It Matters to Someone

It matters to someone. I know this is true, though I may not have empirical evidence with which to prove it. Sometimes, simply knowing something in the core of your being is enough.

Whatever it is you have to say, write, sing, create… it matters. To someone.

That someone might not be a person you know or will ever know. But that’s okay. That someone might be distant from in you in space or time and never have the chance to tell you how much it mattered. But that’s okay, too.

It might matter for a fleeting moment, in a light, insubstantial manner, or it might matter in a life-changing, earth-shattering sort of way. It might matter to someone right before they take their last breath on earth. It might matter to someone just as they are discovering their place in the world. It might matter to a single someone. It might matter to millions of someones.

The point it—it matters. And you must know this. Because often times, it seems like it doesn’t.

There are, in fact, plenty of someones to whom it will NOT matter. Those someones might be your nearest and dearest who are simply too busy, too preoccupied or too different from you for it to land. Those someones might be people with economic power who view you through a lens of commercial value instead of authentic value. Those someones might be strangers whose buttons you push, who lash out and disparage in an attempt to feel big. In other words—haters gonna hate, players gonna play.

It hurts to be ignored, rejected and criticized. This is a law of nature, just like it hurts to stub one’s toe, to get a really bad sunburn and to push a baby out of your vagina.

Good thing you are someone who can withstand pain. Good thing pain is only temporary.

Whatever that thing is, that thing that you want to do or make, but haven’t because you’re afraid that people won’t like it… well, first of all, go easy one yourself. Because your fears are one hundred percent legitimate. Everything that’s ever been created in the history of humanity has been disliked, hated, criticized and/or ignored… by someone.

But nothing that’s ever been brought forth with feeling was ever worthless. I DO have empirical evidence to back this up, just not on me right now, so you’re going to have to take my word for it. Each creation-- from the rough and simple stick figure drawing of an anonymous child to the poetic and encyclopedic seafaring tale of Herman Melville (a commercial failure, by the way, posthumously revered by literary elite, but still unloved by many contemporary readers)-- matters to someone.

Are you really going to stay silent, inactive, scared and shut down, just because of the haters and negaters? Or are you going to honor the somebody or somebodies to whom your generative efforts might mean the difference between a smile and a grimace, a laugh and sob, a moment of transcendence and mundane existence?

Maybe it doesn’t matter in the way that giving someone a heart transplant matters, but you didn’t go to medical school, now did you? So please stop moping, stop hiding, stop procrastinating and engaging in distraction.

It matters to someone.

YOU MATTER.

And that someone is waiting.