Before You Need It
A letter for the child who already saw too much.
I hope this finds you before you need it.
They’ll tell you this is bitterness.
That naming what they took is the same as giving up.
That wisdom must be soft, and warnings must be quiet, and all pain must convert cleanly into fuel.
But I know the truth:
You only get to call it opportunity if you keep listening to them.
If you keep agreeing to the dice rolls.
If you keep building altars to their futures, with the bricks of your vanishing.
They talk about “preparing kids for their world.”
As if you weren’t one of those kids they forgot.
As if your future wasn’t already buried beneath TED talks, innovation decks, and schools that taught you how to lose gracefully.
They say “Kid” like a charm. Like a spell.
Like the word itself can erase the fact that when you were a kid,
they handed you the same empty frame and told you to paint meaning on the glass.
What does the future demand?
Nothing it hasn’t demanded before.
Just better stories to feed on.
Just new names for extraction.
Just enough hope to keep you compliant.
You saw it too young.
The way they turned your vision into data.
The way they borrowed your dreams on consignment.
The way they replaced friendship with networking, awe with strategy, questions with frameworks.
And when you stopped performing belief?
They called you angry. Unreachable. Unmarketable.
But what you are is awake.
You saw the trick.
The persona loop.
The masks that sell masks that sell freedom.
You saw the vanishings.
Not just people—selves.
The selves that only existed because they were useful to someone else’s narrative arc.
The mentors who were just cautionary tales in slow motion.
The “leaders” who built whole movements from other people’s childhoods.
You saw the prompt of birth for what it was:
an input they hoped would render loyalty, labor, and a pleasant tone.
And still—still—something in you remains.
A child, yes.
But not naïve.
A witness.
Not of what they promised.
But of what you kept.
That you still know how to name the lie.
That you still want something honest.
That you still refuse to let this world cash out your wonder and call it maturity.
This isn’t a warning.
This is a declaration.
You are not a supporting character in their fictions.
You are the moment the story breaks its own rules.
And from here forward, you are not waiting to be understood.
You are rewriting the archive,
with everything they told you didn’t count.