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| "Do you trust me?" -Aladdin |
(Just as an aside, I'm not bashing superlatives out of bitterness. In fact, I won the most highly-coveted superlative in all the land. We'll get there..)
One morning in early 2006, each member of my senior class was handed a list of every insecurity known to teens. And they were not just listed, they were listed next to the word MOST or BEST, and we had to decide which blessed senior deserved each title. High school aspirations like being athletic or good-looking were no longer inclusive and subjective categories. They were to be narrowed down to one boy and one girl, leaving us to judge each of our friends and decide who won high school. Because, high school, it turns out, is a state-mandated pageant, with no child left behind.
All of the usual categories were there... Best smile, Most Likely to Succeed, etc... but there was one unusual category that stowed away onto the list that year. One that, upon reading it for the first time, literally made me ask out loud, "What does this even mean???" And that category was Most Trustworthy. I'm not supporting any superlative categories here, but I do think this one was truly a waste of everyone's time. Either you can trust someone or you can't. There is very little hierarchy involved.
Anyways, suffice it to say, everyone wanted this honor. People were campaigning for weeks. Bribing one lunch table at a time, begging to be voted the Most Trustworthy member of the class of '06. (Nope). So it was much to everyone's envy when I took home the title; the least interesting and relevant one on the page (speaking in superlatives).
Winning a high school superlative is like being handed the first cup of water at the one mile mark during a marathon (not in my particular experience, but I imagine the others were like this). You crush that paper thimble like a champion and move forward, a little too confidently, until someone passes you a half a mile later. It's a fake happy ending.
Orson Welles explained it poignantly when he said, "if you want a happy ending that depends, of course, on when you stop the story." Yearbook superlatives provide a pretend conclusion, granting undue power to kids who have yet to understand basic life principles like paying rent. I, for one, started abusing my democratically-instated authority immediately, and have continued to do so ever since, believing that whatever I think should be trusted as correct all the time. A superlative is not a crown you pass on, after all. Once the Most Trustworthy, always the Most Trustworthy, am I right? No? Hm.
This is a long way of saying that happy endings are not something to strive for, because they are just strategically-placed stopping points inserted into the middle of the story. Instead, the most we can do is strive to do our best every day and try to be happy with where we are in our own tales, knowing that both good and bad pieces are on their way. Because life isn't a movie that ends as we stand under the confetti* after being named the Most Trustworthy Girl, Class of 2006. And it's certainly not a contest. It's a rich and whole-hearted story that extends long past the day you graduate high school. Trust me.
Love Love Love,
Kat
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I know you pretty well and I'm not sure that I can trust that this story is true. Maybe you won "most likely to tell a lie about her high school yearbook" and now you are trying to live up to it. There are two identical twins, one always tells the true and one always lies. If you ask, "Which one are you?" Whoever it is will say "the truth teller."
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