A “useless” person’s ache to contribute

I think.

A lot.

I’m a thinker, apparently. :) That’s according to the MBTI personality type system, but you don’t really need psychobabble to see the obvious: I sit around and think. Sometimes I talk about what I think, but only to other people who enjoy it as a mere intellectual exercise. I’ve learnt to shut my trap among people who don’t.

So that’s my personality, the way I function. Some people call themselves doers, and I often wish I was more like them. It’s taken me a long time even to admit that I am a thinker, because it sounds so dreadfully boring and geeky. I’m still struggling to accept that thinking is all I have to contribute to the world.

Because that’s where the shoe pinches for me: I want to contribute. You might not guess it by looking at me. Most of the time, I’m quiet, alone, seemingly doing nothing. The mainstream image of contributing to society, at least where I live, is focused on manual labour and caretaking. If you don’t produce material goods, renovate or clean physical objects, or take care of people’s bodies, you don’t really do anything worthwhile. You’re just sitting around on your arse, letting others do the work for you while you daydream.

I’ve internalized this image. I don’t believe I contribute, not in my heart. I sometimes try to reason with myself, thusly: “All those manual labourers that you admire so much – what would they do without their wrench? And where did the wrench come from, if not from someone who sat around thinking, and finally had a great idea?” We wouldn’t have cars, or computers, or telephones, if nobody had the time to think. Everyone is needed. Every type can contribute.

It’s just that some contributions are so invisible. Someone who works with their hands has something to show for it at the end of the day, while thinkers, like Flaubert, may have “spent the morning putting in a comma and the afternoon removing it”. It’s easy to feel useless when that’s what you do. It’s easy to despair of your ever giving anything back to the world.

But then I remember readers: those wonderful people who accept my thoughts, who even pay to read them, and who listen with their hearts. People who may be helped in a very real way by something a thinker wrote down, or who just get to escape reality for a while because of a story that manages to entertain. This is what keeps me sane: I do contribute, just not in my home town. To the people in my village, I may forever be the recluse who spends all her time on a computer, but to someone at the opposite side of the world, my thoughts may almost take on corporeal form. Those people, then, are my true colleagues. I work with them to create something unique that only exists because of me and my readers.

Because of this, my breath will not be wasted. I will have contributed in my small way, and that’s all I can ask for.