August 2nd, 2021
You are a special, magical, one-of-a-kind being.
But this isn’t one of those fluff “You are a special, magical, one-of-a-kind being” pieces. No, I bring evidence to my parties and you’re about to be handed some.
There are some skills that are obvious, rare and undeniably cool. Successful chainsaw juggling, for instance. (Any dope with access to chainsaws can try to juggle them, so let’s focus on the people who are good at it.)
These kinds of abilities are what we tend to think of when we contemplate what it means to be talented or special.
What we often fail to consider is even the most basic skill to you can be extraordinary to somebody else.
For example: I know sign language. Not once in my life have I, internally, considered that a “skill.” Imagine if I ran into you on the street, you said a couple of words and I exclaimed, “Holy shit! How did you learn how to talk?”
That would be weird, right?
As I got older and started to realize that more people were not like me than were like me (were they ever…), speaking sign language as a hearing person was regularly referred to as a skill and (while internally nothing has changed) I begrudingly allow others (and sometimes myself) to refer to it as such.
You have one of these. You probably have a dozen. You easily have more.
And these abilities and skills are boring to you but interesting to others, and the most interesting part is that nobody has the same combination of them, and they all affect your life in different ways.
On top of that, there is a near-infinite list of jobs, genetic wins and losses, resources — not to mention the choices you make, the decisions you avoid, the random events that occur and the things you feel like happened for a reason.
You are literally — say it with me — a special, magical, one-of-a-kind being, and there are people out there who are in complete awe of you and what you can do.
Yeah. You.
And I just slipped you the proof.
The Den 