I stole you from Emily Dickinson, Nobody. She wrote some short, simple words—”I’m Nobody! Who are you? / Are you—Nobody—Too?”—and they utterly enamored me, so much so that they struck within me the most writerly of impulses: thievery. I liked the idea of there being someone out there like me—a “Nobody too”.

So does everyone else. The poem is popular (wildly popular) because the thoughts Dickinson’s putting to paper are very, very common. Everyone feels like they’re a Nobody, perhaps because being a human is terrible, and being one in the world we happen to inhabit is worse. Emily Dickinson was agoraphobic, metaphorically chained to her Amherst home, an experience few can truly understand (pandemics and social distancing acknowledged). But everyone seems to be able to relate to her. They believe she’s speaking to them—that they’re “Nobody too.”

Dickinson thought it “dreary” to be Somebody—one of the crowd, conventional, unremarkable. And who wouldn’t agree? This makes me think that, in some small way, we are all Nobodies—if only in our own perspectives. We all have a self without a body—a “Nobody” if you will. That’s the inner life, the self defined by perceived difference from others, individualistic impulses, endless delusions and doubts. Fears that there is no one in the world who understands us, that we’re a brain in a vat, hopelessly adrift in loneliness and anxiety and formaldehyde.

So there’s something empowering when Dickinson declares that she wouldn’t like to be Somebody—“public—like a Frog”. It’s okay to be strange, to be perversely Nobody in a world of Somebodies. This is despite the fact that most of us are incorrect in our assumption that we’re Nobody. Most of us are just somebody. Not a bad thing. A good thing, in fact, I keep explaining to myself.

I created you under the assumption that no one else could listen to me and understand what I had to say. Isn’t that silly? Because I’m not really like you at all, Nobody. I’m a Somebody through and through.

I haven’t spoken to you in a long while, Nobody, not for any good or profound reason. I’ve been busy—so little time, so many obligations. But I’ve neglected you and that was unkind. I would like to say it was for an interesting reason: something like “I got afraid of writing to you” or “I outgrew you” or “I got bored with you” because at least there’s a story in there. But no. Nothing. Nobody, I have nothing good to say.

Do you want a story? I grow weary of them myself. I give and I give and I give to them, and it is never enough and I tire myself out with all the Want I have inside of me, that idles away, unsatisfied, growling lazily at me, because I can’t ever find the right way to say things. I write the stories that mean something to me and they’re garbage. They’re rambling. They’re self-pitying. They’re laundry lists of all the things I think are pretty and poetic but really belong in rough drafts. I wrote a disastrous short play about a dream that takes place in a forest, where two people talk about the Beatles and Breaking Bad until they’re eaten by an unspecified and very welcome monster. I honestly thought I was Tom Stoppard.

Why do I keep doing that, writing self-indulgent drivel? Why do I keep doing what I’m doing right now, trying to sound clever and literary and sly and charmingly neurotic (Wouldn’t it be terrible if you didn’t agree with me, Nobody? That you thought I actually sound like a self-obsessed tween with a thesaurus? Best not to dwell on it, what you might think. Who cares? (I do.))

Why do I keep doing that, aping Emily Dickinson, pushing myself to be special, while she so effortlessly is?

Because I think it makes me like you, Nobody.  Rare. Strange. Special, important, someone with a perspective as unique as themself. I can’t be satisfied with myself as I am. Maybe it’s a roundabout search for acceptance, this persona I craft. Maybe it’s just human nature to be dissatisfied with the Somebody you’re stuck with being.

I don’t think I was actually supposed to be a writer. I was never especially good at it. I was, and remain, average. Hopelessly Somebody—another in the crowd. I don’t say that to be self-pitying, and I don’t want you to tell me that I’m wrong. I speak from experience, and too finely tuned self-awareness. I won’t ever be a bestseller. I won’t ever win awards.

But a piece of me is still unable to grasp that. A little piece, that wonders, what if? What if I could be Nobody—a genius in disguise as a person? I could be a very happy mediocre writer. But my ambitions outpace my abilities, so I always come up short.

I worry I chose the wrong path when I devoted myself to writing. I worry that I lack the true essence of a Nobody—a dedicated, singular Nobody (if that’s even a thing a person should even wish to be). I worry that I’m unlike others in a way that’s commonplace. I worry that Emily Dickinson wasn’t writing to me when she asked “Are you—Nobody—Too?” Maybe I don’t even worry about that last one; maybe I just know it to be painfully true.

And yet. And yet. I still want, want, want to be a Good Writer. And that Want inside me is immobile. It’s a fire burning at the core of me, flaming more beautifully than I ever could. The Want functions more than perfectly; it’s just in disjunction with the hearth that is its home.

Why do I keep doing that, wishing I was more than what I am? What a cruel thing to do. I’m a perfectly acceptable Somebody, that beats themself into the wrong outline, until they’ve lost their body, until they’re a no body. Hoping, begging that that might make them close enough to a rare and precious Nobody. I’m a pale imitation of the person I’d like to be; I’m a crayon copy of a watercolor landscape.

Nobody, it’s foolish. Nobody, it’s sad. And it’s a good story—if only I could tell it right.

Talk again soon, I hope.