The fresh air of being a nobody.

I was seventeen in an afterschool poetry workshop when the class instructor asked us to ten minute freewrite about fears. In a poem, I surprisingly was open to read in front of my peers I read the first line from my notebook “I am afraid of being unimportant” I never did ever feel important though I always fought for it. I mask shifted myself into so many versions of a person that could be good enough to be love and accepted by people but it never worked. It was almost as if everyone else got a secret memo on how to be loved and it missed me. I spent a lot of my youth watching others belong. Taking peeking over at girls groups giggling together at the mall or a crew of rowdy friends at lunch tables before I went to read alone in libraries. I wondered what that feeling was like, to be amongst. I only knew alone and it made me sick. The feeling of being unimportant plagued my life that only daydreaming being famous, somebody people looked long at and desired to have around would save me from my day of sulking.

Needless to say, I was an extraordinarily lonely kid. A traumatic level of only child loneliness that has taken me years into my adulthood to make amends with. It continues to be the center of my writing. In a way, I write the same story over and over again. Constantly going back and trying to make sense of it of the cold isolation and understand it contributed to my ways I move through life today.

I am still very much a loner. I have my small community. I am social and person who can chit chat with about anyone. Conversing is a strong suit for me and I put it on when need be but nonetheless I am a loner.

There’s a difference between loner me as a teen then and loner me now though. Plenty of experience exist in between. Experience with a unusual number of friendships and friendship groups. Dates and relationships. Rebuilding and falling of family relations and dynamics. Basically, I lived a lot of life and after about a decade of damn near ruining myself to matter to people, someone, anyone I burnt out. The quest to be important ran me dry. I had nothing to water myself with. I would say depleted but that’s still not even an exhausted enough of a word.

I went from wanting to belong to “leave me alone the fck alone”

I replaced people with nature for a long while. Spending long summer mornings to afternoons to purple dusks in parks. My tote bag tied to my wrist and me slumped asleep under a tree. I’d be passed out for hours. It was something about the giantess of the trees towering over me. The clouds slow walking above me. Bugs swirling around, popping on my arm than popping off. It hit me then in there. I don’t fcking matter.

For some reason this time around in my tired adultness is didn’t feel like a horrible thing. It felt kind of good? I’ve banged through stone my entire life to mean something so much, the radical though of not meaning anything to anyone felt like boulders of my chest. I thought, one day the name even of Michael Jackson will not have gravity on this Earth. There’s greats who existed thousands of years ago we will never know because that’s just the whole point. This life experience is limited. We will live, we will die and our names will be withered away, erased with time. This will happen no matter how big we try to become, how important we want to be. We can have all the success and attention in the world but it’s all confined to sector of this age. So, if that’s true then what the fck am I fighting for?

There’s nothing wrong with wanting to be seen and valued by others but the level I personally was craving to heal the outcasted young girl in me could never be enough to satiate me. I gorged on company and relished on eyes on me and still still still was the her I wanted to tear myself away from. What nature taught me was to just give up. Lay under those trees and be nothing. Take a long walk and the depth of night and look at the moon, look how big it is and how it would still be big and bright, lighting up the navy of the sky regardless if I was here or not.

Giving up my need to obtain significant importance and surrendering to the reality that I am miniscule to that grand scheme of everything happening around me has given me a fresh feeling of relief. I am only the main character to myself, I only need to be somebody to myself and to others who are not enough from themselves but to the trees I am just pesky creature tittering around it’s trunks. To the ocean I am probably just a bigger grain of sand. To the birds in the sky I am just an ant in the distance and to the ants I am just an the annoying giant that keeps banging noises from the ceiling.

Over the years, I’ve gotten intentionally quiet. A spirit of a calm, floating solitude of sorts. The more healed and accepting of my place in the universe the less I inhabited the relentless American ambition to matter.

This year I plan to join my community gardens to tend to plants, the squirrels, chipmunk, tomatoes, zucchini, sunflowers and bumble bees. To have value in that way. That type of importance feels so much more soothing, more instinctual. Nature does not need me but it wanted me and that’s why I am here. I find pride in being chosen in that way. Maybe that’s where the importance lies. I didn’t have to be here on Earth but I was chosen. I have value and am inheritably deserving just because I exist. What validation of fame do I need when God picked me out specifically and placed me here regardless if I’m necessary. I have to be somebody just off the fact that I am here. No approval from any others needed.