Ancestors, Greatness, and the Blessed Mediocrity of Today

Sometimes I think about how our ancestors had to work to immortalize themselves. They had to to be great people, live great lives, do great things. It was so easy to be forgotten. Their lives were a struggle against the relentless eraser that is the passage of time. They had to claw their way into history books, into the stories passed down by their tribes, onto pieces of pressed papyrus. And if you were poor? Forget it. To immortalize oneself was man's essential quest (think Gilgamesh). Simultaneously imperative and impossible, immortalizing oneself looked like a lifetime of striving and proving and rising to some perceived top of some perceived hierarchy... And here I am immortalizing myself on the internet. Not because I'm great, or have lived a great life, or have done anything great. On the contrary, I am a very standard, very average teenage girl who happens to write songs, who happens to have no shame, who happens to have the audacity to post them for total strangers to listen to. But don't be fooled by my boldness - I would never play for the people that make up my life. Hiding behind this screen, I am taking advantage of the luxury of anonymity. Anonymity: the easy way out. My ancestral sisters (for whom it was even more difficult to be remembered!): immortalized because they did great things, stood up for great causes, lived great lives. Me: immortalized in a web of pixels they call the internet because I'm too timid to sing for real people. Ancestral sisters: 1; Me: 0. Lucky I don't believe in keeping score!