You’re Not Special
I should probably warn you that nothing you read in this piece will be revolutionary. Nothing here will rearrange your life. You will read it, nod or disagree, maybe send it to someone if you’re feeling dramatic, and then return to your regularly scheduled self-importance. And maybe that is the point.
This does not need to matter very much.
You are not special.
Not in your suffering. Not in your ambition. Not in your confusion about what to do next. Whatever you are going through has been gone through before, by people who also believed, briefly and sincerely, that they were navigating terrain no one had ever mapped.
We don’t say this out loud, of course. We perform humility. We insist we’re ordinary. But privately, we narrate ourselves as protagonists. We treat our lives as though they are carefully structured arcs. When things go wrong, it must be a turning point. When things go...



