​Your Ladder, Your Tower

There you loom, at the top of your golden ladder, ripe with the sense of your own importance. The corpo-rot seems to have chewed away at your frontal lobe, or at least your optic nerve– because you can’t SEE what’s really happening here on the ground. You unleash the storm of bureaucracy because it’s all you’ve ever known: papers sullied with excessively long and fluffy words that read to me as “We don’t actually know what we’re doing and we don’t really care about anything but the numbers.” You don’t treat the kingdom with the true benevolence and realism that it actually needs.

Do you just sit up there, in the gleam and gold, patting yourself on the back for everything the rest of us have to do? Even when it doesn’t make sense? Why doesn’t anyone get to tell you that you’re on the wrong track? The peasants at your feet don’t shudder, crumble, and collapse for the reasons you think. No no, it’s far worse than that, and with this one-track trailblazing thing you believe you’re doing good with, you’re genuinely neglecting the realest and truest problem that plagues the people of the kingdom. The deaths should be most important, the way people whittle themselves down into nothing over some pyrite, because it’s what they can get. Those that are preoccupied with pyrite aren’t even thinking about what you believe they are (or think they should be) thinking about.

I understand the importance of your own personal mission, and I’m not arguing to abandon it completely. But you need to WAKE UP before someone like me shakes the ladder enough for it to all come crashing down. It’s no wonder I feel like I’m not doing anything impactful as one of your clowns, because I’m not– I’m just carrying out orders that I consistently disagree with, that sit in my chest like a stone, weighing me down into stubbornness and rebellion. Your skewed priorities only hold me back from doing the work that will actually make our kingdom beautiful. Besides, with my own origin story, I can’t justify servicing an institution that reinforces the feeling of helplessness that keeps trying to chase me down and eat me alive. Maybe it’s not that deep to you, or anyone else. But it is to me.

Fortunately, there’s a small beam of light just ahead. To a place where thrones and ladders are replaced with councils and chairs. Where the teamwork IS truly teamwork, not just carrying out orders like submissive little ants. My heart has never been so excited to rest. I follow the light. And I follow it into a dream.