You aren’t one in a million. You are one in eight billion. Maybe it’s time to own your originality.
Lately, I’ve been documenting my days through photos and videos. The unexpected gift has been seeing myself through another lens.
I have spent a lifetime in self-reflection, filling journals with questions and discoveries. Compassionate curiosity has always come naturally when looking at others. Yet when I looked at myself, I often reached for correction.
What needs improving here? What should change?
Then, a few discoveries made me laugh.
Seeing What Was Always Here
Oh, Beloved Creature, what are you doing now?
Apparently, I lean dramatically to the left every time I write. Not a subtle tilt. Not a slight angle. A full commitment to the movement.
It’s pen right, lean left.
Have pen. Will lean.
The funny thing is, the lean isn’t new. My awareness of it is.
I knew these things. I just didn’t see them.
The camera revealed other familiar companions: the topknot that appears because hair has a mind of its own, and I have things to do, along with the raccoon-focused face that looks as though I am solving the mysteries of the universe on a deadline.
For years, I wrote myself little reminders: Smile. Remember to smile.
Now I watch those videos and laugh.
The camera sees concentration.
I know joy.
Both are true.
The Face Beyond Smiling
When I am creating, I am not enduring the moment. I am inhabiting it.
These are among the most joyful and meaningful moments of my life. The love and aliveness are so complete that a visible smile becomes unnecessary.
The smile isn’t missing. It is inward.
There is a face beyond smiling—the face of devotion, the face of flow, the face that forgets itself.
Perhaps the outward expression was never telling the whole story.
A More Loving Lens
What has changed isn’t what I see. It is the lens through which I see it.
For much of my life, the perfectionistic voice asked: What needs fixing?
Curiosity asks a different question: What is true?
That shift changed everything.
Curiosity reveals things criticism never can—not flaws, not projects, but people.
The actual human beings standing before us, including ourselves.
Eight Billion Originals
The more I sat with my discoveries, the less interested I became in the lean itself. The lean was simply the doorway.
The deeper question became: What are you overlooking—not because it is hidden, but because it is familiar?
Perhaps your originality isn’t dramatic. Perhaps it lives in the way you listen, solve problems, make someone feel welcome, bring humor into difficulty, notice beauty, create, love, and keep showing up.
Originality is not something we achieve. It is something we recognize.
Eight billion people with eight billion nervous systems, histories, and ways of loving, grieving, creating, laughing, solving, moving, and making meaning.
No duplicates. Not one.
We easily recognize originality in others. We notice their gifts, their peculiarities, and the ways they move through the world.
Why should we be any different?
The Love Letter
Perhaps owning our originality begins with a simple, loving act.
Notice it. Name it. Claim it. Own it. Rock it.
Not because we have become someone new, but because we are finally seeing who has been here all along.
Every life is a love letter written in a singular hand. This one simply asks us to include ourselves in the mailing list.