You Are Not Special

I’m a mess.

I get obsessed. I get depressed. I compare my inside – my grotesque, insufficient, mangled, mixed-up inside – with everybody else’s outside, and I come up lacking. Always.

I replay conversations in my head, so many times, with such increasing angst, that I’m physically shuddering by the end of it. I imagine conversations that have not even happened and get as upset as if they were real.

This hamster wheel starts the moment I wake up and it doesn’t stop till long after I’ve laid back down at night.

I am, you will agree, nuts. And a useless kind of nuts at that.

I am frustratingly unproductive. I am a tousled, wrinkled disaster. I’m a fraud, an imposter, unlikable, valueless.

But there are two aphorisms I believe. One is that everyone is fighting a battle. The other is that if all our troubles were laid out on a table, you’d pick your own back up.

So here’s the thing. You’re a disaster too.

No offense.

Maybe in your own ways. Maybe on different days. But you’re broken. You’re your own kind of mess.

I can’t remember this every day. Some days, I don’t care how dark you say you’ve been, I’m worse. Those days are bad days. I’m having one right now, truth be told. I’m writing this to convince myself. I’ll set this to publish in the future so I can feel a bit distant from it, and I know that I probably won’t feel this way then. But I know I might.

I’m not special. Neither are you. And let me tell you why that gives me hope.

We’re all confused and ashamed and lonely and hideously imperfect. But if we agree to admit it, that makes us all in this mess together.

And maybe that’s the whole point.