I’ve always hated motivational quotes.

Why?

They felt like lies. They still do—many of them. Arguably, the worst of them are the group of lines, “you can do anything", “your only limitation is your mind”, “everything you can imagine is possible" etc.

I’ve never believed we could be anything we wanted. Never, not even as a child. It had always seemed obvious to me that that wasn’t possible. Could I fly (literally)? Could I go undo the time I wasn’t alert and got chased by a dog from the road down to my house? And if I think now still, there are so many things I don’t believe is possible.

I know, I know, maybe I’m missing the point. Maybe they don’t literally mean we can be anything and do everything. But then, if they don’t mean it literally, doesn’t that make it all lies? 

Anyways, I’m thinking of this now because I’ve found a limitation of my person. Another limitation actually—I’ve always been aware of some of my limits.

The people that said my only limitation was my mind clearly hadn’t met my body. 

What can my mind do when it wants to read but my bones have been battered by ten continuous hours of class through the week and now screeches in terrible exhaustion? Hell, even my mind was drained. 

See, Rest is only one manifestation of the ugly limits of our human bodies. Sure, I fight it sometimes; like the days when my alarm finally forces me awake by 6:40am after six snoozes and a final deliberation: to just crash, or, to mould myself into something I need but don’t want?

But that’s just me using my body’s rapidly dwindling resource even as it warned me of the depletion. When the resources finally finishes, no will nor motivation of mine could mould me into anything useful. It'd be either I faint; or I’m already with my book, trying to read, but the words just gloss over my eyes without my brain registering them at all; or I just break down on my bed in fetal position, crying, mourning my ill-fortune that there is no one whom I could tell how truly tired I was.

I can be a lot of things. The possibilities of me are so vast it aches my head sometimes. If I were to become a farmer, I know I would go on to be one of the best the earth has ever given life to. I’ve thought about the big things I could do in engineering, in psychology, in economics…, about the great things I’m probably on my way to do in the stars of medicine. Yes, I could be so much, but, if I could truly be anything then tomorrow, I would be the boy taking the Hippocratic Oath as the world’s richest man on his way to living a life of immortality.

So please, don’t lie to me. To tell me I could be anything I want is to say that my suffering is a deliberate choice of mine, to say that in this moment, I choose not to become the best I can think of. What I want is exactly that: that right now, I become the best of myself that I could imagine, unlimited by a frail body. I want you to tell me that I have mad potential; tell me that there's so much I don't know, so much I'd probably never know, yet so much I could know. 

The truth is, I cannot be anything nor everything I want to be. But for the things that matter, I can try to be more. I can be more. I have mad potential.