When “Nothing Matters”

Nothing matters.

I can almost guarantee we’ve all felt this way at a time, from an existential thought that spirals into deep-seated dread of life and all the pain, loss, anger, and unknowing it holds.

That feeling of helplessness is so easy in impacting the way we see the world, because being alive is confusing and it’s hard. Emotions are difficult, failure feels inevitable, decisions can feel impossible, and just when things seem in our control, something else can happen that’s completely out of it, and all we can do is accept it.

Acceptance is rough. It can feel impossible to accept what life throws at us all of the time. The things we are forced to accept are oftentimes not things we wish were so.

But we don’t live in a utopia. We live in an imperfect world, created by imperfect people, and maintained by each and every one of us and our individual stories, gifts, opinions, and flaws.

Life, sometimes, feels like a stupor more than a gift. It feels like survival rather than an ambitious, glorious chase. Life, sometimes, is rising slowly, zombified, rather than standing tall, shoulders back, chin held high. We rise, we move, we fall, and we redo it all again. We are born, we live, and we die; then, perhaps, it ends as if it had never begun at all.

This way of thinking about life, about purpose and futility and the curse of time, was ingrained in me for a very long time. It’s still the way I think about things, some days—even most days, when times get hard, and when the mind becomes a place that feels impossible to reside in.

But we’re all so different. For me, it is easy, even with my same core, to feel somewhat differently about the world each and every day. It is with remarkable ease that we remain inconsistent and fickle as human beings. I used to feel that I fell in and out of love with everything, with everyone, with people, with places and faces and interests, with passions I had pledged my life away to, with memories I once held dear.

In many ways, with so many things, and too many people, I stopped trying. I refused to be myself, or to learn what that meant. I gave up on the friendship. I cancelled the plans. I never texted again. I let things slide that should not have. I laughed when I didn’t think it was funny. I succumbed to cowardice and comfort.

I gathered everything that made me myself and threw it away into a place I didn’t have to think about any of it, because approaching life as a blank slate feels much easier. I fought with my morals; I ignored the ways in which I felt I’d betrayed them until I could not any longer. I stopped telling myself I was special in any way; I began to believe in my own mediocrity, and with that, my own lack of purpose.

In other parts of my life, I never stopped trying, but it always became too much. I poured my love and understanding into others and not myself. I became codependent because I did not trust myself to think for myself. I spent hours, probably days, of my life torturing myself over things that bothered me without telling another soul. I found myself caring too much, feeling too affected by the emotions of others, or by the way I was seen.

Cowardice, it seems, has always been at the core of my being, and that has made me time and time again feel like giving up. We have so little time on this planet; there’s no time to unravel all this cowardice and fear I carry. There’s no point; it is who I am.

And then I realized, the way I viewed myself, as not mattering, as having no value or purpose due to my flaws, as being eternally imperfect and disappointing, as not being able to change in any meaningful way, was the exact same way I viewed the world around me.

This is not to say that life is always bursting with beauty and love and meaning, and that anyone who can’t see or understand that isn’t looking hard enough. People endure so much internal pain and suffering that of course it can feel like the world holds nothing but futility. Boredom, too, alongside loneliness, infests the mind and destroys our hope, taking one of our most precious gifts away. In our darkest moments, it can make us crave the only thing we feel will help us escape from how difficult life can be: death itself.

I came to see that my self-resentment was what was truly fueling my existentialism. I was comfortable in the darkness of waiting for death because I was afraid to live as myself. But my cowardice, my fears, my regrets and mistakes, all of my imperfections—I had to live with them, and I had to navigate a way to live my life in a way that alleviated them, little by little.

I wanted to understand why I thought I was nothing. I wanted to understand what I truly thought about the world without anyone else telling me or influencing me on how to feel, or what the reality was.

I am my own person. I live my own reality; I pave my own personal truth. No one else will see the world precisely the way I do, and that’s okay. My truth and perspective matters, just as everyone else’s does too.

Someone can believe that life is meaningless, and I can understand why. But I believe the truth is what we make of it. We carve our own meaning. If everything means nothing, why do we care? Why do we try? Why do we feel such pain or sadness or joy? Things matter to us, and that within itself is proof that life is not, in fact, utterly meaningless, but rather that we must make the meaning for ourselves.

There is a terrible sort of tenderness to begin to love yourself. Coming to know the self is hard, and it hurts. It’s disappointing; it makes the heart sink. It’s looking in a mirror with jagged cracks on its surface that can’t be smoothed out, nor rubbed clean, nor made anew. But it’s also a beautiful, healing gift that allows us to see our world with new eyes.

If nothing matters in the entire world, find the things that matter to you. <3