Looking Up From Yourself

Does individuality serve you?

Ashley Sudeta

Sometimes I feel like the most embarrassing person in the world. I talk too much and forget to laugh at jokes. When I studied abroad, a classmate got drunk and told me not to talk to her, because everything I said was “so awkward.” There are days when I feel like there’s a big secret everyone is leaving me out of.

Sometimes I feel like the most irreparable person in the world. On good days, I writhe on the floor in fits of restlessness. On worse nights, I pause while washing dishes, imagining plunging the sturdy chef’s knife into my chest. In these moments it’s easy to imagine I’m the only one who’s ever hurt.

I don’t care for individualism—I don’t want to be one in a million. There’s comfort in knowing my experiences are familiar to others, even people I will never meet. In his book “Conversations with James Baldwin,” the writer and civil rights activist describes the power of feeling seen through art.

“You read something which you thought only happened to you, and you discover that it happened 100 years ago to Dostoyevsky. This is a very great liberation for the suffering, struggling person, who always thinks that he is alone,” Baldwin said.

I’m not patient zero for strangeness, and I’m reminded of this through my connections with others. The idea of being completely original and incomprehensible can be terrifying, but the ideas we share with each other are capable of soothing this fear.

I watch movies and listen to music and stare at paintings, but I’m partial toward reading poetry online. There’s a poet named Silas Denver Melvin in Plaistow, New Hampshire who can cut himself open and sort the joy from anguish. He knows just what cowboys mean to me—and some people will never understand what a cowboy is to me.

Whether it’s in face-to-face interactions or the art I see and hear, I continually find moments of understanding and being understood. I wake up each day, searching for recognition of myself in others, finding scraps to reassure me I will never be alone.