Redefining Special

The mouse

A little mouse wakes up hungry. She scurries through the grass, collecting seeds and nuts, and finds a fallen acorn. After eating her breakfast, she buries the rest for winter. But you know how it is—life gets busy, winter comes and goes, and she completely forgets where she put it.

Spring arrives. That forgotten acorn, buried in the perfect spot with just the right amount of moisture and sunlight, sprouts into an oak sapling.

Years pass. The oak grows tall and strong, and one day a pair of birds choose its branches for their nest. These birds love the berries from nearby bushes—they eat them, fly around the neighborhood, and… well, birds do what birds do. Their droppings fertilize the soil below.

Wildflowers bloom in that rich, fertilized earth. Bees discover them, buzzing from flower to flower, collecting nectar and spreading pollen as they go. The flowers flourish, go to seed.

A deer wanders through, nibbling the plants, then continues on her way, dropping seeds in her hoofprints that become new patches of green across the meadow. And that meadow feeds a whole family of field mice (descendants of our original little mouse?) who gather seeds and nuts, eating some and burying others for winter, forgetting where they put them…

Every single creature in this story was just being itself. Doing what it needed to do. The mouse wasn’t trying to plant a forest. The bird wasn’t trying to fertilize wildflowers. The deer wasn’t planning to be a landscape architect. But together, simply by being authentically themselves, they created something magnificent.

What if human specialness works exactly the same way?

Beyond the meadow

We live in a culture obsessed with rankings. Best dressed, most successful, highest achieving—we’ve trained ourselves to see the world through a lens of comparison where someone must win and others must lose.This competitive framework has infected even our understanding of what it means to be special. We’ve convinced ourselves that specialness is a limited resource—that if everyone gets to be special, then no one really is. This thinking stems from our habit of equating “special” with “better”—better than others, superior in some measurable way. Under this model, specialness becomes a zero-sum game where your uniqueness somehow diminishes mine. Your gifts diminish my worth. We end up competing for spots on an imaginary hierarchy instead of recognizing we each occupy our own irreplaceable space.

But consider that meadow. We don’t look at an oak in it and declare it “better” than a the grasses or bushes of berries.. Each has its own form, function, and beauty. Each fills a space in the ecosystem that nothing else can fill quite the same way. There are no “better” plants there —just different trees, each perfectly suited to their role.

Irreplaceable

When we shift our understanding of “special” from competitive ranking to unique contribution, everything changes. Specialness becomes abundant rather than scarce. Each person possesses a distinct combination of experiences, perspectives, talents, and ways of being that literally no one else can replicate. You are the only person who will ever exist with your particular history, your specific way of seeing the world, your unique capacity to connect and create.

This isn’t participation trophy thinking—it’s recognition of an objective truth. The exact convergence of factors that created you has never happened before and will never happen again. That irreplaceable quality exists regardless of how many other irreplaceable people surround you.

Sure, there are people who draw people in, command attention, inspire admiration. I think that they are just people who have learned to fully inhabit and express whatever their particular gifts happen to be. They’ve figured out how to let their authentic specialness show up in the world, and others naturally respond to that.

And just like in our ecosystem, not every creature needs to appeal to every other creature. The oak doesn’t worry that the lake trout dont get to appreciate its shade. Each simply offers its gifts to those who can receive them.

The difference between trying to be special and being special is the difference between performance and presence. When we chase specialness through achievement or comparison, we’re performing. When we simply allow our authentic gifts to emerge and be expressed, we’re present. This reframe offers liberation. Instead of fighting for limited spots on a hierarchy, we can recognize that we each occupy our own unique space in the human meadow. The question shifts from “Am I special enough?” to “How can I more fully express the specialness I already am?”

Being

So then our task is not to become special—it’s to recognize the specialness we already are and find the courage to let it flourish. Just like our little mouse, who was simply being a mouse—gathering what she needed, burying what she could, living her authentic mouse life. She had no idea she was planting the oak tree that would become home to the birds that would fertilize the flowers that would feed her great-great-grandchildren.

The mouse wasn’t trying to be special. She was just being herself. And somehow, that changed everything.

Maybe that’s how it really works. Maybe the world doesn’t need us to be extraordinary.

Maybe it just needs us to be us.