"I'm nothing."

We say it all the time to ourselves.  It's our gold-medal effort at deprecation: the very worst thing we can call the face we see in the mirror.  Nothing.

It's funny, though.  We can't be nothing.  No matter how hard we try, no matter how many times we tell ourselves that it is what we are, we simply cannot be it.  To be nothing, we would have to look in the mirror and not see ourselves.  In fact, we would have to have no eyes or body or brain at all.  Even when we die, we will be something.  Dirt is something.  Being nothing is simply impossible.  Why do we try?

Maybe it's because we want to be different.  After all, no one in the history of the world has ever succeeded at being nothing.  Deep inside our dim hearts, we want to do great things, and to be nothing would certainly be an achievement.  Nothing is different.

Even though we use it as an angry word, an insult to ourselves, I think that we don't mean it that way.  I think that there is still a little candle somewhere inside of us that knows that nothing is different and different is worthwhile.  Nothing is something that will give us a fight.  Nothing is something that we can strive for every day, and we need things like that.  Things to fight for, like the way that we turn nothing into something.

But we really ought to stop.  I rarely discourage people from trying to make someone of themselves, but it is so miserably useless to try to be nothing that I simply can't endorse it.  There are many other things that we can successfully be, but we will never succeed at being nothing.  When we try, we only start to turn ourselves into a something that is more and more different than the something that we want to be.  That's what you can say to yourself in the mirror: "I am something." Because you are.  You might not know what yet, but that means that there is room to try.  There's room to succeed, too.  We're all something, and we're all going to be something else once we hit the grave.  No matter what, you win by trying to be something.  But what sort of something?  That is a question worth following.