Adults are always telling kids they can be anything they want. But is that true? On paper, maybe, in places with lots of upward mobility. But on an existential level? Aren’t we inexorably drawn to certain things, by virtue of what we’re actually good at and interested in?

I remember one day during my first week of college. My new friend Daniel and I had gone to the Keenan dorm chapel to play piano after music class. (This was very random. Neither of us lived in Keenan, and there were about 15 pianos in the music building, which we’d just left. Yet this would soon become normal: exploring random parts of campus with Daniel, usually in pursuit of a piano.)

Daniel sat down at the piano and began playing The Beatles’ “I Will” with a grace and abandon I’d never heard from anyone in the same room as me. This was the stuff of performers, of artists, of musicians, not the sheet-music-obsessed pretense I’d been living under. Here was this beautiful soul who’d randomly latched onto me (possibly because we were both horrendous at music theory), who now shyly looked up at me and said, “Do you sing?”

I thought of the million adults who had buried me in good wishes all summer long. College is great! No one knows you, so you can start completely over! You’re a blank slate! You can be whoever you want!

College was not great. I’d cried everyday since I’d arrived, cursing my choices that brought me here, wishing I’d gone anywhere else. But now, Daniel. His smile was kind, his playing hypnotic, and I wanted to be his friend. I wanted to sing. He didn’t know I was a garbage singer. And according to the invisible chorus of adults in my head, he didn’t have to know. Maybe in college, I was a great singer.

“Do you sing?” he’d said.

“Yes,” I said. And we sang.

Who knows how long I’ve loved you? I know I always will…

It was instantly clear that I was a terrible singer. Yet Daniel didn’t seem to notice. He kept playing, his own voice straining and leaping from note to note, both our voices landing precariously like two people landing on stepping stones across a stream, or on pillows across a lava floor. He sang with me, in his shy, gravelly, imperfect voice, just happy to be making music.

We moved on to easier things: “Bridge Over Troubled Water,” that Death Cab song about heaven that everyone was obsessed with in 2010, “Tiny Dancer.” Through it all, my voice cracked and broke and struggled, and Daniel looked up after each and said, “What about..?” or “Another?” until it was dark and we left to get dinner.

What point am I making here? That adults are liars, and you can’t randomly be good at something just because you say you are?

Or is it that adults are right, and that in new places you do get to be a blank slate? That by being willing to be a beginner, you give yourself the grace to become good at something you’ve always wanted to try? That by opening up that tiny crack of Why not give it a shot, you might actually start to become who you want to be?

I’m Kimberly, and I’m a book coach and ghostwriter specializing in memoir and business books with themes of mental health, spirituality, and social justice. Book a free call with me to see how we might work together to bring your book to life.