There are no unique stories.

Long-term readers of this blog would’ve realised by now that the attention I pay to this corner of the Internet has waned. It’s not because of disinterest, but rather a case of the shoemaker’s children never being shod. I used to blog as an escape, to capture my life as it was, to chronicle it for my kid. Nowadays, writing is what I do for a living so my creative juices go most often towards those avenues, and not this one. That doesn’t mean I’m stopping though, but I do know the frequency of posts and glimpses of my inner state have waned. I apologise for that, but mostly to myself because I think I’ve stunted my own monologues for a while. They are a necessary evil when you live in my head. 

I want to say something, and it may piss some people off. That’s okay – I like reactions. Here it is:

There are no unique stories.

Were a story to be truly unique, it would be entirely unrelatable and none of us would read it. In fact, every time you’ve read something and thought “shit that’s great” or “heck, I know what they mean!” you believe it to be good because you find something of yourself within it. Perhaps even something that you wouldn’t admit to in public. That’s okay. In fact, it’s more than okay. It’s brilliant to discover a shiny nugget of yourself reflected somewhere in the world outside of your own headspace. I get it, completely, and I spend my life searching for those treasures. And I write, primarily for my daughter to one day read, but also because I hope that someone else out there might one day find a shiny nugget of their own selves reflecting back them from within the words I’ve squirmed out of my head and onto a page or screen.

Sometimes, people will email me and say things like “thank you for writing that” or “I found something of myself in what you wrote” and that makes all the times I’ve had to deal with comments like “you suck. you should die” worth it. I am so appreciative of the people who reach out, and, for the trolls, I say “thanks for the traffic”.

But I want to go back to my original point and underline something for you. I do not have a unique story, and neither do you. That doesn’t make us any less special or wonderful, or terrible or charming. It is a facet of humanity that actually links us, because we are, at the end of all the rubbish we talk all day to try and justify ourselves, human.

We are squeaky babies when we emerge into the world, naked and yelping. We all wipe twice after abluting (well, you should, at least) and we all sit up at night pondering what the hell we’re doing with our lives. Our details are different but our humanity is the same.

I wish for a world where we could see that, and enjoy the differences in our details and celebrate the sameness we all have. But that’s not the world we live in, or the one we seem so hellbent on destroying, either together or against each other.

But, you know what? Today I’d like you to just look for a sort of sameness within you and someone else. Find a similarity between the two of you that’s evident or not easily visible. I don’t care how you do it, but just try it for a change. Log out of the competition we try and believe we’re in (spoiler – the only person you’re competing with is yourself) and just find something of yourself in someone else.

If you can do that, just today, you’d be a better person for the world, and a nicer person to yourself. I promise.