This is going to sound ridiculous, but when I first saw this silly little aphorism, it sang to me.
During the most difficult period in my life — jail, homeless, unemployed, awaiting trial for a crime I didn’t commit, too poor to buy enough to eat on some days, burdened by tens of thousands of dollars in legal bills that seemed impossible to ever pay, with no viable way of ever making it to college or doing anything with my life — I always believed in my heart that I was more than the failure I seemed to be.
I always believed in the possibility that I might do something better with my life someday.
I wasn’t sure it would happen, and I honestly doubted it would ever happen on many days, but I always knew there was more inside me than people could see.
I could’ve never put it into words back then, but it’s true:
“I never thought I was a muffin. I always thought I was a cupcake.”
When I saw this phrase, it really did sing to me.
It still does.
When I work with my students, I try to convince them that they are cupcakes, too.
It’s what I want my own children to believe with every ounce of their being.
My wife, too. She is such a cupcake. A complete and total cupcake. The cupcakiest of cupcakes.
I’m not sure that she always believes this, but she should.
I try to make her believe it every day.
I hope you believe this, too.
It’s a silly little aphorism that I’m slightly embarrassed to embrace to the degree that I have here, but it’s also a belief — absent the bakery theme — that saved my life. It brought me to this place in my life where I get to be a husband, father, teacher, author, storyteller, entrepreneur, consultant, and so much more.
This belief in myself allowed me to become the person I always thought I could be.
I was a muffin who believed in miracles. And sometimes miracles really do happen.
I know I sound ridiculous, but this sentence captures how I felt so perfectly, and I worry that for every cupcake who believes in miracles, there are so many more muffins who have resigned themselves to being muffins.
I don’t know why I believed in miracles, and I don’t know how to convince other muffins to believe in miracles, but I wish I did.
