The Art of Being a Nobody

When every version of yourself feels distant, do you ever ask if they were ever you?

I used to belong to the roles people needed me to be. Beneath it all, I knew those borrowed personalities were never really mine to carry. Yet the truth is, I never wanted to break free.

My positivity would spill into other realms, feeding others while emptying me. I started to realise being somebody was killing me.

11.04.2024

Life is truly strange. As I lay in bed, fragments of my past flickered before my eyes, each carrying a different feeling, each symbolising a different image. Perhaps my inner struggle today lies exactly here: not knowing which image is truly mine. For a while now, I have been trying to live through my older versions. I keep trying to fit myself into them, yet because I cannot fully belong to any mold, I end up feeling trapped. The journey ahead terrifies me more than anything. None of my past versions will be close, and I will belong to none of them. I fear becoming a nobody.

At the time, no rupture felt harder than becoming a ‘nobody’.

When you feel lost the most, the universe often replies with a small sign.

Slowly, and unwillingly my understanding began to realise it was time to set myself free.

One day a book found its way to me: Midnight Library. The protagonist, Nora, dies after a life filled with misery, she finds herself in a library that stretches infinitely. Each book tells the story of a different life, one where she had made a choice differently.

How many moments have you replayed, wishing the choice had been another?

I used to wonder what life would be if I had chosen differently. Even choices from kindergarten returned to me.

As I finished the book, those thoughts followed me, making the ending seem deceptively simple. Nora stepped into the lives she once regretted not choosing, only to learn the life she was living was the only one that truly felt like hers.

The simplicity unsettled me until I realised that sometimes the most striking truths hide in the simplest answers we dismiss. Life is only as complex as we choose to make it.

I have made choices I once thought destroyed me. Parkinson’s may be written in my genes, but it was my decisions that brought the inevitable sooner than I ever expected.

For years, those choices remained as scars I ached to cut from my story. Then one day, the end I dreaded became the beginning I needed.

Although unsettling, the truth lay in front of me. If it were not for my illness, my life would have been dragged to the edge and hurled down the cliff.

It is still far from perfect, yet I wish to change nothing.

Recently, someone questioned my devotion to the tattoos covering my body. The same tired questions appeared again. ‘What if I get bored? What if I change my mind? What about when I am 80?’

Change is something I welcome, and I see evolving through life as essential. But that doesn’t erase the person I once was; the person who chose each tattoo for the meaning it carried at that time. Each one holds a lesson, a fragment that has shaped who I am today, all aligning with my evolution. In fact, I have 13 tattoos and when I’m 80, I’ll be a very cool grandmother, with stories written across my skin.

That holds not only for the marks on my skin, but for the people who once marked my life. Lately, I’ve extracted many of them and weirdly, that does not upset me. They are parts of me yet, they echo other stories. They had to fall silent for my own voice to rise. Bitterness would not remain, for the sake of the times. Each left its trace, threading into the fabric of who I become.

For the first time, letting go feels like a door opening.

Every night when we sleep, we die. What carries me forward is not endurance but the joy of rising reborn, uncertain who I will be.

I now know, for creation to emerge, space must first be opened.

Being nobody is no longer a fear but a strength that blooms inside me.

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