Not Special

Growing up, I was given two gifts that turned out to be curses.

I was smart without effort.

And I had parents who thought I was the bee’s head, shoulders, knees, and motherfucking toes.

Boo hoo, right?

Your parents loved you.

School was easy.

Nobody crushed your dreams in the crib and told you to become an accountant because screenwriting was for assholes and trust-fund kids.

What a tragedy.

But that’s the problem with easy. Easy doesn’t teach you anything except how to expect more easy.

When you can coast through school with little to no effort, when you are a rule-upholder, when you want everyone to like you, when your parents don’t shove you into some pre-approved life and instead tell you to explore and figure things out on your own, that sounds beautiful.

And it is.

Until it isn’t.

Because somewhere along the way, all that freedom and praise festers into something else.

Entitlement.

Avoidance.

A belief that effort is what other people need.

A quiet little voice in your head that says:

You’re different.

You’re special.

The rules don’t apply to you.

Except I was also a rule-follower, which made the whole thing even dumber. I thought I was outside the rules while obeying every single one. A walking fucking contradiction. Smarter than everyone, desperate for everyone to like me, convinced I was destined for something enormous while still terrified of getting in trouble.

A real delight, I’m sure.

Then school got harder.

Not impossible. Just harder.

And I had no tools for that.

I didn’t know how to sit with confusion. I didn’t know how to be bad at something long enough to become okay at it. I didn’t know how to study. I didn’t know how to apply myself because, for a long time, applying myself was unnecessary.

To this day, because I missed some crucial day of geometry in tenth grade, I still don’t really understand SOHCAHTOA. I know it has something to do with triangles. I know people say it like it’s supposed to unlock some ancient door.

Sine. Cosine. Tangent. Whatever the fuck they mean. I still don’t know.

Great.

I can do difficult arithmetic in my head. I can simplify calculations. I can see patterns without being taught them. I can figure out the difference between the square of 100 and the square of 96 while standing in the kitchen making coffee.

It’s 784, by the way.

But ask me to find the angle of a triangle and suddenly I’m a raccoon trying to operate a microwave.

That is not because I’m special.

It’s because I practiced one thing constantly and avoided the other thing completely.

That’s the whole trick.

That’s the part I missed.

I didn’t magically become good at mental math. I worked it to death in my head without calling it work. I played with numbers. I broke them apart. I moved them around. I made little games out of them because my brain liked doing it.

Same with writing.

I am not good at writing because lightning struck me in the skull and blessed me with cinematic genius. I am good at writing because I kept writing. I wrote terrible short films. Embarrassing short films. Shit that should have been buried in a shoebox under a false name.

Then I wrote slightly less terrible things.

Then passable things.

Then things with shape.

Then things with a voice.

Eventually, I learned the tools. I learned the process. I learned what worked for me. I learned what didn’t. I learned that a sentence can look clean and still be dead. I learned that a story can have all the right parts and still not breathe. I learned that the first version of almost anything is usually shit.

That wasn’t magic.

That was reps.

But specialness hates reps.

Specialness wants applause for existing.

Specialness wants the world to recognize the masterpiece before the work earns the reaction.

Specialness wants to write something and then sit back while everyone lines up to literary-phallate you for your bravery and brilliance.

Specialness is a lazy little bastard.

And I have spent too much of my life letting that bastard talk.

I see it most clearly now in the areas where I still struggle.

Weight.

Fitness.

Confidence.

The mirror.

The scale.

I’ll look at myself and think, Everyone else who lost weight had it easier. Everyone else who got strong had some secret advantage. Everyone else figured out the thing I can’t figure out because I’m different.

I’m special.

Not special in the good way.

Special in the exempt-from-reality way.

Special in the “this is harder for me than it is for anyone else” way.

Special in the “I shouldn’t have to start at the beginning” way.

It’s bullshit.

It feels true, but it’s bullshit.

I just turned 43, and I am realizing something that sounds depressing until you sit with it long enough.

I am not special.

Not in the way I thought.

There is no hidden alchemy that makes me better at the things I want to be better at.

There is no curse that makes the hard things impossible.

There is no secret category of people who get to lose weight, build strength, smile confidently, make art, buy the house, drive the car, build the room, live the life, and everyone else just watches from the cheap seats eating stale popcorn and pretending they never wanted it anyway.

There are choices.

There are circumstances.

There is luck.

There is timing.

There is discipline.

There is avoidance dressed up as personality.

There is fear pretending to be wisdom.

There is wanting something and not wanting the discomfort required to get it.

That’s less romantic.

It’s also more useful.

I’ve been working with a life coach the past few months, and she has pointed out that I have two loud voices in my head.

The punishment guy.

And the reward guy.

The punishment guy says I’m a piece of shit if I don’t do the thing perfectly.

The reward guy says I deserve a treat because life is hard and I thought about doing the thing.

One beats me with a stick.

The other hands me cake for surviving the beating.

Neither one is actually helpful.

What I need is a third guy.

Not a cheerleader.

Not a drill sergeant.

Something quieter.

The guy who says:

This is what it is.

Now what are you going to do?

That’s the voice I’m trying to build.

The one that doesn’t need me to be special.

The one that doesn’t need me to be doomed.

The one that doesn’t turn every missed workout into evidence of moral failure or every good writing day into proof of divine election.

Just the third option.

Reality.

I can lose weight.

I can get strong.

I can smile more confidently.

I can look in the mirror and like what I see.

I can become the kind of man I keep imagining in some distant, polished, future version of myself.

But I cannot become him by thinking I deserve to skip the humiliating first steps.

I cannot become him by waiting for the world to confirm I was right about myself all along.

I cannot become him by trying to be what other people want me to be.

I also cannot become him by refusing to want anything too openly, because wanting something means giving the world a loaded gun and standing still.

That’s the part that scares me.

Wanting.

Really wanting.

Not performing ambition.

Not making jokes so nobody sees the need underneath.

Not saying “we’ll see” when I mean “I want this so badly it makes me feel stupid.”

Actually wanting it.

For myself.

Maybe that’s where the specialness started to dissolve.

When I was younger, I thought I was smarter than the people around me. I thought I was going to be Steven goddamned Spielberg and they were going to be assistant tight ends coaches for the JV football team or bus drivers or whatever small-town future my arrogant little brain assigned them.

What an asshole.

Because some of those people built lives.

Maybe not glamorous lives.

Maybe not lives anyone makes a movie about.

But lives.

Families.

Homes.

Jobs they understand.

Friendships.

Weekends.

Peace.

Some of them probably found more happiness than the richest person in town. More than the head of oncology at the local hospital. More than the guy with the biggest house and the boat and the photos from places everyone else pretends to care about.

Because none of them were special either.

They just made choices.

Some good.

Some bad.

Some forced.

Some lucky.

Some brutal.

Then those choices became a life.

That’s what happens.

You choose, and the choices stack.

You avoid, and the avoidance stacks too.

That is the terrifying part.

It is also the freeing part.

If nobody is special, then nobody owns the right to happiness.

Nobody owns the right to success.

Nobody owns the right to strength, confidence, money, peace, love, art, a dream car, a bungalow in the woods, a room full of books, a body they respect, or a life that feels like theirs.

If someone else can build it, I can build it.

Not because I’m special.

I’m not.

The rules apply to me too.

Effort works whether I think I’m above it or not.

Avoidance has consequences whether I have a clever explanation for it or not.

Wanting something is not enough, but it is where the work begins.

So here I go.

I’m not special.

I know that now.

And it is both a great and terrifying thing.

But I’ll take the third option.

Not punishment.

Not reward.

Reality.

It is what it is.

Now what am I going to do?