Once upon a time there were two small sisters, thinking about the future.
“I’m going to get bigger,” said one to the other.
“I’m going to get bigger than you,” retorted the other to one.
“Nuh-uh!”
“Yuh-nuh!”
And then one bit the other and one and the other’s mother got involved, and the matter was left behind but not forgotten.
***
Twice upon a time there were two medium-sized women.
“I’m still too small,” said one. “I’m going to get out of here and move to the big city, get into big business, make it big. I’ll be…” and here she paused to stare into the sky, not out of dramatic impulse but to look into the closest thing to the infinite she had to hand, to search for inspiration, to find a piece of language that could possibly encapsulate the meaning she felt so clumsily struggling to tear free from her mind.
Her sister waited with a smooth and patient face.
She shuddered as it came to her, a piece of inspiration dropping from the sky and plummeting into her marrow.
“I’ll be…a huge deal.”
“Cool,” said her sister. “Cool, cool, cool. I’ll be huger.”
“Oh yeah? How?”
“I’ll make it bigger. I’ll get into bigger things. I’ll make myself enormous. You’ll see. You won’t be able to get away from me.”
“Listen up, you little goober,” said one, “I’m going to be so big they’ll put my name everywhere. I’m going to be ginormous. I’m going to live in a sky scraper so tall they’ll have to put up fences to keep the clouds out; its foundations will be so deep we’ll have to heatproof them against magma, and I’ll be so damned big I’ll have every floor to myself. I’ve got big dreams. You? You’re small time.”
“Nuh-uh!”
“Yuh-nuh!”
And then one bit the other and their mother screamed at them to knock it off, she was listening to her podcasts, and one left to become big and the other was just left.
At home.
Plotting.
“Mother,” she said at last. “I must become bigger than my sister. I am going to go to school to learn how to Make It Big.”
“Go to hell and let me listen to my misinformation and propaganda in peace,” grumbled her mother.
And so the other sister, the underplanned sister, the sister who felt small inside, took a short walk down to the bus stop for a quick trip. She had a few little plans.
***
First of them was academia. Architecture. Buildings were big.
“And I need to know how to make a bigger one than any other,” she explained to her professor as she graduated. “So my sister will be smaller than me, with just an itty-bitty skyscraper to keep her miniscule eensy-weensy body inside all puny and pathetic.”
“I don’t think you actually took any classes here,” said her professor, “but I feel compelled to tell you this anyways: there is more to size than size alone. The great pyramids of Giza are shorter than many a high-rise, but they loom large in historic value.”
“I see, I see, I see, I see,” she said thoughtfully.
“Please put away the gun. I have children.”
“Am I officially an architect now?”
“The moment you remove the duct tape from my arms, yes.”
“That’s a small-time play,” she said dismissively, and then she rolled out the window as the campus police busted down the door, degree flapping wildly behind her, hands vibrating with excitement as she scaled the juddering, windblown ladder into the riot helicopter.
“Take me to Giza!” she shouted at the cowering, sweaty woman at the controls. “No, wait – take me to Paris! No, wait, take me to London! No, wait – take me to London, then to Paris, then Giza! I’ve got to MAKE IT BIG!”
***
Second was corporate work.
“I can’t believe that it didn’t work,” she seethed, stamping her feet with a crunch-cranch of broken glass on expensive carpet. “I balanced the Pyramid of Khafre on the Eiffel Tower and then I balanced THAT on top of Big Ben! Don’t they know how much harder that was than going from heaviest to smallest?! They stayed up for almost six whole seconds but NOBODY CARED!” She fired her gun into the ceiling. “It’s not fair!” She shoved her bloodied stapler into the carpet and kicked it viciously. “It’s not right!” She turned beet red, shook her fists, and burst into tears. “It’s everyone else’s fault but mine that I haven’t made it big!”
