The Line Must be Drawn Here

By: Mason Absher

When I was growing up,

everything—everything—started with a line.

Not metaphorically.

I mean literal lines.

Chalked onto blacktops.

Formed outside classrooms.

Carved into the halls of public school buildings like tiny rituals of control.

You lined up for lunch.

You lined up for the bathroom.

You lined up to take standardized tests they swore would determine the course of your life.

And they’d say,

“This is good for you.

This teaches discipline.”

I believed them.

I thought lines were just part of the system.

Part of growing up.

You wait your turn.

You earn your spot.

Eventually, you get… something.

What, exactly?

Unclear.

That was the thing about growing up millennial.

You were told to wait.

For adulthood.

For stability.

For something called “real life” to begin.

But no one could tell you what that looked like.

Just that it was coming.

And you’d better be in line when it arrived.

We were raised by people who had no time for questions.

Boomers. Gen Xers. Coaches, teachers, neighbors.

People who liked authority.

People who clung to rules like they were holy text—

even when the rules made no sense anymore.

And when you asked why?

Why are we doing this?

They’d say,

“Because we had to.”

As if confusion were a rite of passage.

I was once told,

“You all think you’re entitled.”

And I remember thinking:

We didn’t crown ourselves.

You told us we were special.

You told us to dream big.

You gave us motivational posters and then

laughed when we quoted them back at you.

We were blamed for things we couldn’t control.

Housing markets.

Climate collapse.

Participation trophies we didn’t give ourselves.

They’d say,

“You have it easy.”

While handing us a world that was already cracked down the middle.

We didn’t inherit the system.

We inherited the aftermath.

And then the whiplash.

One minute:

“Why aren’t you more ambitious?”

Next minute:

“Why are you so anxious all the time?”

It’s like being handed a ticking clock and getting yelled at for flinching.

But here’s the part I think about now:

They weren’t all wrong.

They were just… scared.

They were scared the world was changing,

and we were learning to live in it faster than they could explain it.

They saw us breaking lines.

Skipping steps.

Questioning things they’d never dared to.

And they panicked.

So they told us to wait.

Told us to follow the process.

Told us to stand still

until someone called our name.

But no one ever did.

Because the line?

It wasn’t going anywhere.

And somewhere along the way,

we stopped waiting.

We started building.

Side hustles.

Art.

Businesses.

Communities.

Whole new languages for survival.

Because no one was coming to hand us anything.

So we made our own way.

No line.

No map.

Just each other.