I don't matter.

Not yet, anyway.

*Originally written on 20th February

“What do we mean by saying that existence precedes essence? We mean that man first of all exists, encounters himself, surges up in the world—and defines himself afterward.” — Jean-Paul Sartre, ‘Existentialism & Humanism’

I don’t matter.

I came upon this idea when I decided to change the URL of this blog. The previous URL (leavesinlight) and the meaning that I convinced myself it had suddenly felt void of any sense at all—like when you say a word too many times and that previous mental association you had for it wears away, letters falling into a vague alphabet slop.

At the time of that realisation, I had changed the URL to ‘remaininlight’ after the classic Talking Heads album. (And I’ll probably change it again; I’m indecisive!) A sucker for meaning, I did end up looking into the album details and found out that the central theme was “identity disturbance”. Apt.

Then, like a bolt of lightning, it hit me that I should have just stuck with the original silly little URL because meaning only comes after something exists and has life experience added to it. The only way for those words to have meaning is if I give them time to develop meaning through what I do. Gathering the vague slop into a workable clay to become… some kind of pottery or sculpture. I’m envisioning a vague Renaissance-era statue of one of the very many legendary or mythological figures…

What is “meaning” anyway? A life unlived is to have no meaning at all. I suppose that’s where my lifelong inner turmoil all grows from. I just haven’t lived, so what can I say my life means? Without sounding too self-deprecating, I’m not a very special person, and everything I do is really quite inconsequential. I haven’t gathered much of anything I can call “life experience” to create anything with any significant meaning. I have spent so much of my time in isolation, the textbook example of a recluse, that I feel like a broken person.

An incomprehensible amount of time spent alone— I’m not proud of it, but it’s gotten to a point where I expect it, despite not wanting it. As a child, that isolation was a result of hyper-strict parents, solitude out of habit. As an adult, I enjoyed my alone time and thrived in it. At first. Now I’m suffering. Initially, it was a preference for solitude, which I can still enjoy from time to time, or avoiding daily inconveniences like work commutes and awkward office banter. Later, it became a self-imposed isolation, born out of an anxious belief that whether I’m in a circle of friends or not, whether I’m interacting with people in-person or online, my absence or presence is of no consequence or basically undesired altogether. I save people the trouble. Desire to be or familiarity with being alone became loneliness, and I robbed myself of what could’ve been my essence. Who I am is defined by what I do, and I’ve not done very much at all.

‘"Every man rushes elsewhere and towards the future, since no man has reached his own self," Montaigne warned many centuries ago. Arriving at oneself, figuring out who you are, what you love, what you think about your world and the people in it—these are experiences that require time, patience, boredom, daydreaming, and anticipation to discover. Without those things, we're just killing time.’ — Christine Rosen

So, the lack of life—no relationships or community, nor experiences born from interpersonal serendipity between acquaintances and strangers alike—means that I have no story to tell. Everyone loves stories. Stories are essential to the existence of humanity. The stories parents tell their children of what they got up to when they were kids. Written records of how nations came to be or ceased being. Stories are recipes, warnings, memories, history. Myths and legends. Without stories, we don’t know who we are, who we have been, or who we might be. Stories make things easy to remember.

Stories are also one of the greatest tools we have for building community. They tie friends and family together. The stories we share and believe in, which drive us to act and shape our own lives either to maintain that tale or to challenge it, help us find our kin.

I love the stories built around artists and musicians I admire, like how Davie Jones became Ziggy Stardust. Impossible to compare to, but Bowie is on the brain as I had recently been reading of his legend in David Hepworth’s ‘1971: Never A Dull Moment’, a book filled with so many stories of how iconic rock bands came together and either rose to immediate stardom, struggled for years until one unexpected stroke of luck, or in many cases, created fantastic works in relative obscurity, only to be discovered and celebrated years after they had passed on.

I love stories. I think I’m obsessed with narrative, and worse still, the supposed “perfect narrative”. Can anyone’s life story be “perfect”? That’s subjective. The narrative thread of a life is such a fascinating thing, and I owe my life to those stories of people that I admire. Stories that made them who they are. Tales that give you hope, make you believe in a fantasy so real that you could’ve been a part of it, and the second-hand nostalgia you get from that. Living vicariously through the stories and memories of other people, with the hope that, as long as your narrative has all the right characters, plot devices, and story beats, your own story could be like that too.

