“I’m Nobody!” Emily Dickinson wrote nearly two centuries ago. “Who are you? Are you Nobody too?”

Yes! I answered her in my mind when I first read her poetry in high school English class. These words, like most of what Emily wrote so long before, spoke to me as if she were writing specifically to my quiet, shy, insecure, adolescent self.

“Then there’s a pair of us,” the poem continues. “Don’t tell! They’d advertise, you know.”

Okay, Emily, I thought then. I won’t tell. It’s our secret…

“How dreary to be Somebody,” her poem goes on. “How public like a frog — to tell one’s name the livelong day to an admiring bog.”

Ha! My teenage-self thought. So true. Popularity is just a big old BOG! 

So I never tried to be popular in high school.

Curiously, my attitude about becoming Somebody hasn’t changed at all in all these intervening years. Now, at eighty, and looking back, I see that the shy Nobody I was then is the same person I am today. In this regard, at least, I haven’t changed. 

(Emily Dickinson, ca. 1847 [The Morgan Library])

Emily Dickinson, who became one of America’s most beloved poets, never knew fame in her lifetime. She was a skinny and rather homely young woman who for the most part lived alone in a big, drafty house in Amherst, Massachusetts.

She never married. She didn’t get out much. She thought deeply, read widely, and wrote a lot. Then — our sophomore English teacher, Mr. Ostrowsky, told us, and we believed him — she crinkled up her poems and stuffed them in crevices in her house to keep the cold from seeping in. After her death, her sister Lavinia discovered something like 1,800 poems Emily had written over the years and had some published.

As an adolescent, I carved my favorites of her terse poems on the walls of my brain. Amazingly, they’re still there, intact. She was my heroine.

Although she never sought or knew fame in her lifetime, there we kids were, I realized, reading her words in a public high school English class in suburban New Jersey in the early ’60s. Her thoughts, her words, had endured for more than a hundred years. She’d become a Somebody after all.

In recent weeks and months, my lifelong Nobody-ness has been weighing heavily on me. If only, I’ve been wishing, I were in fact a Somebody in the big bog now who held some sway and could DO something – say something, write something – that would stop (or at least slow) this runaway train the world appears to be trapped in. My uselessness and purposelessness has gotten me down. Am I alone in this existential crisis, I wonder?

I suspect that those who manage to not look at or think about the big picture are doing better than I am at managing to live their lives pretty much “normally.” I, on the other hand, am beginning to forget what “normal” is supposed to be. 

Every morning in my journal I agonize: What can I do? What am I supposed to do? What is my role, my purpose? What could I say or write that hasn’t already been expressed by Somebodies with platforms far grander than mine? 

Truth-tellers are being silenced though. Genocide is becoming acceptable, even commonplace. War crimes are being ignored. The sick and twisted sociopaths in power are trusted by millions of sleeping sheeple. Up is down. Black is white. Who to believe? People are turning off, tuning out. Oh, and computer technology is now the hidden driving force of this runaway train.

How can I enjoy a meal after seeing a sobbing, starving Palestinian child filling her mouth with sand? How can I prevent my heart from filling with hate when I see a sneering Smotrich (Israel’s Finance Minister) this week bragging about the real estate “bonanza” his country will enjoy when they finish clearing Gaza of its people and rebuilding it as an Israeli resort – knowing the country of my birth would surely be in on this big deal? How can I, a Nobody writer with an insignificant blog, continue to write when I find that the vast majority of my “viewers” these days are not human beings at all; they’re Chinese bots?

Yes, it’s come to this. And it’s too distressing.

I can’t help but think this morning: What would Emily do? What would she say about all this? What wisdom would she, could she, bring to the world’s current situation? And who would take her seriously today, this eccentric little introverted woman from Amherst? 

I study the walls of my brain for her old poems carved there, like an archaeologist studying crude paintings in a dark cave. What can they teach me now? What inspiration can I draw from them to help me snap out of my existential angst? Perhaps this one might work, at least for the moment:

If I can stop one heart from breaking,

I shall not live in vain;

If I can ease one life the aching,

Or cool one pain,

Or help one fainting robin

Unto his nest again,

I shall not live in vain.

— Emily Dickinson (1830-1886)

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• For a bit more on Emily Dickinson, please visit: https://www.themorgan.org/exhibitions/emily-dickinson

• P.S.: This WOW post is number 550. If I find it’s only being read by Chinese bots, I think there’ll be no point in my writing another. What do you think?