Feeling Like Nobody Special

You are just a regular person living a regular life and the ordinariness of it sits heavier than it should. Nothing about you is remarkable. Your talents are things lots of people have. Your struggles are struggles most people have. You’re reading the same books as everyone else and watching the same shows and wanting the same things.

The life you are building is functional but not exceptional. You go to work and you come home and you do the things people do. You’re good at some things and bad at others like everyone is. You’re not particularly interesting and you’re not particularly broken. You’re just here.

The fear underneath this is that ordinariness means you don’t matter. That if you’re not special then you’re not important and if you’re not important then your existence is something that could be removed and the world would keep spinning exactly the same. That thought is why ordinariness feels terrifying.

But ordinariness is what most people are. The special people are the exception not the rule. So wanting to be special means wanting to be unusual and wanting to be unusual means wanting to be unlike most of the people who exist. That’s a hard thing to be.

You could try to make yourself special. You could pursue something that marks you as different or develop a talent that sets you apart or have experiences that make you interesting at parties. But you’re aware of the trying and the awareness makes it all feel fake. The trying is the most ordinary thing about being human.

The acceptance of being average is supposed to be freeing but it doesn’t feel free. It feels like giving up on something you never had in the first place. It feels like admitting that you’re going to be one of the people in the background of other people’s remarkable lives.

You live your regular life with regular problems and regular joys and regular disappointments. You matter to the people close to you but beyond that circle you’re just another person doing the things people do. You’ll die and the world will continue and nobody will write books about you because your life wasn’t the kind of life books get written about.

That’s fine, normal, and that’s what happens to most people, but knowing it doesn’t make it easier to accept that you are going to be most people.

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