on the dichotomy of smallness

Yellowstone National Park, 2018

When I was younger I kept a journal, a soft covered yellow composition notebook that had my name scribbled on the front in blue pen. My habit was to either record my day with such a sublime clarity that to read the passage back was to experience it again, or not at all. What is interesting about rereading these passages—which I have recently been doing since I began living again in my childhood home—is not my shocking inability to spell words correctly, but the way in which I was cognizant, even at age 9 or 10, of my own smallness. This was most clearly evident in the way I referenced my hometown, not calling it by its name but referring to it generically as “a corner of the world”, like one in a million dots in Pollock painting. Or the way I wrote about the ocean, “the edge of the world” as it is referred to in the pages of my journal, a recognition that the world, even in its vastness, is still finite. This is also to say that within these microcosms in which I found myself, I felt on an individual level, a distinct sense of smallness.

There is a dichotomy about smallness which I have been stuck on for a while. On the one hand, as per an article posted years ago in the Guardian, “Most of us spend much of our lives trying, in one way or another, to get the world under control, to make reality predictable and explicable and non-intimidating.” Smallness is the means by which we are able to gain a semblance of control. Smallness is the way we approach travel, visiting towns and cities inside of countries, the way we approach literature, piecing together sentences which comprise chapters which make up novels, the way we approach time, the passing of milliseconds. But smallness is also the reason we feel as though we have no control to begin with; smallness is simultaneously the reason that our actions and ideas and words feel as though they have no effect. This is also called, more bleakly, insignificance. In this way, our smallness has the power to suffocate, like spending all your life within the confines of one room that eventually fills with recycled air.

It was in this same journal that I expressed an early eagerness to travel, which was predicated on the misguided and hopelessly naive assumption that it would make me feel less small. Travel, while it shows you possibility beyond your smallness, outside of your own microcosms, doesn’t inherently strip you of your smallness. Years later, when I applied to college, I was again guided by the idea that I would have the power to emerge from my smallness, this time through my education, and “make a difference in the world”, that horribly vague and enduringly naive phrase that makes college admissions officers cringe. I was as unsure about what this would look like in practice as I was confused about my own smallness entirely. Where in my journal I recorded my early recognition of my feelings of smallness, I did not have any grasp over how robust and all-consuming a feeling it is. Not travel, nor anything else can strip us of our smallness, it is our most immutable feature.

How do we continue in a world governed by our own smallness? “If a man does not master his circumstances then he is bound to be mastered by them.” (A Gentleman in Moscow) As I see it, there are two ways to master our atomity. We can take up as much space as possible within the places we exist, molding and contorting ourselves into every nook and cranny until we no longer resemble our original selves. Or we can master our smallness in such a way to make an impact of equal proportion on the people to whom it most matters. We can travel, and feel less lonely in our smallness and we can read in order to understand all of the many forms that smallness takes. But it is only in the company of good people can we feel not as though we are ruled by our smallness, but rather empowered by it.

There are many ways to reach people, to master our smallness, without trying to break free from it. A meal is one of these ways. A moment of vulnerability is another. By accepting my smallness, which I was unable to do for so many years, I am allowing myself the opportunity to master it.