explain how, exactly, one arrived at that conclusion, what the intermediate steps were, what had replaced the anxiety. She wondered whether there was a system, a timeline, a checklist. She also wondered, suddenly and with a small flicker of panic, what happened to people who genuinely didn’t care. Did they squander their potential? Live in the shadows of who they could have been? Were they really content, or was the drift toward complacency a slow death, one endured solely through an understanding of the opposite: death by unfilled expectations?
“But,” she said carefully, “you still do well, right?”
Isaac smiled at her then, not unkindly, but with a softness that felt almost condescending.
Olivia felt small. It was the same feeling she got when her name wasn’t called at an award ceremony, when the answer to a math problem refused to clarify itself, when doubt of her greatness slipped from the unreachable margins of her mind into conscious thought.
She stayed long enough to make it look like she wasn’t leaving because of that, long enough to nod at something someone said from across the circle, long enough to force a laugh that didn’t belong to her, long enough to accept a red Solo cup she didn’t drink from. When she finally stood, her legs tingled from sitting cross-legged too long, she murmured an excuse to no one in particular – something about being tired, an early morning, a reading she had to finish. Isaac didn’t try to stop her. Someone opened the door for her with a lazy kind of kindness, and the hallway air hit her like relief.
In truth, it wasn’t Isaac’s words that had seized upon her. It was Yale itself. It occurred to Olivia, dimly and unpleasantly, that this might be the first place she had ever entered without knowing where she ranked.
Olivia collected proof of her greatness the way other kids collected baseball cards. She stored them carefully in the crevices of her mind, pulling them out to admire whenever she felt sad or lonely. Didn't get invited to Sarah Hernandez's make-a-splash-back-to-school bash that year pool parties were definitely in? At least she had her smartest kid at space camp card. She replayed her proudest moments like film reels: the local writing contest she'd won, her short story published in the paper; debate regionals; the organization she'd started that donated twenty thousand dollars to hurricane relief in Haiti.
And so she knew what to do with this feeling. In the thin autumn dark of her dorm room, she went through her proof one by one, holding each up to the light. Collected over eighteen years against moments of doubt precisely like this one. She saved the best for last—the card she'd been waiting her entire life to collect: Yale. She took it out slowly. It could only be brought out in the worst of moments – a special hail mary.
The thick, crisp envelope had appeared in the Kims’ mailbox on a beautiful November afternoon. Too heavy to contain a rejection letter. As Olivia held it – cold air filling her lungs, red and orange leaves crunching beneath her feet – she felt a quiet, sublime assuredness. The leaves were falling from the trees, as they were supposed to. Olivia Kim was going to Yale, as she was supposed to.
But her prized memory was no longer making her feel better, as it was supposed to.
She turned back to her old baseball cards, and looked at each one plainly. Cheap paraphernalia collected as a childish source of pride. Translating to no real value beyond personal nostalgia. More often than not afforded by her parents’ money.
As Olivia lay in her bed, a new and unsettling collection of thoughts began to swirl around her head like a snowstorm. Why had she equated academic success with greatness, as if the two were inextricably linked? What had she done her entire life that made her something other than a good student? She could get a perfect score on the SAT, write a compelling essay on how Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby criticizes the fallibility of the American Dream, and spout useless facts about cells, but she didn’t know what she liked to do for fun. She was so assured of her own greatness without ever having bothered to define what she wanted to be great at. And didn’t everyone who wanted to be great for the sake of being great never actually become great?
For the first time in her life, she wondered what would happen if she stopped counting. The thought made her uneasy. It also made her strangely light – like taking off shoes she didn’t know she was wearing.
Somewhere down the hall, a door slammed. Somewhere else, someone laughed. The building settled into itself, old and unbothered. Outside her window, the quad lay open and dark, the grass flattened where people had been sitting earlier – talking without urgency, leaving without explanation, existing without expecting.
She closed her eyes. The room was quiet. She didn't reach for anything.
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This is lovely. I was never good at school so I had to unlearn the attachment to academic achievement quickly. I'm happy for you and Olivia, life is meant to be enjoyed and experienced while trophies are nice, we should actually enjoy ourselves