Ever since I was a kid, I have always dreamt of having a legendary life like those musicians or prolific writers whose music and writing transcend time and generations. Masters of their craft who have sung and written about unbelievable experiences and had scores of people retell their stories, spoken or sung, just like folktales and myths we all grow up on. I’ve spent so many years filling myself up with music, books and poetry, trying to find some missing part of myself through every page, every song and every line, desperately waiting for the chapter where I show up in this great story. I still do that now.

I often wonder what my story is, how the narrative of my life is taking shape. I have no memories, I have no experiences—no significant ones, anyway. I don’t have a story, and without a story, there’s not much to remember. And my greatest fear is being forgotten. I paused to think about that statement after writing it. Really? Surely there are more pressing issues to be worried about. Aren’t you more afraid of something like death?

Isn’t being forgotten a kind of death? Maybe that’s what this all is—I’m just scared of dying without leaving anything behind to be remembered by.

That would explain why I’m always afraid of running out of time because I have wasted so much of it living this way, if you could call that living. How much time do I have left?

An old work colleague used to tell me that I should travel to New York and write my memoirs there. I was in my late twenties at the time he said this. I didn’t have a story to tell then, and I still don’t have a story to tell now in my early thirties. That’s still young to some, but also not very young at all in a lot of ways. Yet, I still crave that perfect narrative for my life, and I’m waiting for the story to start. How much time do I have left?

What if I am just meant to be as I am, wholly unremarkable, nothing more, nothing less? Perhaps I have an ego bigger than my drive and much bigger than what I am destined for. Should I just put myself out of my misery now? (Stream of honest thought. I will not edit that out.)

And so, without a story, I realised I don’t matter.

But once I told myself that, really just got down to what that really meant, there was a sense of liberation. Nothing I do will be of any consequence and won’t mean anything.

Okay— Let’s go.

It’s very easy to take this as a surface-level nihilistic outlook, but that’s not what I mean. I desperately want my life to have meaning, and I want to mean something to people. Hell, I want to mean something significant to a lot of people. I want to matter. But I have to accept that, ultimately, I might not matter that much to many people at all. The only truth is that I exist, and meaning only comes from a life lived, from discovering who I am through all the experiences I encounter in the world, my loves and hates and desires, my personal relationships and in the work I do. In that journey to discover who I am, that is where I find meaning. So that’s what I must do.

So, I have to stop hiding my inaction behind the excuse of my story needing to be perfect. I just need to remember that I don’t matter. The meaning I wish for my life and work to have is out of my control and can only come once the work exists. If I don’t create the work—if I don’t write or sing or play or speak to anyone—there’s nothing to attribute meaning to, nothing to be remembered. And even once the work is done, I have no control over how it’ll be remembered, if at all.

If I prematurely worry about what kind of meaning a non-existent audience will attribute to my non-existent work, I’ve failed. I will approach it as if I do not matter because I don’t! I create the work to exist as an expression of myself, to communicate some kind of truth, a love of music and creativity, and a celebration of the stories that came before me. An imprint of my existence. “Zain was here”. And since I don’t matter, it should be no bother whether or not the work has any meaning to anyone else. I would’ve created something true to me; that is the most important thing.

And so today, I write as if no one is reading. Honestly, this is the hardest part to grapple with because I want to belong to this creative, musical world and its history, have a legacy, become a legend and all that—ha! Maybe I’m becoming more narcissistic as I get older and closer to death. I thought it’d be the opposite. The life of a recluse does some serious damage to the brain.

I think there’s always an element of narcissism in the arts. While it may be a bit narcissistic, I think, ultimately, there’s just a pure desire to be seen, heard, remembered, and belong.

It’s not that the work doesn’t matter or that the work has to be devoid of meaning; I just can’t anticipate the meaning of the work and try to put that in there. All I can do is create with sincerity and truth, made of my life experiences, and have the work exist. Whatever happens to it after that isn’t up to me. That’s the part that I need to let go of. If I don’t, there will be nothing left of me at all.

So, I don’t matter. Or maybe, I just don’t matter yet.

*I have been sitting on this thought for about a month now. Initially, I wanted this piece to be a more researched analysis of why I feel this way, with citations and references that could better help describe what I’m feeling and why, but I have a lot more research to do yet. As the potency of that initial feeling hasn’t passed, I just wanted to keep the raw emotion I felt during that moment of clarity. I may return to this topic at a later date. I may not.