There was no point to anything. And that supreme desolation—that realization that I had been abandoned by my own certainty of how the world worked—gave me the reckless freedom to do something truly wild. I started believing in myself. I believed everything I thought. I couldn’t fail. My newfound narcissism felt like revenge. I figured that if the world was going to wreak its random cruelty on me, I might as well aspire to greatness in the meantime.
