Elan Gale - You’re Not That Great: (but neither is anyone else)

Were not born laughing. Were born screaming.

Brannon Braga (producer, director, screenwriter)

Let me tell you the story of you.

A long, long time ago, a man and a woman looked at each other and said, Well, thats good enough. They fell in love, or at least they liked each other enough to want to get naked in the same room. Either the first night they met, or maybe a few months later, the man put his penis into the womans vagina and gave her three relatively unpleasant minutes of grunting and sweating and thrusting before rolling onto his back and feeling pretty good about himself, while the woman regretted ever giving him her phone number. As the woman lay there, wondering why this man couldnt even bring her halfway to orgasm, a tiny little sperm somehow lazily stumbled towards an egg and weaseled its way in.

Those two people are your mother and father. That is how you were created. You are likely the result of two people being whatever about each other and deciding not to put latex between their genitals.

The following nine months you lived inside your mother, stealing most of her nutrients and generally making her feel sick and woozy. She had to quit drinking and smoking and missed out on a lot of the things she wanted to do because you were growing inside of her, kicking intermittently for no fucking reason. You just swam around in there, contributing nothing, and sucking vitamins through a tube like some kind of vampire. Literally, you began your life as a leech.

Finally, one glorious day, once youd drained your mother of her last ounce of joy and energy, you decided to go ahead and make your grand entrance into the world. What followed was ten or so gruesome hours of screaming and general genital discomfort. No matter how great you think you are, its important that you remember that your first act in this beautiful world was to cause the highest possible amount of pain to the person who loved you the most. Nice work.

The immediate future wasnt much better, to be honest. You spent the next three years as a waste-manufacturing facility. When you werent making unpleasant sounds, you were making unpleasant smells, shitting and pissing and vomiting everywhere. You made abundantly sure that your parents never slept. You made them feed you every few hours, which for your mother often demanded public nudity. Any gift you were given, you would put in your mouth and then immediately throw onto the floor. Basically, you made sure to make every single moment of your parents lives difficult while offering little reward other than the promise that maybe, one day, youd turn into a worthwhile person. This is how you treated the people who spent every waking hour just trying to keep you alive.

To strangers, you were no better. You ruined dinner for countless families in countless restaurants and your mere presence made the already dreary business of air travel even more unbearable. Your incessant wailing, your tantrums, your screaming bloody murder, went on for years.

But not to worry, you would soon escape infancy and become a child and surely you would finally become something worthwhile, right? You would become self-sufficient and selfless in no time, right?

Well, not quite. Instead you just became a bottomless money pit. School supplies, new clothes, and birthday parties drained your parents bank accounts. Playdates, sleepovers, and thankless PTA meetings wasted countless hours of their lives. On top of that, you began to develop emotionally and required constant coddling. You demanded to be told that you were a good boy or a good girl when in fact you were pretty terrible. But instead of sitting you down on your little ass and telling you that you were slowly killing them, your parents encouraged this selfishness.

The very first bit of respite your parents got from the twenty-four-hour nightmare that was raising you came when you were old enough to begin your education. You were finally sent to school (which gave your parents a chance to just feel alive again and maybe fuck without you in earshot) and while there you would make drawings. And these drawingsif you can even call them thatwerent just bad; they were total garbage. You were asked to draw a house and your parents, and what you ended up with looked like two malformed hot dogs in front of a big brown cube. And you probably drew a ridiculous sun in the corner like some kind of idiot who has no sense of scale and no idea that if the sun were really that close it would burn all of our skin off.

This is where things went from bad to worse.

When you came home from school with that disgusting drawing in your hand, your parents should have lit the page on fire and duct-taped your fingers together to make sure that you never got it in your mind to pick up a crayon again. But something told them not to do that. Something deep down inside told your parents not to be truthful with you. So instead of looking you square in the eyes and telling you to keep trying until it wasnt such a piece of shit, they smiled at you and taped your monstrous masterpiece to the refrigerator door. They told you that they were proud of you and called you their little artist. And you felt so good about yourself.

And on that day, they turned you into the self-loving, egomaniacal monster that you are today!

The day your horrendous ego was born, it began whispering sweet nothings to you from inside your head. Its the little voice inside that tells you that you deserve to have a good life. Its the voice inside that tells you that you are special. Its the voice that tells you that you are strong and powerful and can have anything you want. It tells you that youre good enough, youre smart enough, and doggone it, people like you.

From the day you brought your garbage artwork home from school to yesterday when your friends lied to you and told you that you look good in those pants, that voice has been growing and growing, larger and larger, and now it is the only voice you hear and the only voice you trust. You somehow believe that you are destined for big things. You believe that youre special. You believe that youre important.