“What did you want to do? What did you want to be?”
What was all that hard work for? That’s what he was asking me. The truth was I didn’t know. I never knew. I just liked being in school. It was the closest thing I had to a safety net. Or maybe it was something like Stockholm syndrome. It was what I understood. The clear design of it, the easily navigable benchmarks. Every week, there were dozens of opportunities for me to succeed. I did it for the A. The gold star.”