Instructions on How to Be a Minority

Instructions on How to

Be a Minority Look around yourself. Realize that the world was designed to put you last. The world doesn’t live for you, you live for it. By Aislyn Echols

You live to be the bottom of the barrel, because someone has to. You are meant to be crushed by those more important than yourself. You live to be the oppressed, because you can’t have the best without the worst. You’ve been given, no, gifted the honorable title of sacrificial lamb and shall watch helplessly as the world feeds on you, and others that mirror you, like the hungry, twisted fox it is. Taking only enough that you want to die, but it won’t allow you that pleasure.

Admire at the best of the best and realize that you will never be there. Idolize the one or two of your kind that made it, while being ignorant to the thousands that prove your worthlessness. There are few who reach the top, many who strive to be those few, and many more that have accepted their fate quietly.

Look at those who are said to protect you, and live in constant fear. Be afraid when you step out of your house. Be afraid when you go to work. Be afraid when you are lying in your bed at night. Don’t even think of stepping out of line, you’ll only give them more fuel to add to your living pyre. What did you do? Well, you lived, and that is a crime sinister enough for punishment.

Always be perfect. There are eyes watching you constantly. You are walking on a thin tightrope and the crowd waits for you to fall, that’s what they came here to see after all. Some will throw whatever they can at you: wallets, phones, keys, popcorn. It doesn’t matter what they lose, as long as you fall.

Their cheers will be deafening as you greet the iron hands of fate. Children will squeal with joy and excitement as your life is drained from your body. This is the main performance.

This isn’t your life, you are merely a vessel, a toy. You dance on a string. You will swallow fire. You will be entertaining, otherwise the real show begins. They feed off of you, even if they don’t know it, because that’s all they know how to do.

The man helping you off the streets is the one that bought your house from under you. The woman that offers you her extra umbrella is the one that locked the store. The child that offers you a towel is the one that threw the drink.

The life you live is not your own. Live to be crushed. Live to be laughed at. Live only to fall.

Art by Hannah McElhiney