You can do

anything

It’s the first time I remember feeling that heat at the base of my neck. And my first thought was that someone touched me. Right? Like a ghost had laid a hand on me.

I turned to look. I TURNED TO LOOK, Jolly!

And I wouldn’t say nobody was there because…who knows? Do you? SOMEONE had to have delivered that message to me. SOMEONE chose then to tell me, just me, Kitty Lamb, that hey, you can do anything you want with your life.

ANYTHING

I bet it just sounds like words to you right now, Jolly. I bet it sounds like one of those phrases. But the phrase didn’t just travel from one ear to the other. It wasn’t just wind in my head:

It took root, buddy.

ROOT

Hey, Jolly, do you know the power of the word…anything? What a word, right? ANYTHING? Ha. I could’ve walked to the kitchen and grabbed a knife and killed Mom and Dad. I could’ve become a killer that night. I could’ve left the house and started walking and never looked back and started a whole new life that, years later, I would tell strangers about, I would tell them about the time I just left the house and didn’t turn back. ANYTHING. I could start studying psychology. I could start building things. I could marry, love, kill, eat, hide, run, sing, swing, punch, laugh, scream, mimic, kick, drink, move, walk, dance. I could DO anything and by doing anything I would be knocking over the first domino on the way to BECOMING anything I wanted to be. It’s impossible to explain to you what this felt like unless those words take root for you too.

Do you know that you can do anything you want with your life?

Is it easier if the words are smaller?

You can do anything you want with your life

You wanna be a musician? A doctor? A baller? Sounds like a nice revelation, right?

Right…

Here’s the thing: it became truth too fast.

Like the death of close friends.

TRUTH TOO FAST

My PERSON was bursting with the fact that, while I sat on this couch in the middle of Samhattan, Michigan, I COULD be anywhere. Why not steal a hundred bucks from Mom and Dad and walk to the bus station and just…go? It had nothing to do with loving them or hating them or hating Samhattan or anything like that at all.

This was new thinking. New me.

All at once.

And so WHY NOT leave the house and go wherever the phrase took me?

But in that moment I couldn’t even stand up, let alone make a decision. The heat had risen from the base of my neck to my ears and the top of my head.

I felt like I was gonna die from revelation. I believed I would DIE from this truth. That’s how little room I had FOR that truth, at that time, that time. Were my eyes open or closed as I sat on the couch? I can’t say for sure. I can still see the record spinning, can still hear the songs, so loud, too loud, gonna wake up all of Samhattan with this revelation, right? If my eyes were open, I was seeing only the future. About a thousand futures.