You Don’t Matter

It has always been hard for me to admit that I don’t matter.

For the longest time, I have always considered myself rather special. And I know exactly where that comes from: my middle school science teacher. He used to call me Newton for he thinks I’m a genius. For a 13-year-old, I was fully aware it was nothing more than a nickname. He probably has taught other Newtons as well. Newton or not, there are always hints suggesting I do not exactly fit the average bucket. And somehow that defines the way I see myself.

[For the reference, I think I hit 90-ish on the middle school entry IQ test. And yes, we do an S-shape class assignments where there’s students from the top and students from the bottom in every class.]

The way I see it, it has been fortifying my confidence against setbacks. The most iconic example can only be the one where I was the top 75 percentile in the first midterm exam in high school and I mistook it as the 25 percentile. So I was proud of getting there without any bit of studying. What’s more, the school I went to was only the 3rd best in Taipei. So I thought I didn’t belong there. Everyone, naturally, looked dumb.

That mindset — things can’t go too bad with me — seemed to work out okay for me.

It is when plans don’t pan out as expected that I get hit hard. There’s no better expression in echoing the feeling of realities bursting the expectation bubble than John Mayer’s Gravity.

It was when I came across this line did I realize I had been delusional. “You are absolutely unique, just like everyone else.” Dull as it seems, the proverb shook the shit out of me. Just maybe I’m not as special as I thought.

Facts are: I’m an average looking person from a developing country with a mediocre background and a underwhelming job. What I do can be easily done by at least thousands of others. What I know is no more than an untrained YouTuber can share. Do I stand out from the crowd in any interesting way?

That being said, should I think think of myself any less than? Don’t I matter?