The Pursuit of Greatness

‘Those of us who imagine achieving greatness, often imagine doing so by a series of well-planned and executed steps. I don’t think that is how it happens for most people though. It certainly isn’t how it happened for me. Why we suppose we are somehow worthy to hold greatness by the horns and tackle it, I don’t know. We don’t have the strength to tackle greatness, we only arrive at it, when it comes to us. It ambushes us and we are left as grateful victims.’

That is how I started my diary entry the night before I delivered my internationally televised speech in parliament. Unfortunately the same eloquence and flair didn’t make their way into the speech itself. The speech began with ‘um.’

The speech I was meant to be giving, was a proposition of changes in our international policy regarding cotton trade. If we won the vote, our nation would be pioneering an incredibly large step in preventing slave trade globally, hence the attention. It was a risky step, but we had always been a pioneering people. Why I, an incredibly underqualified, recently-an-intern-secretary was delivering the speech was an interesting story.

Human rights law had sparked my interest in high school and I pursued it on a whim. I don’t think of myself as an impulsive person, but the journey of this story is full of periodic swerves off of the beaten path. I’m from a pioneering people, what can I say? On a whim I applied to the same summer internship in Greece as my friend one summer during uni. I got in, she didn’t, I lost a good friendship and got an amazing experience. I miss her.

I was working in a team in the brothels and it was hard, emotional work. By the end of the summer I was incredibly dissatisfied. There had to be more that we could be doing than talking to people. It was good work, but we were just a drop in what felt like an ever-rising ocean. Surely there was a systemic change that should be happening?

What I have realised, looking back, is that asking questions is a dangerous occupation if you want to live a quiet life. Even if you are only asking them in the abstract, asking them for someone else to answer. Big questions prey on your mind, then you begin to ask them out loud. Once the right people hear you asking it’s hard to escape.

My captor was a woman called Alice Grey. She took me under her wing and I was paid well to get her coffee, file things, tidy her inbox and write up her notes. Then one day she asked me to make her notes into a report, and then the next time I was asked to write my own notes. Soon enough I had my own workload and was promoted. She had discovered I had an aptitude for writing and I was put to work. The next thing I knew I was talking in schools, taking a masters in international law, standing as MP and now I was on international television. I’m really bad at saying no. Alice is really bad at hearing it.

The schools were really fun. I shared about my time in Greece, talked about hotlines, and fundraising. Teenagers are a tough crowd, but I felt as if they were on my level. Somehow the last five years have blurred and I never stopped being twenty-one. I belong among young people and feel utterly out of place amongst all these old men and women with their golden experience who I find in the house.

Alice says that experience isn’t linear; that one month in Greece was worth a year in court, or as a lecturer, or a great number of places. Easy for her to say, with decades of experience under her belt. I’ve realised though, that to get experience, you just have to pretend. If your write or talk as if you were 40 and knew it all, often times you’re onto something. Imagination is a powerful weapon.

After ‘um’ in my ground-breaking speech, I looked up to the room full of old men. I mentally exchanged each of them for a teenager, shuffling on an uncomfortable chair in a school hall. One particular, tall woman somewhat opposite me had hair a similar colour to Alice’s, so I made her Alice in my head. I was just talking to teenagers. This I could do.

“I’m here to talk to you about our proposed reform bill…”

It wasn’t Shakespeare, but it was something. Starting was better than staring.

The vote passed. Alice said I did a good job. Apparently ‘most people don’t usually handle something quite so substantial on their first rodeo.’ Trust Alice to throw me in the deep end. I’ve found that in these preceding days my inbox has been full to bursting with opinions, congratulations, speaking engagements and ideas. There’s more than I know what to do with, so Alice hired me an intern. I have a me. It’s bizarrely like looking at myself in a mirror.

Maybe the history books will write about this day, and I’ll be yet another of those unknown names who are paraded around in ink as an inspirational hero to motivate kids to do something with their lives. Unfortunately I’ll never have anything to say about how I’m portrayed, and they’ll make it out as all my own doing. No-one will ever know that I never did anything, I was a mascot for other people’s efforts and a face for decades of silent people before me. We don’t choose to be great; greatness chooses us and we either stay on the crazy train, or fight hard to leave it for a mundane life. Maybe it’s the pioneering blood running through my veins, or maybe it’s my lack of assertion, or perhaps it was Alice’s guidance, but the crazy train has been fun and would have been more work to leave than to stay. Perhaps secretly I wanted to see how far greatness would take me in its wake.