What happened to me here did matter.
Yeah, it might not have mattered to you, or to her, or to him. I bet they never even heard my name before. In fact, I’d probably bet you any sum that they haven’t. I think I’ve learned to accept that. That I’m not really a big pull on the universe, that no one will cry in Russia when I die or send their congratulations from Swaziland when I have my first child. I simply mean nothing to those people. And I say that because they don’t mean anything to me. I mean, I hope they live full, healthy, and happy lives, but that’s just trying to spread around the positive juju. You always hear about the cartels in Mexico cutting off people’s heads, child soldiers in Africa, young women abducted and sold into sex slavery in Eastern Europe. And it sucks that it’s happening, it really does. On that level, I care. But I don’t care about them as people. They’re not even real anyways. They’re just ideas. And I’m just an idea to them.
It’s sobering, for sure. You wish you could amount to something else, sometimes. From when you’re a child, you have it thrust into your mind that you can take on the world, add your face to Mount Rushmore, claim a new star as Carterland and bring peace to the galaxy. But you can’t. You aren’t important enough to the people around the world who have their own Hells to go through. And the people who were all important enough to make that happen? They’ve been dead for a long time and they were never that important when they were alive, anyway. Rigor mortis is the best look you can put on to get someone to notice.
That doesn’t mean that what I do doesn’t matter, though. I have my struggles every day. Whether to drop it all and keep walking or to endure. Whether to keep the dream alive or to mature. Whether to help people out or just focus on myself. I have these struggles every day. I assume everyone else does, too. And that’s important. No matter who you are, there’s someone who holds you in some type of regard. We matter to ourselves. We matter to those around us and, like it or not, we have pull, like our own miniature gravitational fields. Not all of us can be a black hole, but we hold our influences, big or small.
My writing may get published. It may not. It may just be a life of rejection after rejection with the only person reading my writing being the lawyers reading my will after my death. But I am my writing. I can control that. And whether or not it ever gets huge and the world reads it, I can still do what I can to be proud of it and make it what I want it to be. Isn’t that the beauty in it all? Some of us write because we want others to read it, true. But it’s how I express my struggle. It’s how I escape and make all the problems in the world go away, even for an hour.
When I was young, Snicket and Rowling were the two big escape artists in my life. They helped to smuggle me in to a new land where I could just escape for a few hours. It’s what I hope to do with my writing for someone someday. But if the only person I’m able to help escape is myself, then I think I’ve won the fight. I mattered.
