"If the Queen had balls..."

 One of the most impactful parts of reading is when you stumble across a line that you immediately connect with. Maybe You Should Talk to Someone, by Lori Gottlieb was full of quotes like that but my favorite is this:

“If the queen had balls, she’d be the king.”

Though the reason this quote stuck out to me is obvious and not very deep, it stuck with me for an entirely different reason. Essentially, Gottlieb was pointing out that often people get too caught up in unimportant details that prevent them from going after what they truly want.  Too often we find ourselves justifying things saying, “well if only ____, then I could be happy”, or “we’d still be together”, or “I would’ve passed that test”.  I have found myself thinking along these lines far too often. It’s easy to get caught up in things out of our control and use them to make excuses for our own inaction or mistakes.

This impossible desire for change is even reflected in the characters we read about. Nea, from Saving Sourdi, wishes to become a “Naga”, a powerful mythical creature capable of destroying whole armies. She believes if she possessed some magical power or form her life could be different, better. Yet this fantasy is ultimately useless to her. She can’t change the present, and even if she could, there is no guarantee this hypothetical life would really be superior to her current one. 

At the end of the day, it’s up to us to decide how our life will go. We can’t sit around and wait for perfect opportunities to just fall into our laps. Though it seems obvious and cliché, reminders like this are sometimes necessary to jolt us back into reality.