We are the chosen ones.

We have been chosen for something that no one should be chosen for.

We are the many who wish to be the few.

Because even if we go through it no one else should have to.

We are the ones who have no choice but to eat canned tuna for the twelfth time this week because nothing else is in the house.

That’s if we even eat that many times in a week.

Money is not an item to us, it is a seemingly unattainable goal that no matter how hard we try we cannot reach.

We’ve known how to do taxes from the time we were young, and it is not because that is our chosen career path, but because we’ve always been without money to get them done for us.

Ten dollars in a birthday card from an aunt halfway across the globe feels like a million. We’ll save and save that money until we find something perfect.

That is, unless our parents need it first.

Which they will.

So we give it to them.

Every time.

Sometimes we hear our parents crying because it’s the middle of winter, the power will be shut off tomorrow and there isn’t anything they can do

College seems like an impossibility without a full ride, and even when we work as hard as possible it isn’t ever enough.

Sometimes we lie in bed wondering if we should just kill ourselves, for no other reason then that our parents could afford to pay the bills if we were gone.

If we were gone.

But if we were gone the cycle couldn’t change.

That repetition of high school dropouts who were on drugs, pregnant, or just not good enough.

We are good enough.

And we will stand up to the mistakes of our parents, look them in the eyes and tell them, “not this time.”

Because we are the many who wish to be the few.

And we’ll die for that to be the truth.