The Hamlet Project

Oh sweet young man, with so much confidence. I once felt that myself as a young woman. I believed I could bend the world to my will. In high school, I remember thinking “If I don’t like my college, I’ll change it!” And I fully believed I could. And I didn’t like my college as much as I thought I would and I tried to change it and it didn’t budge. I feel it must have been somewhere in that year when my understanding of the limits of my will began.
There are some young men who never run into their limits. The bubble of privilege means that they never encounter a stop – and then, as time goes by, they think everyone else’s wills are weak, since those people did not achieve all that they aimed at.
It makes me think of that cartoon of a race where a straight white dude has a clear course and the woman of color has a dozen treacherous obstacles. The caption says something like, “But the race is the same!”
Anyway – I suspect that until this moment, Laertes has never known an obstacle he couldn’t get past with his will.