There's Nothing Special About You (Or Me, Either)
And that's precisely what makes us so special and worthy of happy, fulfilled lives.
My mother - who was a narcissist obsessed with having “gifted” children - raised me to believe that I was incredibly special in all the world. She would tell me that I was the smartest person in the room and she would tell me that I could achieve anything I wanted in life. All of this, of course, had more to do with her than me. As a narcissist, she demanded high-achieving children, and she wouldn’t get that if we were hammered into the same delusions she held for herself.
The truth, of course, is that I was never that special or that exceptional. None of us are. Little more than a link in a genetic chain, all of us are incredibly, incredibly average in the scope of human existence - and that’s a powerful thing to be. Average.
Embracing my averageness is what, ultimately, saved my life and pulled me out of a narcissistic family system. When I accepted that I wasn’t the pedestal-riding child my mother wanted me to be, it unlocked a new reality. A reality in which I was free to be the person I wanted to be. The human being, full of imperfections, that I needed to be.
There’s nothing special about any of us.
It seems brutal at first. “I’m not special, what a terrible thing to say!” After years of desperate parents instilling the idea of snowflakes in the heads of their children (instead of teaching them healthy, realistic self-esteem) it’s an alienating idea to embrace the fact that you’re just one of the herd. But it’s freeing too.
Let me explain.
There is nothing about you that is original or unique. Billions of people are alive on this planet right now. Billions of them have come before. There is no thought you will have, no emotion you will experience, no failure you will confront, that hasn’t already been confronted before (in some shape or manner).
We are not snowflakes. We are an algorithmic sequence of repeating shapes and structures. Our bodies, our minds, and the secrets in our souls have already existed a thousand times, in a thousand lifetimes.
There is nothing special about any of us. Our faces have been worn before in lands and cultures we can’t even imagine. Our wants, our desires, hopes, and dreams, all of them have been held before in the hands of someone who looked up at the same sky. Those people prayed to strange gods, and they wore strange garb, but the core of who they are is and always was ultimately the same.
For some, this is a defeating idea. “Nihilism,” they will scream! To the contrary, this thought is anything but.
To embrace that you are not special, that you are one of a billion, a link in the chain is an incredibly freeing reality to accept. How lovely life becomes when you’re no longer burdened by the pressure of being “one-of-a-kind:”. How easy it is to accept the ebbs and flows of life when you’re not beholden to a self-imposed platform of importance.
Do you have the courage for such an ego death? To see yourself as a piece of the puzzle, instead of the center of the universe? Are you ready to embrace that speck of dust spiraling through a chaotic and unpredictable cosmos?
Why that makes each one of us so special…
Those still chained to their egos will walk away at this point. They can’t imagine such a thing. “I am a precious snowflake, unique in every way,” they will grumble as they fade into the back of the audience. The ones who know the truth remain. That’s because they see the beauty in acceptance of reality. The smallness of not being special, it’s not foreign to them, nor is it scary.
Those who can see the truth know the secret…
It is precisely our smallness that makes us special, that makes us unique in all the (known) universe. It is our interlinking, repeating series of emotions, perceptions, experiences, and triumphs, that unite us all. We all touch one another, change reality around one another, and come together to make this world what it is (whether we realize it or not).
His Holiness the Dali Lama gave the best explanation of this in his 1998 bestselling “Handbook to Living”, The Art of Happiness.
In this guide to finding contentment (the Buddhist way), the Dali Lama gives an example of consumerism. A man buys a shirt on sale in a faraway land, and he thinks little of it. There is a whole chain of people attached to that shirt, however. The man and his family who grew the cotton, struggled against the elements and produced the fibers that were eventually sent to the factory. There, they were processed by dozens of hands, each human and filled with all the emotions and experiences that entails.
One becomes the other becomes the next. If one link in the chain fails, the future changes. Everyone else is affected.
We are special because we are a part of an incredibly social species, with the power to move mountains and conquer space. If each of us embraced making ourselves the best possible link in the chain that is our species, we could change everything for the better. We could find ourselves and within that, our place in the cosmos.
It’s scary, to think that we are nothing more than a piece of something so large, so unfathomable. To accept that you aren’t any more special than anyone else is to admit that you are like them, that your world is their world. It’s to admit that you aren’t the main character. You’re a part of the chorus.
But you can free yourself. We can free ourselves by accepting the truth. Using it to our highest good, we can improve our communities, our relationships, and the way we see the world in general.
Do you have the courage to admit that you aren’t special? Do you have the courage to admit that everyone around you has the same experiences, the same values, the same humanity?
As always, this is your call to action. This is your chance to see the world differently, and in that shift, make a change. A better tomorrow is just around the corner. Are you going to be a part of it? Or will you let this chance slip you by?
© E.B. Johnson 2024
Great article! Would have been great to have read while growing up. As the firstborn, golden child, the expectations were not to be believed. I had to be perfect, body and soul. Then of course came their disappointment when I turned out to be rather ordinary. I remember finally realizing I could embrace my ordinariness, relax and give up trying so hard. I just loved being a regular person for a change!