Hello, my name is Galina and I’m addicted to Hamilton: An American Musical. It’s been consuming my days. I wake up singing “How lucky we are to be alive right now” and quickly segue to “Life doesn’t discriminate between the sinners and the saints” and go to bed singing “Who lives, who dies, who tells your story?”

I suspect my husband and teenage son are staging an intervention.

I won’t stop. I can’t stop. I don’t do Star Wars or sports, but I do Hamilton. Compulsively.

I go through the 2 hours, 22-minute soundtrack and as soon as they hit the final note of “The World was Wide Enough,” I’m crying and immediately feel compelled to hear it from the beginning. Another listen, another clue, another piece of the puzzle to discover.

Hamilton is a guide to life. It transcends the music. It spills with motivational quotes to encourage you to reach and with inspirational quotes to encourage you when you fall, (which we all do at some point).

Everyone could relate to this story. It’s 1776, it’s 2016. The background is American history, but the foreground is love. It is about humanity, about pride and persistence and morality and personality. It’s about sisters and sons and daughters and death and living. It’s about friendship and enemies and strife. It shows life as a circle and life as ironic and we’re all living our story, crafting a legacy, day by day. Each scene is a brick in this colossal theatrical cathedral. It burst with heart and this is the universal thread which connects us. “It’s not a moment, it’s a movement.”

I made my teenage son, husband, and 5-year-old daughter “watch” the soundtrack on YouTube as the words scroll in front of us. We are paralyzed by the melodies, captivated by the lyrics, engrossed as if we were watching a car chase in a Tom Cruise action movie. I turn into an English teacher, a philosopher, a poet. The writer in me, the artist in me, we explode in tandem from these inspirational words.

“Do you get it? Do you really get it?” I say it over and over. “Do you see this genius?”

Yeah, duh.The country sees it. We hear it.

I am currently in the process of calligraphing my favorite Hamilton quotes on watercolored backgrounds. I plan on wallpapering my office with these words in hopes they will saturate through me, like the study notes I used to put under my pillow the night before a big test. But there is no test, only another day of the Hamilton Lottery, waiting for my shot!

MY FAVORITE QUOTES

“There’s a million things I haven’t done, but just you wait, just you wait.”

“In New York, you can be a new man.”

“Talk less, smile more. Don’t let them know what you’re against or what you’re for.”

“I’m not throwing away my shot!””

“The plan is to fan this spark into a flame.”

“Geniuses, lower your voices. You keep out of trouble and you double your choices.”

“Chaos and bloodshed are not a solution. Don’t let them lead you astray.”

“You’re like me. I’m never satisfied.”

“Love doesn’t discriminate from the sinners and the saints, it takes and it takes and it takes and we keep loving anyway.”

“Death doesn’t discriminate between the sinners and the saints, it takes and it takes and it takes and we keep living anyway. We rise and we fall and we break and we make our mistakes.”

“Look around, look around at how lucky we are to be alive right now.”

“Look at where you are. Look at where you started. The fact that you’re alive is a miracle. Just stay live, that would be enough.”

“If you could let me inside your heart…Oh, let me be a part of the narrative in the story they will write someday. Let this moment be your first chapter.”

“You have no control: Who lives, who dies, who tells your story”

“History has its eyes on you.”

“I imagine deaths much it feels like a memory.”

“I need no introduction, when you knock me down I get the fuck back up again!”

“You’re on your own. Awesome. Wow. Do you have a clue what happens now? Oceans rise. Empires fall. It’s much harder when it’s all your call.”

“If we lay a strong enough foundation we’ll pass it on to you, and you’ll blow us all away…someday, someday. Yeah, you’ll blow us all away, someday, someday.”

“Why do you assume you’re the smartest in the room”

“How do you write like tomorrow won’t arrive? How do you write like you need it to survive? How do you write every second you’re alive?”

“Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” We fought for these ideals, we shouldn’t settle for less.”

“In the eye of the hurricane there is quiet for just a moment, a yellow sky.”

“You and your words flooded my senses. Your sentences left me defenseless. Your sentences left me defenseless. You built me palaces out of paragraphs, you built cathedrals.”

“There are moments that the words don’t reach. There is suffering too terrible to name. You hold your child as tight as you can and push away the unimaginable. The moments when you’re in so deep, it feels easier to just swim down.”

“There are moments that the words don’t reach. There is grace too powerful to name. We push away what we can never understand, we push away the unimaginable.”

“Legacy. What is a legacy? It’s planting seeds in a garden you never get to see. I wrote some notes at the beginning of a song someone will sing for me.”

“Let me tell you what I wish I’d known when I was young and dreamed of glory. You have no control: who lives, who dies, who tells your story.”