Be Nobody by Lama Marut Read Free Book Online Page A

to jump through and more rivers to cross, with no end in sight.
    We often glorify and idealize those who seem to really be somebody : the rock star, the Olympic athlete, the A-list actor, the mega-rich or supremely famous. But even off-the-charts superstars like Madonna can never quite measure up when it comes to this kind of achievement-based understanding of the self. As she candidly confessed in an interview, no matter how successful she became, she never quite felt that she was “somebody enough”:
    My drive in life comes from a fear of being mediocre. That is always pushing me. I push past one spell of it and discover myself as a special human being but then I feel I am still mediocre and uninteresting unless I do something else. Because even though I have become Somebody, I still have to prove that Somebody. My struggle has never ended and I guess it never will. 16
    Madonna fears “being mediocre”—that is, not being “Madonna enough.” Similarly, the great hockey player Wayne Gretzky has complained that “The hardest part of being Wayne Gretzky is that I get compared to Wayne Gretzky.” Cary Grant also reportedly once declared, “Everyone wants to be Cary Grant. Even I wish to be Cary Grant.” II
    These testimonials should give us a clue about pinning our hopes for identity and self-satisfaction on achievement alone. If Madonna can’t be Madonna enough; if Wayne Gretzky can never quite live up to being Wayne Gretzky; and if even (the real) Cary Grant wanted someday to be (the ideal) Cary Grant, well, what hope is there for us less-than-superstars?
    The ideal of a “special self” one wishes to construct through accomplishment tends always to outstrip the reality, leaving one feeling incomplete, inadequate, and continually running to try to catch up. The fear of not being so special after all— the anxiety ofbeing ordinary —haunts and follows even those among us who seem to have reached the very apex of our chosen endeavors, and it is endemic among those of us who, by and large, are actually pretty ordinary when it comes to our abilities and our achievements. 17
    While Socrates encouraged us to “know thyself,” others have pointed out that self-knowledge is sometimes bad news! If the worth of the self we’re trying to know and identify with is judged by performance-based criteria, we will usually find ourselves perpetually coming up short. We will encounter a self that is forever not special enough, a somebody who is not big enough.
    Although even the most ordinary of us apparently would rather not think of ourselves as such, the burden of being special is perhaps a much heavier weight to bear.
T OO S PECIAL FOR O UR O WN G OOD
    And then there’s the other side of the coin. If we’re not suffering from neurotic apprehension that we’re not special enough , we’re puffed up with the narcissistic arrogance of thinking we’re somehow more special than others. The desperate need to be special easily morphs into a competitive quest to feel superior in one way or another. Fearing that we’ll be seen as nobody and urgently trying to be somebody, we get too big for our britches. We become too special for our own good.
    As Pema Chödrön notes in the epigraph to this chapter, it’s a mistake to overestimate the role and ignore who is really playing that role. It is a given that we are all unique individuals, but attaching to and elevating our uniqueness is not the recipe either for true happiness or for more comprehensive self-knowledge.
    It’s somewhat ironic that, driven by the belief that we’ll be happy only by being distinctive, separate, and unique, we end up collectively pursuing this Holy Grail of redemptive individuality in verysimilar ways. The reader might recall a scene in that Monty Python movie, Life of Brian , in which a mob pursues Brian, the supposed messiah, and surrounds his home. The reluctant