Ain't never gonna be Miss America

Sometimes it's really frustrating to know I've already done just about everything I can do to raise my position in my culture's food chain.

Aside from the possibility of lucking it out with a bestselling book or having some other career breakthrough, I've gone about as far as I can go. No matter what else I do, I'm always going to have several millstones around my social-status neck, and thus will always be furiously treading water just to stay where I am, much less get any farther.

There is an upside, though. Knowing that I'm never going to reach those higher levels takes a lot of pressure off of me to keep trying for them. I'll never, for instance, feel the need to carve up my body to try to meet some ridiculous attractiveness ideal because no amount of surgery will ever make me pretty enough. And I ain't never going to be straight or femme enough to make some people happy, so I'd never even try to fake it. Nothing I can do about being born poor and not having the connections for a name-brand education. Nothing I can do about having had to work my way through school and therefore never having the chance to properly train for any life's work when I was young. Nothing I can do about not having the pedigree or spotless personal-life record necessary for a political career. An awful lot of life's doors permanently closed for me the moment I was conceived, and trying to pry them open is only going to make my fingers hurt, so there's no point. Which is a relief.

And really? I think I've done pretty damned well so far with opening the doors I could. Not quite ready to rest on my laurels just yet, and there's plenty more I can do with the time/bandwidth I have left, but I think I've fulfilled quite a bit of my potential so far. The fact that I've not fulfilled potentials that were never mine to begin with shouldn't matter.