“Your attitude is perfect, and your skillset is on-point,” marvelled the receptionist. “But I must repeat – regretfully – that we already have a CEO.”
“I know THAT, that’s why I stapled him. I’m a go-getter. Promote me.”
“Sure. You’re the CEO.”
“As CEO, I order you to put me into space.”
“Why?”
“I want to live there. It’s huge. It’s ginormous. It’s the biggest. I need to be biggest, or at least bigger than big. For spite.”
“You’re overqualified for this job,” said the receptionist, relaxing and removing her hand from the alarm switch. “The next rocket’s taking off in six minutes. It’s unmanned but if you tuck yourself in a maintenance panel with an oxygen mask and a water bottle you’ll probably be okay.”
“Thanks, wish me luck. You’re acting CEO while I’m out.”
So she ran, ran, ran across the launch pad, crowbarred open a metal panel on a howling giant of steel and poorly-conceived trajectories, and slipped herself inside its skin like a bad Christmas card in a pre-packaged envelope.
“Here I come!” she shouted over the rising scream of engines that statistically were expected to explode in twenty minutes. “Here I am, heading for the BIG TIME!”
***
Third was practical experience and cultivation of growth mindset.
“Space is so dull,” she sulked from ground level, dirt sliding between her restless fingers.
“Agreed.”
She worried five little pits in the earth, one for each digit. “It’s not BIG, it’s just empty.”
“Yes.”
A sweep of the palm, all the quarries eliminated. “Who’d want to live there? Nobody. Losers. Small-timers. Not me, I’m all about hitting the big time. Only the most time for me.”
“Absolutely.”
She looked up and around herself at the boundless and bare lone and level sands. “So. You are big. And you have time. Can you teach me how to be big?”
“Sure,” said the desert. “Are you ready?”
“Yeah.”
“You sure?”
“Yeah!”
“Alrighty.”
“YEAH!”
“Remove all your bodily hair and clothing.”
She blinked.
“We need to denude your surface so wind and sun can tear your substrate into tiny little pieces.”
“Okay!” she said. “I’ll go ask the ocean.”
She went and asked the ocean.
“There’s only room for one body of water covering seventy percent of this planet,” it told her flatly, wetly, evenly distributed everywhere across the globe that the vagaries of plate tectonics permitted it, “and that’s me.”
“Come onnnnn, let me try just a little. You’re so BIG, surely you can spare a little space for a big deal! I can do that. I can be your big deal.”
“Fine. Lie on your back.”
She laid on her back..
“Now be denser and less buoyant than the crust of the continent surrounding you, plunging yourself to the floor of the world’s surface and becoming covered with water.”
“To become big I have to go DOWN?” she asked incredulously.
“And let everything else trample all over you. And get soaked.”
“I’ll ask a mountain,” she said.
So she asked a mountain.
“Sure,” said the mountain. “You can be big by being a mountain. It’s easy.”
“Oh GOOD,” she said. “And you’re big where everyone can see you, right?”
“Yeah! Go it alone, go with a range, either way there’s no missing you on the skyline.”
“And you don’t have to strip naked?”
“Hell no. See my treeline? See my glaciation? Well, what’s left of it.”
“And I don’t have to start by sinking down below ground level?”
“Nah – it’s the complete opposite of that, right from the start.”
“How do I start then?”
“Are you standing there?”
“I’m standing there.”
“Now stand up REAL TALL.”
She stood up real tall.
“Now wait.”
She waited.
And waited.
For a while.
“Okay, cool. Now just keep doing that until you get ground away by time and weather.”
The wind whistled.
“Hello? You still listening?”
The hinterlands aged a little further.
“Wow, she already eroded flatter than a foothill? I only left her alone for like, a thousand years or two. Three tops. Best mountaineering I’ve ever seen – now THAT’S a bigshot.”
***
Her sister, by contrast, worked in a call center for ten years, then did retail for the rest of her life. It was okay.
No need to make a big deal out of it, really.