You ARE Somebody
By: Mj Blehart
Tags: Awareness, Self Improvement, Life, Mindfulness, Personal Development

Recently, I took on a gig that was not even remotely what I applied for. I previously wrote about this, questioning how I got there in the first place.

It has been quite the ride thus far. There have been several unexpected perks, including my own office, a title, and business cards.

Upon looking at these business cards, my first thought was, huh, look at that — now I am somebody. Cool.

On second thought, I was somebody before there were cards with my name and unexpected title on them.

It’s easy, however, to not consider that you are somebody all the time. How many celebrities can you name in film, television, sports, and music? How about politicians, certain business leaders, renowned authors, and other big names? All of those somebodies can make you feel like quite the nobody.

Then you get to tighten your focus into your personal life, and if you in any way compare yourself to other people — and I would wager you probably do — it’s easy to measure-up short. You look at other people at work, in your community, maybe even within the infrastructure of your hobby, and question if you are anybody worthwhile.

No matter the situation, you ARE somebody. There is no need for a fancy title or other accolades. You are somebody, and you are worthwhile just by being you.

Most people are ‘nobodies’

Let’s face a couple of facts here. The human race is made up of more than 7 billion people. That number, written out, is 7,000,000,000. Point of fact, in 2020, that number is apparently closing in on 8 billion people. That is a LOT of people living on this planet.

I haven’t the foggiest idea where to look for this number, as “celebrity” has a rather loose definition. For the sake of argument, let’s just say that any recognizable person frequently in the news and easily named counts. Thus, I am going to hypothesize that maybe there are, across the entire planet, 7 million people that fall into this category.

That means that .1% of all the people in the world are celebrities, and thus counted as “somebodies.” One in a thousand. That’s a really small number when you get right down to it.

Now let’s include other people who you think would be more of a “somebody” than you because they have a better job, more money, or a fancy title or other than you don’t. So let’s say you multiply this by ten times. This puts us at 70 million of 7 billion.

That comes out to only 1 percent.

Even if my numbers are super-conservative — and maybe they are — I would guess no more than 10% of any given population would fall into the category of “celebrity” or “somebody.”

Given these numbers — can you really fathom that between 99.9% and 90% of the people on this planet are “nobodies?” So 6.99 (6,993,000,000) to 6.3 (6,300,000,000) billion people are not “somebody?”

I know I can’t.

This tells me that you ARE somebody, not nobody.

Think well of yourself

You are perfectly imperfect. So is pretty much everyone. Really.

I have several things I am working on. My weight needs to come down, which will improve the health of my body. I need to be more mindful about where my headspace is and work on using my affirmations to stay in a good mindset. It would behoove me to not allow distractions to get in the way of my work towards my goals.

As a human being, it is totally natural to cope with all of this. I am perfectly imperfect, but that doesn’t make me any less of a somebody. Neither does it make me unworthy or undeserving of achieving the goals I have for my life.

The fact of the matter is, you do not need a title, fancy job, wealth, or anything else to be somebody. There is only one thing you need to do and be:

You need to be you.

That is surprisingly challenging for a lot of people, though. With all the messages telling you that there is a cosmic measuring stick somewhere out there that you don’t measure up to, this is difficult. It is easy to think poorly of yourself because you are being constantly bombarded by messages telling you that you’re nobody.

That’s simply untrue. You ARE somebody, and you shouldn’t think poorly of yourself. It may feel like a lie of some sort, but you deserve to think and feel good about who you are. Even if you are working on growing, changing, and improving yourself.

Practicing mindfulness and being aware of what you are thinking, what and how you are feeling, and the intention of your actions gives you control over this. Mindfulness is consciousness in the here-and-now, with which you can choose to think well of yourself.