The Solo Pour

I was always bigger than most kids growing up at Central Avenue Elementary School.

That reality shows up early when you are a kid. You do not ask for it, but you feel it. People treat you a little differently. They expect something, even if they never say it out loud.

And with that comes a decision.

I figured it out pretty young. Being the bigger kid came with responsibility. Not the kind anyone sat me down and explained. The kind you just know.

I had a choice.

I could use my size to push people around. Get my way. Make things easier for myself by making things harder for someone else.

Or I could use it to protect.

To step in when someone else could not.
To stand next to the kid who did not have a voice in that moment.
To make things a little more fair, a little more steady, just by how I showed up.

No one handed me a rulebook. But the choice was always there.

And if I am being honest, that lesson never really left.

Because it turns out, being the biggest kid on the block does not end in elementary school. It just changes form.

Sometimes it is your position.
Sometimes it is your experience.
Sometimes it is your voice in a room where others do not feel like they have one.

Power does not always look loud. But it is always there.

And the question stays the same.

What are you going to do with it?

We live in a time where it is easy, almost encouraged, to use power for personal gain. To win. To get ahead. To protect your own comfort and your own outcome.

But there is another option. There always has been.

You can use what you have been given to steady the room.
To speak when it would be easier to stay quiet.
To notice who is being overlooked.

To protect.

Not in some grand, heroic way. Most of the time it is smaller than that. Quieter. Less visible.

But it matters.

It always mattered.

I learned that as a kid, standing a little taller than everyone else, trying to figure out what that meant.

I am still learning it now.