Never Fully Allowed to Arrive
A piece about potential, delay, pressure, and the feeling of never quite becoming.
Trey Robinson
There is a particular loneliness in being described as potential.
Potential is a compliment that never cashes. It keeps you in the hallway. It lets other people love a version of you that has not caused them any trouble yet. It turns delay into a character flaw, and arrival into something you are always almost ready for.
I spent years trying to become the person the word promised. The closer I got, the more the target moved.
This book is, among other things, a record of what it costs to stop waiting for permission to be here.