When I think about legacy, I think about what people generations from now will think of me.  Will I even be known?  Frankly, if this is after my time, does it even matter?  In my younger days I was far more secure in my knowledge of the world because that knowledge revolved around what already happened.  I thought I knew it all and could make choices based on what I saw and what I felt.  If only it were that simple.  There were times I thought I made a stand for something when in reality I just made a scene—and that is not the legacy I want to leave behind.  It can be a fine line between notoriety and notorious and my goal was never to be known as anything but a conduit for change, a smart person who understood what needed to be done and was instrumental in arriving at a mutually beneficial outcome for everyone.  I wanted to be a problem solver and someone to help shift things so they were better for everyone.  I mean the goal wasn’t to be remembered but it also wasn’t to be nothing—I wanted to have enough of an impact now that I could put the voices of others’ criticism behind me, secure in who I was.  I wanted to just do something I found valuable that provided value to others.

I fell into the trap of getting caught up in what other people thought I was.  I spent more time trying to convince them to look beyond my appearance to see what I was inside than I did focusing on my work—to stop looking at my stature and realize how big my ideas were.  I thought people had to believe in me BEFORE I did anything of value, that they needed to take me seriously so I could do serious things.  I deferred to too many people whether they were the adults around me, trying to make them proud, or my peers, trying to make them accept me.  It created instability in my own sense of self that lasted long into adulthood.  I still feel the pull of that at times.  Now as I’m getting older, I do think a bit more about my legacy.  Watching our numbers grow smaller as our friends and family leave or pass away puts a different light on the future.  We start to see that we, too will face that inevitable conclusion some day and that begs the question what do we do with our time?    

I worried so often about what people thought of me and learned the hard way that anything I did meant absolutely nothing—not getting chosen for the awards, not being asked to dance, being remembered as a suck up rather than top of my class, being passed over for job opportunities. That’s the other side of this: we don’t always have a say in how we are remembered or perceived by people.  Our legacy will be whatever future generations make it, some fabled story from once upon a time that either ended in triumph or disaster.  No one talks about the fact that for the majority of us we don’t live in the extremes of good or bad.  Some people may want us to live like that or may function with that belief, that but the majority of our day is spent simply BEING.  I wasted a lot of time trying to get people to see me in a certain way, and even while I’m still here that was misinterpreted. I can only imagine the future, either fading away or being remembered as nothing close to who I am.  And the truth is if we are trying to make an impact while we are here, we don’t need to move the whole mountain—the stone makes a ripple too.  Our existence is enough to make an impact now—we have no say in what happens in the future—so just live now.