Dear Mr. President
Three months a new job last year, at their holiday party where I tried my best to stay sober, I slipped off a stage and onto my forehead. When I came to, my first thought was, “I need to get up fast, so everyone thinks I’m fine…but this is how NFL players must feel when they want to show coach they should stay in the game.”
The impact touched off chronic pain, nausea, light, and noise sensitivity. I moved back home, went on disability and spent months in my bedroom with the blinds drawn.
After some dark days, I finally drummed up the willpower to rededicate myself to hours upon hours of therapies.
As a big Kanye fan, it crushed me over the summer that whenever he released a new single, I could only make it through twenty seconds before my headache screamed to stop. But on my way to physical therapy on September 28th, something seemed to have clicked. A friend posted your Summer Playlist 2016, and I figured, what the hell, let’s see how far I could get.
Standing in Columbus Circle, I got all the way to Classic Man. The image of you listening to the lyrics “Get ’em, we’ll get ’em, I know that we’ll get ‘em/Cause I lived through this shit before” as pre-Putin negotiation hype music had me laughing in tears on the subway platform. When you spoke to our intern class, it felt like you were a cardboard cutout of “Barack Obama.” But this moment brought home to me that you are a real person, someone I could actually try to be like.
Reporter Cal Fussman recently lamented that my generation didn’t have heroes on the level of a Muhammad Ali. While, yeah, you’re no Ali, your grace, empathy, honesty, integrity, optimism, and conviction are all outstanding characteristics I hope to model in private life and perhaps one day as a public figure.
More than any other person outside my family, you have shaped the person I aspire to be. While it’s sad to think that my little brother will be going to college next year without you on tv every day to look up to, I am eternally grateful for the time I was able to learn from your example.
Thank you.