I was reading a book this summer and from all of it, one line stuck clearly with me: “Yes, everyone else thinks they are just as special as you do.”
The line itself was inconspicuous, dropped nonchalantly in between four consecutive pages of space-less, single-paragraphed text and amid other random musings and facts about the habits of recovering drug addicts. In other words, it surely didn’t seem like that line was meant to stick out. It may not have been intended to make me stop, but it did. It made me stop enough that here I am, still talking about it three months later.
This line came reeling back to me again this weekend while leaving a music festival. The night was dark, the day was long and the crowds were large. It was a typical post-concert scene: herds of slow-moving people being ushered to ‘another place.’ Frustrated and shuffling behind the plodding couple before me, I turned to my friends and muttered something about how this moment made me feel like we were all just simple sheeple, and damn it if I didn’t hate that feeling.
That feeling, though, had been with me all day. As I wandered from stage to stage at the festival, I couldn’t help but realize everyone around me looked and seemed so much the same — a double irony, of course, because all these everyones were dressed in intentionally “unique” music festival attire, and yet, all still looked the same. Fast forward to the end of the day, when my three friends and I were being pushed along with the crowd toward the exit. I looked quickly at those around me and asked myself, “How am I any different than any of these people?”
It’s a bit of a haunting question when you really think about it. Without getting too meta, we all live in our own personal worlds, viewing everything through our own lenses. It makes sense, then, for you to think you are somehow unique, distinct from everyone else you cross paths with. That part’s not terribly surprising. What did surprise me was the hard-hitting realization that, undeniably, it’s not only you who thinks that.
Just as much as I may be convinced I’m the most deserving, the most hard-working and/or the most insert-positive-adjective-here, everyone else thinks the same about themselves. That’s damning because it detracts from my own believed uniqueness. I live in the world of me, and thus, I think that, in one way or another, I’m a standout. But you think the same thing about yourself. Everyone does.
In the interest of humility, you may have a little voice in your head that reminds you of this, one that whispers every now and then that the world doesn’t revolve around you. But even when you think that, it’s still you talking. To have another person say out loud, “I am just as self-centered as you are,” would be a bit more striking. Can I really be distinctly unique if I’m thinking the same thoughts about me as you are about yourself? What does it mean to realize that I am, however begrudgingly, the same as everyone else?
Long story short, this idea began to overwhelm me. But post-festival, I hopped back in a car with my friends and we began the 22-hour drive back to Charlottesville. Along the way, we stopped in Jackson, Miss., and by some strange course of fate, ended up at a hole-in-the-wall Italian restaurant 20 miles from the interstate, eating the Crawfish Creole Pasta special and being waited on by a kindly and attractive — but intellectually lacking — waiter named Clay.
As I sat around that table, eating great bread and laughing with my friends about how we got to this random restaurant and this very moment, I couldn’t help but find an answer to the questions of sameness I had been asking myself the day before.
From a bird’s eye view, sure, I look no different than the next person. But zoom in, and there’s a story. There are, in fact, multiple. There’s the story of me, which somehow connects to that of each of my three friends who sat around that table with me and were similarly crazy enough to drive from Charlottesville to Austin and back over a six-day period. All of these somehow connect to the story of Clay the waiter, which somehow connects to the story of the suited-up Mississippi stranger who suggested this hole-in-the-wall in the first place. And so on, and so forth.
From afar, we may look mostly the same. But up close, we each become unique. So yes, surely, everyone thinks they’re just as special as you may think you are. But don’t let that discourage you. Rather, let it humble you, and serve as a reminder that anyone can be reached, can be understood. For just as seeming sameness can cover up originality, so too can imagined difference hide similarity. If you can overcome one hurdle, surely the other can’t be too difficult to cross either.
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