Sometimes I feel pointless.
An early capture of existential angst
It’s not a new feeling for me. It’s been the background static of every difficult part of my journey: a fear that I’ll die without having mattered, that I’ll be forgotten, that regardless of how much I try to contribute while I’m here it’s not enough and I’m simply a meaningless blip.
You might be thinking, “Gee Melissa, this is pretty dark for a Friday morning in the middle of a pandemic. You okay?”
To that I’ll answer…. yeah, it IS dark, and yeah, I’m okay.
But I’m showing you the inside of my (recently) dark brain for a few reasons:
- If you’re visited by darkness, you’re not alone (especially right now.)
- You can (like me) have tons of healing tools, loads of incredible therapy, a “great” life…and still be raked over the dumpy coals sometimes
- The darkness exists for a reason, if we’re willing to allow it. And I went through darkness this week.
Here’s what I found.
**
This “I’m pointless” worry was accidentally inherited from my mom, who had the same fears for her own life…and though I convinced her endlessly that she was important to the world (and if nothing else important to her kids) I accidentally acquired her fear after she died: when I’m not here to write about her anymore, when her name is said for the last time…when my name is said for the last time…what then?
Was she pointless?
Am I?
Is there a point?
***
I once read a book called “The Five People You Meet in Heaven” by Mitch Albom.
(Spoilers ahead – but I promise I can’t ruin this beautiful book for you in a few paragraphs. Please read it if you haven’t.)
The story begins with the sudden death of an old man named Eddie – a man convinced that his life had been unimportant and meaningless.
Why unimportant?
Well, he died without much money, was never able to give his wife (whose death preceded his) the life he thought she deserved, they wanted (but couldn’t) have kids, and he never got out of the same “dead end” job he’d inherited from his alcoholic father: being the maintenance man of a run-down carnival pier.
To Eddie, his whole life had been a dead end…and now he himself was dead.
Pretty sad, right?
But when Eddie gets to “heaven,” he’s confronted with five people whom he impacted (or was impacted by) during his time on earth.
A few of these people are obvious characters from his path, but most are people whose lives he had no idea he’d impacted at all.
The message the author illustrates in this beautiful way is that we have NO idea how our lives are impacting each other. We are constantly causing things to happen (or not) simply because we are here, alive, existing. We are all the proverbial butterflies flapping our wings and causing hurricanes on the other side of the world – or town.
And…you guys…
Doesn’t this just remind you of the moment in time that we’re in?
Have you noticed how now, more than ever, we’re seeing the ways that we’re all connected, all important, all a part of this intricate web of humans that can influence another person’s life simply by sharing their airplane, grocery store, bus, or home?
Have you (like me) scrutinized each piece of fruit that you bought and pictured every single hand it passed through to get to you?
Yes, I know, we’re doing this in a conscientious-of-a-scary-virus kinda way, but still…do you guys see it?
Do you see how powerful we all are? How inter-dependent?
“The Five People You Meet in Heaven” was all about how we unknowingly affect the lives of others.
This pandemic has made us cautious of unknowingly infecting the lives of others.
Affect…infect…affect…infect.
All of us.
Connected.
A point.
**
“You wanna know why people feel like shit?” a friend once asked me.
“Why?” I answered with a smile.
“Because we’re all like this shiny tip to a diamond, all sparkly and beautiful and luminescent, exactly as we are, you and me and all of us, fucking perfect…but since you’re at the tip, you can’t see how beautiful you are. You look to your left and right and you see emptiness, you feel alone, you think you ARE alone, because you can’t see this gorgeous thing that you’re a part of….a diamond.
‘You are the point of a fucking perfect diamond and you don’t even know it.”
A point.
You.
The point.
**
Growing up, we always had photos on the fridge of kids that I didn’t know.
“Who’s that?” I’d ask my mom, pointing to a chubby baby with ringlets, or a little boy in a baseball uniform.
“That was a patient I helped,” my mom would say, referencing her job as an ER nurse. Parents would send the photos with a note scrawled on the back: “Thank you.”
The baby pictures would eventually be replaced with school photos, then prom photos, until there were no photos because the babies had grown up and gone on: out in the world, flapping their wings, creating their destinies, interconnected.
Sometimes my mom would come home from the ER in tears because of someone who couldn’t be saved.
And there are people alive today because of all those she did.
Butterflies, all of them.
“I’ll be forgotten,” she feared.
“You won’t,” I promised, though my own voice shook.
The shiny tips of the diamond.
The point.
**
May this pandemic remind us that we are all wing flapping, hurricane causing, inter-dependent and luminescent shiny tips of the same diamond.
Never alone, never apart, all connected.
We will all be forgotten, and at the same time never so because our lives are built upon the lives of others…and theirs on us.
We are all the point.
The entire.fucking.point.
“Each affects the other, and the other affects the next, and the world is full of stories, but the stories are all one.” ― Mitch Albom, The Five People You Meet in Heaven
xo,
Melissa
PS: Just keep going.